A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare: 1599 (P.S.)

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The judges of the Winner of Winners Award were: New Statesman editor-in-chief, Jason Cowley (chair); academic, critic and broadcaster, Shahidha Bari; journalist, author and academic, Sarah Churchwell; and biographer and critic Frances Wilson.

In Shakespeare studies, this declares a revolution. Ever since Coleridge, the prevailing view has been that the poet not only transcended his age but also wrote, in Coleridge's words 'exactly as if of another planet'. This point of view derives in part from Ben Jonson's 'He was not of an age but for all time', an idea echoed in Matthew Arnold's 'Others abide our question. Thou art free'. Shapiro will have none of this and, bringing us down to earth with a bump, his ambition is to understand, as Greenblatt put it, 'how Shakespeare became Shakespeare' by placing him in a world of plague, conspiracy and invasion. Graham, Nicholas (2014-01-01). "A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare: 1599". Library Journal . Retrieved 2023-07-03. 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. was chosen from a shortlist of six books, taken from the previous 24 prize-winning books, by a panel chaired by New Statesman editor-in-chief Cowley. Academic, critic and broadcaster Shahidha Bari was a judge alongside journalist, author and academic Sarah Churchwell, and biographer and critic Frances Wilson.

In 1599, Shakespeare completed Henry V, wrote Julius Caesar and As You Like It, and produced the first draft of Hamlet. In his book, Shapiro, who is professor of English at Columbia University, looks at how the political and social context of the time influenced the work. It is when one comes to the essays on Henry V, Julius Caesar, As You Like It and Hamlet– embedded as the climaxes of 1599’s successive seasons – that one starts to have misgivings about Shapiro’s project, not least because these assured sections of the book are likely to become, in paraphrased form, undergraduate lectures at universities throughout the anglophone world. For one thing, Shapiro’s sense that his book is in direct competition with Greenblatt’s biography seems to have inclined him throughout towards treating 1599 not just as a conveniently well-documented 12-month sample of the playwright’s life but as a specially formative year, ‘perhaps the decisive one, in Shakespeare’s development as a writer’. Hence his book, like Greenblatt’s, seeks to explain, as Shapiro puts it in a direct quotation of Greenblatt’s subtitle, ‘how Shakespeare became Shakespeare’. This tends to skew Shapiro’s judgment of the relative significance and artistic achievement of different plays: every work the book discusses in detail is heralded as a major breakthrough, and those already written by the end of 1598 are pervasively undervalued. (The author of Venus and Adonis, Richard III, Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Richard II, King John, The Merchant of Venice and the Falstaff plays would surely occupy a pretty distinguished place in world literature even if he had been run over by a carrier’s wagon that New Year’s Eve.) If you have any interest in Shakespeare at all, you won't be able to put it down…for my money, A Year in the Life really shows how books like this ought to be written.” -- Hans Werner, The Toronto Star a b c McCrum, Robert (5 June 2005). "To hold a mirror up to his nature". The Observer . Retrieved 30 April 2023. Shapiro is also a judge on this year’s Booker prize for fiction, and he is fascinating on the distinction between his work and that of novelists. He admires “the way that creative minds can tease out things that are less visible to those of us who deal in facts”. How does he feel about historical novelists – indeed, about a work such as Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet, a reimagining of Shakespeare’s family that has just been adapted for stage by the RSC?

Shapiro…has produced a scrupulous, lively account of Shakespeare's meaning for Americans past and present" -- David Mikics, Literary Review Shakespeare in America'...offers amazing variety--genres, authors, styles, and contexts--all placed in conversation with each other. The result is a wide-ranging of America's ongoing relationship with Shakespeare, uses and abuses alike." Oberammergau: The Troubling Story of the World's Most Famous Passion Play. New York: Pantheon Books, 2000. ISBN 0-375-40926-2 Impeccably researched, the book focuses on how key figures in American history have experienced Shakespeare... A thought-provoking, captivating lesson in how literature and history intermingle."-- Kirkus Shaffi, Sarah (27 April 2023). "James Shapiro wins Baillie Gifford anniversary prize with 'extraordinary' Shakespeare biography 1599". The Guardian . Retrieved 30 April 2023.

