World Famous Comics: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare: 1599 (P.S.)
A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare: 1599 (P.S.)
By: James Shapiro Publisher: Harper Perennial Average Rating: Binding: Paperback Label: Harper Perennial Number of Items: 1 Number of Pages: 432 Publication Date: June 01, 2006 Release Date: June 13, 2006
1599 was an epochal year for Shakespeare and England
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.
A brilliantly written book! This book is one of those rare works in which you read it word by word and each phrase creates another thought in your mind. There is focus on a few of the plays worked upon in this year, The ones of most interest were Henry V, Julius Caesar, and Hamlet. The author does a superb job in blending the history of the moment with the plots, the characters, and words.
For anyone who has matured with Shakespeare, I played Richard III in grammar school, under the aegis of Redmond O'Hanlon, a $64,000 Question winner, Shakesperian expert, and New York City police officer, not that I contributed anything of great import to my part. Reading the details of Henry V and the problems of Elizabeth with Essex and others, and Julius Caesar and the Queen, and Hamlet and the transition from a Medieval period to the Rennaisance, one gets to understand what is happening as Shakespeare is writing.
The author writes on page 286 "There are many ways to be original." Yes indeed, Shakespeare did take from existing works, but his intensity of character and his reflections of the present as described by the author make this a most original work.
On page 81 the author talks of the sounds of Shakespeare, the voices, their accents, and use of words and phrases. Sounds of this type were the transition from the spoken word to written word, and as Chaucer was to be spoken, as was Homer, Shakespeare was to be spoken and read. The speech of the Shakesperian plays was a most powerful speech. That of Henry V at Agincourt were to be the most powerful, the words used by Churchill to move England in its defense during the darkest days of World War II. The trilogy of these three plays in 1599 were plays of speech as well as of words, of actions and of courage, of leadership and of mastery of the new English. This year was that year of transition for Shakespeare and for the English language.
The discussion on page 134 regarding the "something extraordinary was beginning" as he speaks of Julius Caesar was indeed a well placed phrase. The something extraordinary was happening in 1599. It was a change in English culture, government, and the role of England in the world. It also became the foundation of our shared values and culture.
The author shows how Shakespeare understood people by having proximity with the players in the Court of Elizabeth. The characters in the plays are real people, taken from the people in the Court and the the society in general. Shakespeare understands people by interacting with them, by living with them, and his representations of Romans, Angevins, and Danes through the eyes and psyches of his contemporaries lets us see real people. There is a continuity of humanity and at the same time is is its progression.
This book must be tasted a bit at a time, it is one of those rare books that one goes back to page after page, each time understanding more and more of the Bard. The book is an all-you-can-eat buffet which allows you to go back and taste each well prepared dish. It is not the recap of many many biographies of the Bard. It is the original writing of a brilliant expert who understands and loves the Bard both in the context of his time and ours. Congratulations on writing a book with great substance.
Shakespeare in an Historical and Political Context A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare by James Shapiro takes a novel approach in its presentation of Shakespeare. It resists both the urge to give a birth to death account of Shakespeare's life and the urge to form extensive conjectures based on what little is actually known about Shakespeare. Instead, it focuses on not only a pivotal year in Shakespeare's writing career but also a pivotal year in the history of England, 1599. This is the year the Globe was erected and Shakespeare wrote Henry the Fifth, Julius Caesar, As You Like It, and Hamlet. A Year in the Life discusses, in depth, the highly volatile and dangerous political context in which Shakespeare was writing and performing. Queen Elizabeth was aging without a clear successor in line for the throne; England was at war with Ireland and feared an invasion from the Spanish Armada. Free speech was not something that existed in 16th century England, and playwrights as well as common housewives were put in prison and punished for subversive speech. In this context, Shakespeare managed to escape prison, unlike several fellow playwrights, while he both wrote and performed in politically relevant plays that spoke to his contemporary audience. In his fascinating book, Shapiro sets the historical and political stage of 1599 and places Shakespeare and his plays firmly on it. I highly recommend it to anyone interested in biographical and historical information about Shakespeare.
