A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare 1599 (review)

Abstract

Shapiro, James. 2005. A Year in Life of William 1599. New York: HarperCollins Publishers. $27.95 he. 394 pp.Perhaps greatest biographer of has observed that public nature of facts known about poet afford no insight into interior life of artist, wherein resides chief fascination of literary biography. It is ironic that these words of Samuel Schoenbaum (1971, 1) find their echo in last sentence of Shapiro's sterling book, clearly most important work on Shakespeare's life among many since Schoenbaum's A Documentary Life (1975). Though able to open the hearts and minds of others, Shapiro concludes, kept lock on what he revealed about himself (333). Still, Shapiro's deft ability to zoom in and out on Shakespeare's life in English society in 1599 does seem to make bard take on flesh and blood especially in silences that Shapiro allows us to hear in form of what did not-or dare not-write. Despite beautifully written thick description that Shapiro offers of one year in Shakespeare's life unfolding season to season, we still do not know how he felt about basic public issues that faced English culture that year. To oversimplify these, we still can ask, was he Catholic or Protestant, Monarchist or Republican or Monarchical Republican? His personal life seems even more remote, paradoxically, in face of this most diligent, lucid book, mustread for all who study Shakespeare. How did he feel about his marriage or his family, who probably never saw single play by their most eminent member (240)? Such mysteries of history and life deepen, not recede, as Shapiro makes us peer across centuries dividing post-modern from early modern and beyond, to chivalric world recognized in Hamlet to be dead but not yet buried (276).Herein lies great value of Shapiro's work. It shows us how, through dark glass of history, we can vividly make out form and pressure of times on four plays worked on in year 1599, Henry V, As You Like It, Julius Caesar and Hamlet. Against and within massive forces that made the death of chivalry coincide with the birth of empire (274), English man both disappears and emerges. Zooming out on grave problems of enclosure and vagabondage particularly acute in Arden (233), Shapiro shows immortal poet as just one more rich man among an uneasy multitude, having already stuffed his barns in 1597 with 80 bushels of malt, not ignorant of consequences upon poor of Warwickshire (241). Through Shapiro's other lens, we see Protean pleaser-and reader-of great crowds, with over third of London's adult population likely to attend play each month (9). On stage at least, was able to make them think he had heard and seen their very voice and image, showing true sympathy for those hurt by the personal and social cost of enclosure, for example, in figure of indigent shepherd Corin in As You Like It (243). In so hurtling and maintaining obstacles of social class, emerges in Shapiro's richly detailed portrait of late Elizabethan culture like character of Henry V, a man who mingles easily with princes and paupers but who deep down is fundamentally private and inscrutable (92).Indeed, Shapiro tellingly demonstrates how fact that Shakespeare played vasdy different roles in London and in Stratford (240) fully situates his life and career in growing divide of city and country, center and margin, lords and commoners in early modern British culture overall. For example, he convincingly detects in nationalist rhetoric of Henry V futility and desperation of English crown's attempt to colonize Ireland in view of 1598 massacre of English troops at Blackwater by Earl of Tyrone. By presenting the fantasy of English and Irish fighting by side so soon after Blackwater (95), Henry V displays shallow hopes of conquest that rested now on Essex, leaving for Ireland in spring of 1 599. …