First of all, when I bought it, I thought this book was a novel, I don't know why, but that was what I expected. The first sentence in the blurb misled me:

"An intimate history of Shakespeare following him through a single year that changed not only his fortunes but the course of literature."

I guessed it was a fictionalised biographical work. But misled I was, indeed!

Professor James Shapiro, who teaches at Columbia University in New York, writes an illuminating essay both on Shakespeare's staggering achievement and what the Elizabethans experienced in the course of 1599. The resulting account is so gripping and so convincingly narrated to sound like a real historical adventure novel. Anyhow, it is a real academic research work, thoroughly documented.
I can't say it can become a pleasant informative reading if you are accostumed with the language history and you like historical essays. But get ready to what it is: a product of deep scholarship. If this is what you are looking for, this book is perfect for you. It will be the perfect addiction to any Shakespeare addict, fan or scholar.
How did Shakespeare go from being a talented poet and playwright to become one of the greatest writers who ever lived? In this one exhilarating year we follow what he reads and writes, what he saw and who he worked with as he invests in the new Globe theatre and creates four of his most famous plays: Henry the Fifth, Julius Caesar, As you like it and Hamlet.

We follow him at court:
" ... Shakespeare and his fellow players had been invited to play at court far more than other companies combined - fifteen times in the past three years ... They were keenly aware of how important the support of the Queen, the Privy Council, and the Lord Chamberlain was - all the more so, given the uncertainty about how much longer Elizabeth would reign".

We sympathize with his frustrations:
" Just because Shakespeare was able to write plays that appeal to adiences across a wide social spectrum didn't mean that he wasn't frustrated by the limits this imposed on what he could write".

We face with him one of greatest tragic events in his life happened just three years earlier (1596), the death of his only son, Hamnet:
"It could not have been easy for Anne Shakespeare to contact her itinerant (the theatres in London had been closed for the plague) husband to convey the news of Hamnet's illness and death - it would have taken a messenger from Stratford four or five days at least just find Shakespeare - so it's unlikely that he learned of his son's demise in time to return home for his funeral"

This book focuses on Shakespeare's life on this single year, 1599, but it is also an incredible picture of the time in which he lived, a very interesting portrayal of London and the Londoners of the last years of Elizabeth's reign, its society, economy, politics and, of course, the intrigues and historical events of the Tudor era (the Tudor state had to crush an Irish rebellion and see off another armada threat from Spain).

It is often said that we know very little about Shakespeare. The truth is that reading this rich, detailed account you get the impression that we know a lot instead thanks to the mass of documentary evidence mentioned.

As a Shakespeare lover, I'm glad I bought it, happy I managed to get through it, proud to keep it on my shelves.

(Read my complete review at http://flyhigh-by-learnonline.blogspo...

I didn't really care for this book very much. It explores one year in Shakespeare's life and the amazing plays believed to have been written in that year. Its ok but I have read many other books on Shakespeare that are better.

Description: Shakespeare wrote four of his most famous plays: Henry the Fifth, Julius Caesar, As You Like It, and, most remarkably, Hamlet; Elizabethans sent off an army to crush an Irish rebellion, weathered an Armada threat from Spain, gambled on a fledgling East India Company, and waited to see who would succeed their aging and childless queen.

James Shapiro illuminates both Shakespeare’s staggering achievement and what Elizabethans experienced in the course of 1599, bringing together the news and the intrigue of the times with a wonderful evocation of how Shakespeare worked as an actor, businessman, and playwright. The result is an exceptionally immediate and gripping account of an inspiring moment in history.

Opening: The weather in London in December 1598 had been frigid, so cold that ten days before New Year's the Thames was nearly frozen over at London Bridge.

It was weird reading this, where the Irish 'problem' loomed large at the Elizabethan Court, and it being the 100 year anniversary of the Easter Uprising. What bastards the English were - truly, and I was amazed at Edmund Spenser: feel that I should go back and wipe that 5* off. Yet hey, that would be as stupid as taking Rhodes's statue down from Oxford - uncomfortable or not, these things did happen and we should not squirm in the light of past atrocities but make a better world by examining past mistakes.

WHOA - in a **ping** moment of self enlightenment I come across how being PC can help wipe guilt off a subject. That really musn't happen - let those bad decisions from the past stay and act as a warning.

The main themes in this book:
- bye-bye Will Kemp
- Essex and Ireland
- the Spanish question
- Globe building


Thanks Susanna & Judy

4* A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare: 1599
4* The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606

If you're looking for a standard biography of Shakespeare then this definitely isn't it: Shapiro eschews the usual methods of writing a life and instead concentrates on a single year in Shakespeare's life.

He examines what was happening politically and culturally and how those events both manifest in the plays Shakespeare was writing that year, and also how they might have affected his future work. As he admits himself, this is mostly speculation and cannot ever be confirmed, but it's an imaginative and original approach which works excellently.

Shapiro examines the four plays written in 1599 (Henry V, As You Like It, Julius Caesar, and Hamlet) and relates them to both Shakespeare's (assumed) thinking and external events. He re-reads the plays themselves in light of this and makes some excellent points. But this isn't a 'lit crit' book: it also delves into religion, Shakespeare's possible relationship with his wife and family back in Stratford, the Elizabethan theatrical world, and Elizabethan politics.

The one major gap for me was an exploration of the sonnets written around this time. That small caveat aside, this is an excellent, well-written, and entertaining book, as rewarding, I would guess, for the non-specialist as the specialist.

This is an absolutely fascinating read! It is NOT a biography of Shakespeare -- those are abundant, despite the meager information available about the man -- but rather a study of the significant events which most certainly influenced the writer.

While some of the information grew a little tedious for me (specifically the long chapter on Essex's battle with Tyrone of Ireland), I found much of the examination quite remarkable.

