1599

Critics

• The Bard goes global

  1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare by James Shapiro 416pp, Faber, £16.99 Looking for a hitchhiker's guide to the Shakespearean universe? Hitch a ride with James Shapiro. He introduces you to the entrepreneur who rented Shakespeare a geld ... (read full critics)

  guardian.co.uk published on Sat, 25 Sep 2010

• To hold a mirror up to his nature

  1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare by James Shapiro Faber £16.99, pp416 The film Shakespeare in Love has a lot to answer for. The Oscar-winning movie cut a swath through the tranquil meadows of Shakespeare scholarship. First, there was t ... (read full critics)

  guardian.co.uk published on Sat, 25 Sep 2010

1 Review

• *** This comment contains spoilers! ***

  

  Let Shakespeare speak for himself

  1599 was the year that the famous Globe theatre was built and the year that Shakespeare created Hamlet, probably the first character in the history of the theatre to wrestle so intelligently and so eloquently with his own demons. For these reasons it seems, James Shapiro chose to focus on 1599 when ... (continue)

  1599 was the year that the famous Globe theatre was built and the year that Shakespeare created Hamlet, probably the first character in the history of the theatre to wrestle so intelligently and so eloquently with his own demons. For these reasons it seems, James Shapiro chose to focus on 1599 when he set out to write his "intimate history of Shakespeare" as the blurb on the back of the book puts it. But very little documentary evidence exists relating to Shakespeare's life, apart from his plays and sonnets, and therefore Shapiro felt obliged to draw heavily on the historical events of that year to flesh out his intimate history. This would be very interesting and informative if Shapiro didn't intersperse it constantly with a huge amount of conjecture as to what Shakespeare might or might not have been thinking or doing at any given moment, empty theorizing that adds nothing to the readers' pleasure. He develops certain minor themes extensively, eg a possible trip on horseback from London to Shakespeare’s home in Stratford, only to draw weak and almost pointless conclusions: "There's simply no way of knowing how he felt unsaddling at New Place on this or other visits." or on page 203, “The answer to this would tell us a great deal about what kind of person Shakespeare was; but we don’t have a clue what he did.”
  When Shapiro points out that the historian John Hayward, a contemporary of Shakespeare’s, understood “how invented speech made the past come alive”, the reader wonders if Shapiro himself could not have learned from that and fictionalized this “intimate history”. Hilary Mantle’s Wolf Hall comes to mind as a fine example of invented speech making the past come alive. Such a device might have helped the pace as well; the first two hundred pages drag quite a bit. Then on page 211, Shapiro mentions Hamlet and the reader sits up but Shapiro goes on to add: “But this is getting ahead of our story.” The reader thinks: Please, please let us get ahead of the story!

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Book Details

• Rating:
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• English Books
• Paperback 464 Pages
• ISBN-10: 0571214819
• ISBN-13: 9780571214815
• Publisher: Faber and Faber
• Pub date: Apr 06, 2006
• Dimensions: 1290 mm x 839 mm Just how big is that?
• Also available as: Hardcover

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