This has just been awarded Baillie Gifford Winner of Winners in a special announcement to mark the 25th anniversary of the prestigious nonfiction prize.

A biography of the year in Shakespeare’s life in which Globe was established with Shakespeare as one of the partners and in which he completed “Henry V”, wrote “Julius Caesar” and “As You like It” and drafted “Hamlet”. Shapiro argues that these plays were a turning point in his career – as he moved away from popular and formulaic plays to a more demanding spectacle. To Shapiro a crucial symbol of this was Shakespeare’s break with the company’s clown Will Kemp who until then had often dominated the plays with his post play jigs and heavily influenced Shakespeare’s writing.

Shapiro also sets Shakespeare’s year in a historical context – not least Essex’s ill fated expedition to Ireland, his subsequent and equally ill fated flirtations with some form of military coup, the ever present sense of a Spanish military threat with an accompanied Catholic uprising and (resulting from these) the growing censorship on writing which led to the playhouse becoming the only source of political comment and satire (although even that had to be carefully done).

The historical context of the plays and the many topical comments in them is very interesting – although the reader would enjoy the book more with an exiting familiarity with the plays (in particular the section on Hamlet becomes too detailed and hard to follow without knowing the play – this is probably the only area where the book lapses into the usual non-fiction trap of too much detail for a casual reader).

The book may have been more interesting (although more challenging to write) as a novel (like “Thing of Darkness”) as it lapses too often into “Shakespeare may well have”, “It is likely that …”, “We can imagine that …” and so on as well as often imagining Shakespeare’s thoughts (although at all times making it clear what is fact and what is speculation – all of which makes the book a clumsy read at times).

“Shakespeare didn’t conceive of his tragedy in Aristotelian terms—that is, as a tragedy of the fall of a flawed great man—but rather as a collision of deeply held and irreconcilable principles, embodied in characters who are destroyed when these principles collide.”
This is a close look at one year in Shakespeare’s life. That year is 1599. It was the year the Globe theatre was built. Shakespeare completed Henry V, wrote Julius Caesar and As You Like It and wrote the first draft of Hamlet. There was a threat of another Armada from Spain. A significant army sent to Ireland to subdue a rebellion, which ended up being a disaster and led to the downfall of one of Elizabeth’s favourites, Essex. The censors were busy and Elizabeth was aging and becoming a little unpredictable. At this point Britain didn’t have an Empire and wasn’t involved in the Atlantic Slave Trade. It was the year the East India Company was founded with many prominent people investing. Apparently, Shakespeare wasn’t among them; he preferred to invest at home, in malt. Obviously, Shakespeare liked his beer!!
Shapiro analyses each of the plays, setting it in the context of what was happening and how current events related to what he was writing. It is literary criticism and is pretty good. Shakespeare wasn’t writing in a vacuum and although there are Shakespeare scholars who do not believe in setting Shakespeare in his context, but Shapiro shows how important this context was in understanding the plays Shakespeare was writing. It’s a fascinating read and well worth checking out.

James Shapiro, by writing up the history of the year 1599 in Elizabethan England, sheds a powerful light on Shakespeare and the four great plays written in this year: Henry V, Julius Caesar, As You Like It, and Hamlet. Having seen all but Julius Caesar fairly recently, I was surprised at what a different reading I found here. All these plays feel different when seen in the light of the great effort to punish the Irish rebel Tyrone and the threats to Elizabeth and England that accompanied it. Shapiro deftly interweaves this story with conjectures about Shakespeare's life in London, at court, and in Stratford-on-Avon to both reveal the plays and Shakespeare's growth as a playwright.

I FINALLY FINISHED THIS BOOK!!!! I didn’t realize I’d begun it so close to the same date back in 2017, but here we are. It was a book I read little by little before bed some nights, and while I obviously wasn’t deeply taken in by it in a way that invited deep, focused reading, I thought it was a very interesting history book. I enjoyed my time with it, and I’d pick up another by Shapiro for the next three years if I wasn’t now determined to finish Terry Jones’ book on Chaucer!