Most certainly I learned some things about Shakespeare and about his writing. I learned about why some things might have been much more interesting or humorous to the play-goer of 1599 but is lost on today's audiences.

Not exactly a "light" read, but not a work targeted solely to scholars, either.

I HIGHLY recommend this book to anyone interested in history, theatre, and/or Shakespeare.

A challenging read but, had I had access to this book in my secondary school years, I may have appreciated Shakespeare, English history, and life a whole lot better. An apparently "dry" subject well explained!

Twenty-some years ago – between the ages of fifteen and twenty – I devoured the bulk of Shakespeare’s dramatic works. Nowadays, I usually pick up a single contemporary retrospective on the Bard of Avon; the last two being Stephen Greenblatt’s A Will in the World and Bill Bryson’s Shakespeare: The World as Stage . Having recently come across Shapiro’s latest nonfiction offering in paperback while scouring the remainder tables of the U Bookstore, I was more than happy to shell out six bucks for another glimpse into the looking-back-glass.

Rather than being yet another of the countless biographies on Will, or one of those new-fangled over-wrought theories as to the real author behind the man, Shapiro instead focuses on the year 1599. He effortlessly balances and interweaves the politics and cultural state of late Elizabethan England with that unforgettable year in which the Bard put Henry the Fifth, Julius Caesar, As You Like It, and Hamlet on the stage. In due course, Shapiro recounts the armed uprising of the Irish and how Elizabeth directed the Earl of Essex to quell it (shades of Henry the Fifth), the danger of putting Julius Caesar before London playgoers in light of potential political assassinations of the Queen (which brought Will and the Chamberlain’s Men on trial for conspiracy, but resulted – most fortunately for history’s sake, if not theirs – in acquittal), and even the threat of a second Spanish invasion.

I equally enjoyed learning about other cultural, political, and literary influences – or at least Shapiro’s interpretation of them – instead of the usual references to Holinshed’s Chronicles and those musty writings of the Venerable. By doing so, Shapiro breaks some new ground here in the over-inflated field of Shakespearean studies. And for that, my hat is off to him.

An engaging, deeply researched look at the works Shakespeare produced in a single year—Julius Caesar, As You Like It, Hamlet—placing him firmly in a specific time and place and examining the works in detail to demonstrate how they very much reflect the events of that tumultuous time and demonstrate Shakespeare’s continuing development as a sui generis artistic genius. History truly came alive, on so many levels. We see the roiling politics of the time, with an aging, childless queen and the succession at stake, court intrigue and plots and subplots aplenty (Essex lost his head), and Catholic-Protestant tensions still very much in play at home and abroad, with a rumoured second Spanish Armada much feared and greatly prepared for. And we see Shakespeare as a rising man, one of the partners in the risky venture of building a new theatre, The Globe. So much fascinating detail about how the theatre of the day worked, about people’s daily lives, how it all got worked into the language and shape of the plays. Very highly recommended.

3.5 Stars Rounded Up

1599 was an unbelievably productive year for William Shakespeare. During this year, he started and/or finished The Merry Wives of Windsor, Henry V, Julius Caesar, Much Ado About Nothing, As You Like It, and Hamlet. He honed his craft and tested out new forms for the time. His poetry was published for the first time, albeit without his permission. He used his plays to ask hard political questions that would've landed anyone else in heaps of trouble.

I found it so interesting to read about the historical context in which Shakespeare wrote these works. As Shapiro points out, 1599 was the exact midpoint of Shakespeare's career, and there would not be many years after this to match his productivity in 1599. I did not realize that Shakespeare was writing at the same time as John Donne, and he attended the funeral for Edmund Spenser. It was really an unbelievable time in English literature....

Fascinating insight into Shakespeare, the four plays he wrote in 1599 and the political and religious climate of the time. This book really helped demystify Shakespeare for me to such an extent that I look forward to reading him a lot more. Elizabeth I is very present as well as the sad story of the Earl of Essex, Robert Devereux. A dynamic and ambitious era filled with intrigue, conspiracy and rumour. James Shapiro brings it all to life.

I don't know that I could say exactly why, but I absolutely loved this book. It was such an interesting read and I just drank it all in.
I felt it was well done, although perhaps not exceptionally so, but I had one major issue with it. I felt there were several points where Shapiro draws conclusions about what Shakespeare must have felt about a certain issue based on something that a character says in one of his plays. This is extremely fallacious, in my opinion, and really bothered me. The one I remember the most is where Shapiro uses the one scene in Shakespeare's plays that talks about writing to conclude that Shakespeare's method of writing/re-writing must have been similar. Possible, but NOT necessarily the case. However, as it only happened a few times, it didn't bother me to the point where I would have rolled my eyes and stopped reading.
I think one of my favorite things that Shapiro brings out is information about some other contemporary writers of Shakespeare and how they might have influenced him, been influenced by him, and what they might have thought about him. Very few other writers from the period are still read today and many of the ones mentioned I had never even heard of, so it was interesting to learn about them.
I don't know that this book would be a great one to suggest to someone that isn't already interested in Shakespeare, but I really, really enjoyed it!

Very enjoyable, giving a lively contextualisation of Shakespeare's playwriting in his personal, social and political environment, his doings and concerns in 1599 and what was going on around him. Also some good discussion of the plays, which include two of my favourites, Julius Caesar and Hamlet.

Detailed enough to be very informative, at least to a layman like me, but not so technical as to be hard work, and it succeeds well in giving a fairly vivid and engaging, if inevitably fragmentary, picture of life in the time and place.

In short, if you have even a moderate interest in Shakespeare and/or early modern (if that's the term) British history (with a fair bit of Irish and a little French, Spanish and Dutch around the edges), give this a go.