Shapiro describes his M.O. best: this book is “about both what Shakespeare achieved and what Elizabethan’s experienced this year...it’s no more possible to talk about Shakespeare’s plays independently of his age than it is to grasp what his society went through without the benefit of Shakespeare’s insights. He and his fellow players truly were in Hamlet’s fine phrase, the ‘abstract and brief chronicles of the time’ (II,ii,524).”

1599 was a watershed year in Shakespeare’s career for it was then he slipped out of the category of “very good” to “brilliant.” At the beginning of the year he finished Henry V, and by the year’s end he had completed the first draft of Hamlet; in between came Julius Caesar and As You Like It. I’ll not be able to read these plays again without constantly thumbing through Shapiro’s enlightening commentary.

Highly recommended for Shakespeare, literature and medieval history buffs.