Imagine that your world is internet-free, no television or telephone to slake your boredom. The church, in a rash of papist fears, has just banned all saint days. Enter the Sam Shepard or Spike Lee of the late 1500s—Will Shakespeare. Instead of what current screenwriters are doing by taking Marvel characters, he took Roman myth and current events and mixed them up. Of course people will be going to see plays! What else is there to do?
I appreciated the even the most minute attention to the specific lines of verse and prose. Very satisfactory.

How can you study a virus? A virus is covered by a dye that can't penetrate it. We see the dye covering the virus, not the organism itself.
Similarly, in James Shapiro's "A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare:1599" a tapestry of events and inferences surrounding Shakespeare is the dye, but we are left to infer (or deduct) a portrait of the man himself. He is a shadow on Plato's allegorical cave wall.
Nevertheless, it is interesting reading; a mixture of history and speculation, but never a direct look at Shakespeare himself.
Shakespeare's very identity is questioned, largely due to other writers of the period who emulated and sometime boldly stole from his work. Some Oxford scholars argue that Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford, is most likely the author behind the alleged pseudonym, Shakespeare.
Shapiro's attempts at analyses can be fascinating, especially as he describes Shakespeare's evolution from an ordinary dramatist to the attained level of brilliance shown later.
It is a story of the evolution of Elizabethan drama as well as that of the man.
Readers should prepare for an interesting voyage through the history of the era as Shapiro interweaves events and personages of the times with speculation on how they influenced the production of the Globe Theater and Shakespeare's work. Shapiro interlaces celebrated historical figures (e.g., Elizabeth; the Duke of Essex) with plays and the state of English culture at the time, suggesting that Shakespeare's plays parallel historical events.
Overall, this was an interesting read, so long as the reader remains aware that it is far from a solid biography. Much of what we learn about the author is shadowy, indefinite, and hypothetical. This is not due to Shapiro's lack of scholarship, but a function of the mystery still enshrouding the elusive "bard of Avon."

Listened via audible.

I know what you are thinking - why did I read this book? Well, its because I read "Hamet" a few months back and then picked it for our book club and decided since I had already read the book I should probably read some history on Shakespeare! Only problem is that there really ISN'T a history of Shakespeare. Very little is known of the man! Hardly anything from his original writings still exist so historians basically have to assume things based on the history that was happening at the time and what he wrote himself.

This wasn't by any means the best history book I have read BUT I am now prepared to sling at few cool facts at my book club (if I can remember them!). I wish I could tell you that I am now inspired to read a Shakespeare play, like "Hamlet" but ironically - several parts of the play are included in the last 40 minutes of this book - and well, I didn't make it very far in!

Review title: 1599: A Year in the life of William Shakespeare

Shapiro has done the seemingly impossible for the notoriously undocumented Shakespeare: written a full length treatment of just one year of Shakespeare's life. He succeeds by focusing on possibly the most productive year of his writing career (responsible for "As You Like It", "Hamlet", "Henry the Fifth", and "Julius Caesar"), documenting the political and cultural events swirling around him, and pulling in events before and after the year to show the continuity of the year within his life.

And what a year it was. The aging Queen Elizabeth was facing foreign enemies and unrest at home, while she attempted to export her domestic problems by sending troops headed by infighting nobles to subdue Ireland. The world was growing to encompass mysteries and wonders from the New World of the Americas, foremost of which were new foods and fibers and of course silver and gold that distorted international relationships and partnerships in this first age of globalization (see, for example, how Spanish gold influenced the history of the building of St. Peter's in Rome at around this time). And at the same time the world was shrinking to the "wooden O" of the Globe Theater that Shakespeare and his acting troupe constructed that year from timbers torn from a previous venue north of the Thames. Now on the "liberties" of the South Bank, Shakespeare could find a stage for his new genius that would shine forever on the human endeavor.

