1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare: Winner of the Baillie Gifford Winner of Winners Award 2023

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Winkler, Elizabeth (May 2023). Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies. Simon & Schuster. p.326. ISBN 9781982171261. In 1599, perhaps the decisive year in Shakespeare's life, art and politics collided to an extraordinary degree. The Tudor state had to crush an Irish rebellion and see off another armada threat from Spain. And, if you happened to be in London, there was an annus mirabilis in the playhouses. Toby Mundy, the prize’s director, added: "This has been a heroic, epic undertaking by our judges. They’ve had to grapple with some of the most brilliant non-fiction books written in English in the last quarter century and have done so with astonishing seriousness and engagement."

In this case, what Shapiro does is create a biography about one of the greatest writers who ever lived, about whom we know almost nothing. And he does that without ever cheating, by actually marshalling this huge amount of evidence to uncover not the life of the person, but the life of a mind.” Shapiro reconstructs seven 'defining moments in America's history' in which Shakespeare's writings played a significant part…He does so with his characteristic blend of acuity, assiduousness and unflaggingly narrative prose…. Shakespeare in a Divided Americahas many virtues. It affirms a story with which we are not fully familiar about Shakespeare holding up a mirror to the socio-political dynamics of American history; it will probably win plaudits and prizes alike, and will fly off the shelves in an election year "—Rhodri Lewis, TLS

Books

With the lightest touch and the most formidable scholarship, James Shapiro, once again, proves himself to be an irresistible storyteller. And what an exhilarating and disturbing tale he has to tell. Here is proof that Shakespeare's power remains undiminished in our divided and unhappy world."--Simon Russell Beale Previous Winners of the Samuel Johnson Prize". BBC Four. 5 October 2008. Archived from the original on 5 October 2008 . Retrieved 30 April 2023. Listed among books of the year in The New Statesman, Fortune Magazine, The Paris Review, Fahrenheit Magazine, Octavian Report, The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Times of India, and the BBC History Magazine.

James Shapiro is an academic who not only teaches Shakespeare, but has also learnt a thing or two himself from the Sweet Swan of Avon about the art of storytelling.His book, Shakespeare in a Divided America, is an unpretentious, fact-filled, lightly-written, meticulously-researched history of seven politically-defining moments that occurred in the US over the past 200 years….There has been so much written about Shakespeare, and a great deal about America's history, but by bringing them together James Shapiro has pulled off a masterstroke and illuminated both in a fresh, vivid, and thoroughly entertaining book." -- Will Gompertz, BBC His vision for 1599, a microscopic look at the critical year in Shakespeare’s life when he was working on Henry V, Julius Caesar, As You Like It and the first draft of Hamlet, was not initially endorsed. His application for a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities in the US in the late 1980s was turned down twice, he remembers. “I wasn’t discouraged by that. I just felt they didn’t understand that I was trying to do something different.” The “something different” was to understand the immense anxieties of the age: the country poised on the brink of invading Ireland with a 16,000-strong force; the fear that Elizabeth I’s reign was approaching its end with no clear successor in sight; the strengthening possibility of another Spanish Armada. It’s no coincidence, says Shapiro, that Hamlet opens with men on the ramparts, nervously watching for hostile forces. Creative minds can tease out things that are less visible to those of us who deal in facts Readers who have invested in his two books about seminal years inShakespeare's creative life, 1599: A Year in the Life of WilliamShakespeare and 1606:Shakespeareand the Year of Lear, know what a lucid, lively joy he is to read. And his dissection of the controversy over whether the Elizabethan Mr S wrote his own plays, Contested Will, settles the issue for any sensible reader. [ Shakespeare in a Divided America] isn't a long book and it's easy to read, elegant, to the point and with very well-chosen quotes." ---David Aaronovitch,Times (London)

Footnotes

The Guardian's Robert McCrum described 1599 as "an unforgettable illumination of a crucial moment in the life of our greatest writer". [3] More than any other Shakespeare biographer, Shapiro emphasises the importance of such revisions. The hero of 1599 is famous for "reworking rather than inventing stories". Shakespeare did not write; he re-wrote. Shapiro's account of Shakespeare's revisions of his own text of Hamlet is complex and interesting. The entry for "1599", in my edition of the Hitchhiker's Guide, says only that it is the title of a popular song by The Artist Formerly Known as Prince Hamlet. Shapiro's guide to 1599 is much more encyclopedic and reliable, but even the best guides occasionally get lost in the Forest of Shakespeare.