A new perspective on Shakespeare The year is 1599. "A year in the life..." takes a new look at the Bard ( if this is possible after the rivers of ink that have been written ) by concentrating on a thoroughly researched year in the history of Enland and Queen Elizabeth I, and melding it in with a prolific year in the works of Shakespeare (Henry V, Julius Ceaser, As you Like it , Hamlet). The result is fascinating, and sheds another ray of light, this time from a different angle , on the man of the millenium.
A Magnficent Account Of Shakespeare's Annus Mirabilis While we have his magnificent plays and poetry, we know little about Shakespeare the man. We have the dry details of his birth, marriage, and death, the birth and death of his children, his education at Stratford Grammar School, his will, and some business and legal records. We can infer a little from what others wrote about him, especially in the 1623 First Folio; and we can extrapolate a bit more from what we know of the London theater scene and its denizens during the Elizabethan period. But the stuff of a real biography -- what Shakespeare was thinking, feeling, and experiencing during his life -- perforce are matters only for speculation.
It is truly remarkable, therefore, that Professor Shapiro uses this small heap of facts to bring Shakespeare brilliantly to life. Shapiro focuses on Shakespeare's life during 1599, which Shapiro forcefully argues was the year Shakespeare began his transformation into one of the greatest dramatists of all time. It was a year in which Shakespeare and his partners built the Globe Theatre where the Chamberlains Men / Kings Men would perform for the rest of his career. It was also the year in which Shakespeare ground out masterpieces in all three of his genres of history, comedy, and tragedy: Henry V, Julius Caesar, As You Like It, and Hamlet. Linking his sensitive and erudite explications of these plays to contemporary political developments (such as the bogged-down English invasion of Ireland and the threat of Spanish invasion), occurrences in the rapidly changing Elizabethan theater world (e.g., the diminishing roles of clowns like Shakespeare's partners Will Kemp and Robert Armin), literary trends (such as the development of self-expository monologue in Montaigne's essays and Shakespeare's soliloquies) and events in Shakespeare's own life (e.g., his quest for middle-class status as evidenced by his application for a coat of arms), Professor Shapiro paints a colorfully vibrant portrait of Shakespeare and the competitive theater business in which Shakespeare became so prominent as both a creator and an entrepreneur.
I don't know enough about Shakespeare to have an independent opinion about whether Shapiro overstates the case for the crucial nature of the year 1599. However, I thoroughly enjoyed this book. Although a product of deep learning, it is beautifully written and compellingly readable, and makes Shakespearean scholarship accessible even to a general reader like me. It also made me want to read many of the plays again, which I haven't since school days. Whether you love the Bard, or haven't thought much about him since you were forced to read the plays in school, this book is a wonderful and essential companion to Shakespeare's works.
a magnificent book; clear, detailed and lucid. A joy to read.
This is a magnificent book; clear, detailed and lucid.
Much has been said already about this book. It gives a very clear insight into Elizabethan London towards the end of Elizabeth's reign. As a student of the Bard, Shapiro performs well in widening the discussion to mention the theatre-going habits of plebs and aristocracy alike; how Shakespeare and his players would have attended palaces which informed his works. Shapiro notes the echoes of Catholicism, the threat of another Spanish invasion, the deeply unsettling rebellion in Ireland, even the confusion over the calendar and holy/national days. Given the difficulties and expense of publishing in the 1600's, I suppose it is possible to read every individual item published in 1599, and the comprehensiveness of the author's grasp of Elizabethan London, makes me believe he may have done so.
All told extremely well, he plots Shakespeare's emergence as a serious playwright, who eschews the popular trivialities and takes on large questions of politics and personality. I was less impressed with the later discussions of Shakespere's rewrites of the great plays of 1599, however it is a work of great learning, synopsized very well and told in an engaging style.
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