Of course, the fact remains that few facts remain for sure about him, so Shapiro must call on extensive research, informed speculation and conjunctions, and his great writing skills to make a consistent story of it all. The 40 page bibliographical essay at the end testifies to the depth and breadth of the research, and allows interested readers entry points into the historical documentation to follow their own paths through the data. Even where Shakespeare is not specifically named or or traceable to a point in time or place, Shapiro is able to use the circumstantial evidence to make solid inferences about Shakespeare's influence on the world around him, and the influences his extensive contacts in the political, literary, and the vibrant thriving theater world had on him and his work.

It is at this last point where Shapiro does his best writing as he examines the four plays of that year and shows how Shakespeare constructed them and how the context of 1599 shaped them. Really at its core the book is a series of critical essays on the plays, but so well written into the history and biography that even a person like myself who has never intentionally read literary essays on plays will find the book well worth the reading. Shapiro shows how Shakespeare was transitioning from standard popular stage fare (set-piece histories and comedies with clowning and jigs) to the powerful political commentary of Julius Caesar and the ahead-of-its-time introspection of Hamlet's "To be or not to be" internal monologue.

There are of necessity time when Shapiro must use speculation and qualifications because of the lack of direct documentary history of his subject. But placing what he knows about Shakespeare in the deep context of the documented world around him brings to life a three-dimensional more human Shakespeare than the marble bust of a museum hero, and certainly more plausible than the conspiratorial team of playwrights some have tried to convince were actually the genius behind the Shakespeare plays (see Shapiro's Contested Will for his take on that subject). Taking the bust off the pedestal of worship and examining the man more closely makes his achievements even more remarkable. The effort proved so successful that Shapiro followed up in 2015 with "1606: William Shakespeare and the Year of Lear", a book that I plan to add to my reading wish list.

”Better be hanged at home than die like dogs in Ireland.” pg. 64

This book is about the year 1599 and how what was going on in 1599 affected Shakespeare and his plays.

I found the English history to be interesting. I loved hearing about what was going on in 1599. Shapiro covers the war in Ireland, everything the Queen was doing, and what the common person was reading and watching.

The less interesting aspect of the book for me was Shakespeare. How he was living, what he was doing, what he was writing. I didn't really care. Don't get me wrong, I like Shakespeare's work. I enjoy reading his plays. I think he's clever. Etc. But it doesn't really matter to me what influenced him to write what he did or why he made the word choices he did or etc. etc. I just don't have any interest in that.

The history was fascinating, though. The war in Ireland and what people thought of it.

The underlying threat to English identity produced by conquering and intermarrying is given rich expression in the anonymous New English tract A DISCOURSE OF IRELAND, written in 1599, which notes that "it is a thing observed in Ireland and grown into a proverb, that English [settlers] in the second generation become Irish but never English," adding that the cause is that "the evil overcometh and corrupteth the good." To preclude any more of this mix of "English with the Irish," the author urges that the English simply relocate, rather than annihilate, the Irish: "The removing of the Irish may happily alter their dispositions when they shall be planted in another soil." Ideally, they'll be shipped off to provide a servant class "throughout England" (though the author of this tract never considers the possibility that they would mate there with the English.) Spenser himself in his VIEW discusses how the English living in Ireland are "grown almost mere Irish" and asks rhetorically in lines that anticipate Macmorris's defensiveness about his national identity: "Is it possible that an Englishman brought up naturally in such a sweet civility as England affords can find such barbarous rudeness that he should forget his own nature and forgo his own nation? How may this be?" pg. 98


The revelations about the legal system:

