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. 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 Winkler, Elizabeth (May 2023). Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies. Simon & Schuster. p.326. ISBN 9781982171261. 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.”

James Shapiro excels at bringing Shakespeare's works and worlds to life for our time. Now, in this fascinating book, he ingeniously explores how unending disagreements over the plays illuminate our national past as well as the present. Selecting powerful stories where history and literature meet, he spares his readers none of America's violent passions-or Shakespeare's." -- Sean Wilentz 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 An Interview with James Shapiro", The Literateur interviews James Shapiro on the subject of Shakespeare conspiracy theories and authorship. Robert McCrum: "To hold a mirror up to his nature", The Observer, June 5, 2005 (review of 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare).

Footnotes

Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare?’ serves as the first full-length discussion of the big authorship question by a Shakespeare pro in 100 years, maybe the first ever. It's worth the wait. Shapiro is a powerful, engaging writer with a gift for connecting great generalities and illustrating them with telling examples. "Contested Will" explores the origin and development of the authorship question with unexpected openness and some insights that will be new even to the most seasoned of authorship buffs.” (Ward Elliott, Los Angeles Times) 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 Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare? New York: Simon & Schuster; London: Faber and Faber, 2010. ISBN 1-4165-4162-4 As he conducts us through the pretensions of the Baconians, the Marlovians, the Oxfordians, and on through the latest internet conspiracy theories, larded with pompous quasi-legal language about "reasonable doubt" and "prima facie case", Shapiro sprinkles his text with glinting, steely facts, about the actors of Shakespeare's company, about Elizabethan printers and their methods, about what Shakespeare's manuscripts reveal about how his plays and stagecraft worked. These details, in the chapter which he devotes to Shakespeare himself, are the most riveting part of his book…. Shapiro does not waste words on the preposterous, but he does uncover the mechanism of fantasy and projection that go to make up much of the case against Shakespeare. His book lays bare, too, assumptions about the writing life that come to us from the 18th-century romantics. Those who made Shakespeare a demigod have much to answer for.” (Hilary Mantel, The Guardian)

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.

Books

Churchwell said each book had to be judged on its merits, but added: “We also had to recognise there were structural inequalities, in bookselling, in publishing, over the last 25 years that were being reflected.” In 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?