The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606. New York: Simon & Schuster, October 6, 2015. ISBN 1416541640 Shakespeare in a Divided America' finds Shapiro at his best: engaging, precise in detail, and always willing to look beneath the skin of the matter at hand." --Tim Smith-Laing, The Daily Telegraph Graham, Nicholas (2014-01-01). "A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare: 1599". Library Journal . Retrieved 2023-07-03. Shapiro's rich portrait of 1606 is every bit as compelling as his excellent 1599, handling huge amounts of research with a winningly light touch.' Claire Lowdon, Sunday TimesIn fact, 1599 might just as easily be described as what Huang called "a chronicle of failure". Henry V has never been as loved or admired as Henry IV. Although middle-aged Shapiro may think that the relationship of Rosalind and Orlando is more "complex" and "real" than the passion of Romeo and Juliet, what actor ever made his reputation by playing Orlando? Nowadays Rosalind may or may not be Shakespeare's "most beloved heroine", but in Elizabethan England Thomas Lodge's "Rosalind" was much more popular than Shakespeare's. Shapiro argues persuasively that Shakespeare welcomed, and may even have provoked, the departure of the great clown Will Kemp from his acting company, but who would rather see Touchstone than Falstaff? Shapiro presents eight cases of Shakespeare's impact in a perpetually culture-clashing U.S. … Filling out each chapter with vivid context, Shapiro could hardly be more engaging ."--Booklist Shapiro treats us to one deep-dive vignette after another, most of which center on Shakespearean nuggets from America's past that have vanished from view even among seasoned fans of this country's neglected cultural curios."--Tom Carson, Bookforum

SHAKESPEARE IN AMERICA: A LITERARY ANTHOLOGY FROM THE REVOLUTION TO NOW, ed. by James Shapiro with a foreword by President Bill Clinton Were I to offer an introductory course in the Bard, one could not ask to do much better than SHAKESPEARE: THE KING'S MAN. [Shapiro’s] smart, sharp and succinct analysis of sixteen plays or so a true joy to experience--he presents them all in a particularly inspired manner, oftentimes highlighted by fantastic live performance footage that manage to expertly capture much of the themes, feel and mood of many of these admittedly tough-to-grasp later plays composed by the King's Man. Indeed, Shapiro's insight into the history of the time and his vast knowledge of the supposed history of the man behind the play himself is thorough and thoughtful to a fault--consistently engaging and never veering too far from the various topics under discussion, with some illuminating location visits and conversations with other historians; the focus always remains firmly set on the second half of Shakespeare's career and the historical circumstances surrounding the creation of the plays themselves. And, who could honestly ask for a better overview?” (Pat Cerasaro, Broadwayworld.com) In his often fascinating book, Mr Shapiro explores specific plays and productions that have reflected national concerns at fraught moments in the country's past….These cases, Mr Shapiro argues, show how Shakespeare alerts Americans to the "toxic prejudices poisoning our cultural climate". Whether they salve such antagonisms as well as exposing them is another matter. Sometimes the plays function like Rorschach tests that reveal and confirm whatever viewers want to see. " – The Economist The narrative flows like a novel with many plot lines, and you don'tneed to be a Shakespeare scholar or a historian to enjoy this well-researched book."—Joseph Peschel, Christian Science Monitor Shakespeare might hardly seem to need another biography, but James Shapiro's 1606: William Shakespeare and the Year of Lear (Faber) is so much more than that. Using the same methodology that he brought to 1599, his masterpiece of 10 years ago, Shapiro digs deep into the social and political context that gave rise to Shakespeare's greatest late work. There is terror on the streets, thanks to the failed gunpowder plot and to an outbreak of plague, while at the Jacobean court politics is, as ever, rotten to the core. In masterly detail Shapiro shows how this simmering paranoia fed into every line of King Lear.' Kathryn Hughes, GuardianJames S. Shapiro (born 1955) is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University who specializes in Shakespeare and the Early Modern period. Shapiro has served on the faculty at Columbia University since 1985, teaching Shakespeare and other topics, and he has published widely on Shakespeare and Elizabethan culture. In this fascinating study, Shapiro, an English professor at Columbia, casts skepticism about the authorship of Shakespeare’s works as a “long footnote to the larger story of the way we read now” and traces shifting assumptions about the relation between art and autobiography….. Shapiro is lively, psychologically subtle, and dryly appreciative of conspiratorial excess.” (The New Yorker) The story of 1599, then, is an enthralling one that includes the rebuilding of the Globe; the fall of Essex; the death of Spenser; a complicated publishing row about the Sonnets; the sensational opening of Julius Caesar; rumours of the Queen's death; the completion of a bestselling volume of poetry The Passionate Pilgrim; and finally, the extraordinary imaginative shift represented by the first draft of Hamlet. Shakespeare in a Divided Americashows that no writer has been more closely embraced by Americans, or has shed more light on the hot-button issues in our history. Indeed, it is by better understanding Shakespeare's role in American life, Shapiro argues, that we might begin to mend our bitterly divided land.