Given the intimate working relationships between playwrights (and between playwrights and players), personality clashes were inevitable. It didn't help matters that many Elizabethan actors were skilled fencers. Just the previous September, Ben Jonson had quarreled with Gabriel Spencer, a rising star (and shareholder) in the Admiral's Men, and in the ensuing duel near the Curtain killed him. Jonson, who was briefly imprisoned, only escaped hanging by reading his “neck verse” - a legal loophole dating from medieval times whereby the literate were spared the gallows by reading from the Bible in Latin, a task easy enough for the classically trained Jonson. But he did not escape unscathed: Jonson was branded with a “T” for Tyburn, Elizabethan London's site of execution, on his thumb. The next time he committed a felony he would hang there. pg. 11


Elizabeth didn't have a standing army:

...”musters” was the far more corrupt practice whereby poor men were randomly hauled off to fight, sicken, and often die in foreign wars... able-bodied Elizabethan men between the ages of sixteen and sixty, all of whom were potential conscripts... The authorities had no scruples about using required church attendance as a means for rounding up recruits: John Stow reports that on Easter Sunday, 1596, after an order came for a thousand men, “the aldermen, their deputies, constables, and other officers, were fain to close up the church doors, till they had pressed so many men.” pg. 62


The more things change, the more they stay the same. Here's a bit on book-burning and book-banning:

Around mid-May, fifteen hundred copies of the new edition of Hayward's History were printed and ready for sale at Wolfe's bookshop in the Pope's Head Alley near the Royal Exchange. The Bishop of London, Richard Bancroft, responsible along with the Archbishop of Canterbury for censoring printed works, had had enough. After Whitsunday, on May 27, Bancroft ordered the second print run seized by the wardens of the Stationers and delivered to his house in Fulham, where he burned the lot of them. Though done quietly, everyone, including those clamoring for a copy of the sold-out book, soon learned what had happened. Wolfe could curse the loss of his investment, but he had no recourse. From now on, there would only be one book for sale about Henry IV in London's bookstalls, Shakespeare's.

Hayward's History turned out to be kindling for a much larger conflagration. A week later, on June 1, John Whitfift and Bancroft ordered that more than a dozen other titles be confiscated and burned. The list included, first and foremost, the works of satirists: Joseph Hall's Biting Satires and Virgidemiarum, John Marston's The Metamorphosis of Pigmalion's Image and The Scourge of Villany, Everard Giulpin's Skialatheia, Thomas Middleton's Micro-cynicon: Six Snarling Satires, Thomas Cutwode's Caltha Poetarum, and John Davies's Epigrams, which was bound with the Elegies of Christopher Marlowe, were all destroyed. Thomas Nashe's and Gabriel Harvey's works were singled out for special attention: "None of their books be ever printed hereafter." Even two antifeminist works that could be read as critical of the unmarried Elizabeth - The Book Against Women and The Fifteen Joys of Marriage - were tossed into the flames.

The Bishops' Ban made clear that the vogue for topical satire was officially over: "No satires or epigrams" were to "be printed hereafter." Hayward had also poisoned the well for those writing national history: "no English histories" are to "be printed except they be allowed by some of her Majesty's Privy Council." For the time being, then, only political and not ecclesiastical authorities could approve the publication of histories; an author of an even mildly critical history would have to be unusually bold to approach the councillors for permission to publish. Not even London's dramatists escaped the ban, which also decreed that "no plays [were to] be printed except they be allowed by such as have authority." Left unexplained was exactly why some works were called in and others spared. The ambiguity, perhaps deliberate, had a chilling effect. Looking over the seemingly arbitrary list of prescribed books, English men and women, some of whom were forced to abandon works in progress, must have been left wondering whether it was topical satire itself or rather the drift by some satirists toward the obscene or the explicitly political, that had provoked the bishops.