Peter Singlehurst, partner at Baillie Gifford, commented: "The strapline for the Baillie Gifford Prize is ‘all the best stories are true’. But it is not necessarily their factfulness that makes these books so special, it is the stories about people, ordinary and extraordinary. Choosing one book seems an impossible task and we thank the judges for taking on the unenviable responsibility.” Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare? New York: Simon & Schuster; London: Faber and Faber, 2010. ISBN 1-4165-4162-4 Shapiro’s book, which won the prize in 2006, explores Shakespeare’s life in teeming Tudor London in the year he turned 35, completed Henry V, wrote Julius Caesar and As You Like It and produced the first draft of Hamlet, widely regarded as his greatest play. beat five other books, including British writer Craig Brown’s One Two Three Four: The Beatles in Time, Canadian author Wade Davis’ mountaineering odyssey Into the Silence and Canadian Margaret MacMillan’s history of the post-World War I peace talks, Paris 1919. 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

James Shapiro's 1606: Shakespeare and the Year of Lear (Faber) is a meticulous narrative of a momentous year in the life of the playwright and a masterpiece of intelligent literary criticism.' Colm Toibin, Observer In Shapiro as in Huang, so-called barbarians threaten the empire's edges. Shapiro exposes the "incoherence and neglect" of Elizabethan policy in Ireland and the disastrous consequences of the Queen's "muddled and half-hearted strategies" for dealing with the Earl of Tyrone's insurgency. Ireland casts a long shadow over 1599. The year begins with the death of Edmund Spenser, only a few weeks after he returned to London from the destruction of his Irish estate. At his burial in Westminster Abbey, his hearse was carried by poets -Shakespeare perhaps among them - and afterwards their "mournful elegies and poems, with the pens that wrote them, [were] thrown into the tomb".

Footnotes

Shakespeare in America: An Anthology from the Revolution Until Now, ed. James Shapiro, with a foreword by Bill Clinton. New York: Library of America, 2014. ISBN 1598532952 There is a worrying circularity about the critical procedure this mandates: non-Shakespearean texts circulated in 1599 are read in search of context for what Shakespeare wrote that year, and then each text Shakespeare wrote that year is read in search of what Shapiro has already identified as its context. Shapiro gives the impression that he studies Elizabethan history only so as to understand Shakespeare and then studies Shakespeare only for his insights into Elizabethan history, and that he wants to confine the meanings of these plays within a museum of what we currently think matters about 1599. It’s an approach to the plays that risks reducing them to journalism and their interpreters to antiquarians: it seems fundamentally to misapprehend how they have gone on working for generations of readers and audiences with precious little interest in the fortunes of Essex or the progress of enclosure. A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare is a 2006 book by James S. Shapiro about the life of William Shakespeare in the year 1599. [1] [2] [3] 1599 was the year Shakespeare finished writing Henry V, and wrote Julius Caesar and As You Like It. [3] In addition to detailing Shakespeare's life, Shapiro "delv[es] into evocative details of social, political, and artistic life in London in 1599." [4] Critical reception [ edit ]

She said: “We felt that each book had to just be judged on its merits, but we had to also recognise that there were structural inequalities in the industry — in bookselling, in publishing — over the last 25 years, that were being reflected. Because this is a cross-section of the books out there that people have admired over the past 25 years.”The limitations of Shapiro’s approach become obvious when one tries to imagine what would happen if a present-day director, convinced that Julius Caesar owed its significance and impact entirely to the historical circumstances of its composition, tried to stage the play so as to restrict the production’s meanings to those that might have been available in 1599. I am reminded of a well-intentioned RSC revival of All’s Well that Ends Well in the late 1980s, whose director, in a fit of Shapiro-like historicism, decided that the play must originally have reflected something of the change of mood between the last days of Elizabeth I and the new court of James I, and who accordingly hung a big portrait of Elizabeth behind his cast during the first half and an equally big one of James in the same position during the second. It didn’t help. 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's outstanding 1606 (Faber), in which the Jacobean Shakes­peare gets his due, follow[s] Shapiro's magnificent take on the Elizabethan one in 1599.' Sarah Churchwell, Guardian 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) 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."