Shakespeare hadn't had any of his works banned, but even he was singed by the flames. Neither the popular Richard the Second nor the First Part of Henry the Fourth were published again during Elizabeth's lifetime. The Chamberlain's Men took extra precautions with his two other works on the hypersensitive Lancastrian reign: both The Second Part of Henry the Fourth and Henry the Fifth were sanitized and seen into print far more quickly than any other plays Shakespeare wrote before or after. Both plays had unfortunately painted an Archbishop of Canterbury in a particularly unfavorable light, especially The Second Part of Henry the Fourth, which when published eliminated such potentially offensive lines as "the Bishop/ Turns insurrection to religion" (I.I.200-I). With the opening of the Globe, this was not a time to take unnecessary risks. The publishing history of Shakespeare's plays at this time suggests that it was wiser for the Chamberlain's Men to publish lightly sanitized versions and pull offending plays from the repertory, rather than let linger the memory of what might otherwise be regarded as seditious history. pg. 136


The Queen was very touchy about being spoken against or written against. It was interesting.

Another interesting tidbit was the Jesuits trying to assassinate Elizabeth. They had some pretty kooky plans to do so, including but not limited to kidnapping people and brainwashing them into murdering Elizabeth. Fascinating.


TL;DR Couldn't care less about Shakespeare's personal life, I'm afraid. However, the history of England in 1599 was fascinating to me. Reminded me of One Summer: America, 1927 by Bill Bryson. Except focused on 1599. I like these little "mini-histories" or "slices of history" where you take a small time period and do a deep-dive into it. Much more satisfying than a book of history which covers a longer period but can only skim the surface of things.

If you don't care about history nor about Shakespeare this book is going to be worthless to you. You'd have to have interest in at least one of those topics.


NAMES IN THIS BOOK

William m
Thomas m
Samuel m
John m
Henry m
Edmond m
Ben m
Christopher m
Francis m
Joan f
Judith f
Virginia f
Sylvia f
Thomas m
Giles m
Richard m
James m
Cuthbert m
Lewis m
Cornelius m
Valentine m
Justus m
Cecily f
Friedrich m
Augustine m
Everard m
Will m
Conyers m
Jacob m
Nicholas m
Penelope f
Elizabeth f
Ellen f
Phelim m
Peter m
George m
Robert m
Michael m
Anthony m
Philip m
Gabriel m
Martin m
Hamnet m
Anne f
Susanna f
Paul m
Leonard m
Tobie m
Dudley m
Victor m
Alexander m
Gilbert m
Abraham m
Adrian m
Margaret f
Cecil m
Stephen m
Alan m
Edward m
Ferdinand m
Frank m
Hans m
Jane f
Walter m
Baptista m
Katharine f
Dick m
Rowland m
Charles m
André m
Arthur m
Marcus m
Hugh m
Roy m
Alfred m
Renolde m
Mabel f
Colin m
Isaac m
François m
Ralph m
Simon m
Fulke m
Nicholas m
Matthew m
Barnaby m
Lodowick m
Geoffrey m
Mary f
Lancelot m
Raphael m

Completely awesome, and a very nice complement to the book I just read, Will in the World. Shapiro covers a little bit of the same territory, which helped to solidify that information in my brain. But he does a fascinating close up of four plays in particular and the circumstances surrounding their creation: Julius Caesar, Hamlet, As You Like It, and Henry V, Part 2. It makes me want to watch that BBC Elizabeth series again starring Helen Mirren, all about the entanglement between the Queen and Essex (father, then son). AND I want to read Richard II, and reread Caesar, and.... Well, I guess I'll never be done.

This book examines the year 1599, which was an extremely productive year for Shakespeare as his plays Henry V, Julius Caesar, As You Like It, and Hamlet were produced. The author looks at the historical and literary events that were happening in this year and shows how these events are reflected in these plays. I found it fascinating as it opened up new ways of thinking about these plays for me. This book is worth reading for fans of any of these four works.

A pretty good look at how the events in one year - both nationally and personally - might have impacted Shakespeare's writing. Unlike some authors I can think of, Shapiro keeps the guesswork to almost non-existent and is always very clear when he is guessing.

I would've liked a look at connection between Hamlet and Scotland, though I must admit.

Nice combination of history, biography, and criticism.