1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare: Winner of the Baillie Gifford Winner of Winners Award 2023

Product Information

Readers who have invested in his two books about seminal years inShakespeare's creative life, 1599: A Year in the Life of WilliamShakespeare and 1606:Shakespeareand the Year of Lear, know what a lucid, lively joy he is to read. And his dissection of the controversy over whether the Elizabethan Mr S wrote his own plays, Contested Will, settles the issue for any sensible reader. [ Shakespeare in a Divided America] isn't a long book and it's easy to read, elegant, to the point and with very well-chosen quotes." ---David Aaronovitch,Times (London) The Guardian's Robert McCrum described 1599 as "an unforgettable illumination of a crucial moment in the life of our greatest writer". [3] 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? a b c McCrum, Robert (5 June 2005). "To hold a mirror up to his nature". The Observer . Retrieved 30 April 2023. I]t is a profoundly thoughtful study, and reminds us that, although we imagine that we read great literature, it also reads us, and in our interpretation of it we discover ourselves."—John Carey, The Sunday Times (London)

An Interview with James Shapiro", The Literateur interviews James Shapiro on the subject of Shakespeare conspiracy theories and authorship. 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. The Columbia Anthology of British Poetry Edited with Carl Woodring. New York: Columbia University Press, 1995. ISBN 0-231-10180-5 The prize has been won by 16 men, including one person of colour, and eight women in its history. This gender balance was reflected in the shortlist for the Winner of Winners. Churchwell said the fact that Shapiro was a white man writing about a white author wasn’t something that the judging panel would hold against it, given that it was “a remarkable book”. But she said the judges did discuss the prize’s historical bias – which reflected the landscape of nonfiction publishing – saying the “vast majority of the [previously winning] books were by white men about western themes and subjects”.

Footnotes

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. His vision for 1599, a microscopic look at the critical year in Shakespeare’s life when he was working on Henry V, Julius Caesar, As You Like It and the first draft of Hamlet, was not initially endorsed. His application for a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities in the US in the late 1980s was turned down twice, he remembers. “I wasn’t discouraged by that. I just felt they didn’t understand that I was trying to do something different.” The “something different” was to understand the immense anxieties of the age: the country poised on the brink of invading Ireland with a 16,000-strong force; the fear that Elizabeth I’s reign was approaching its end with no clear successor in sight; the strengthening possibility of another Spanish Armada. It’s no coincidence, says Shapiro, that Hamlet opens with men on the ramparts, nervously watching for hostile forces. Creative minds can tease out things that are less visible to those of us who deal in facts Cowley said: " 1599 is a remarkable and compelling book. A history of four masterpieces and of so much more, it produces a life of Shakespeare, about whom so little is known, through an ingenious fusion of history, politics, and literary criticism. The result is a poised and original re-imagination of biography. Most Shakespeare experts have a lot to say about the conspiracy theorists who deny Shakespeare’s authorship of his own plays – but very little of it is printable, let alone as readable as James Shapiro’s Contested Will….[T]he application of Shapiro’s detective skills to the piles of pseudo-scholarship from the past century and a half yields valuable results. Contested Will isn’t just the most intelligent book on the topic for years, but a re-examination of the documentary evidence offered on all sides of the question.” (Michael Dobson, The Financial Times) The year 1599 was when Shakespeare completed "Henry V", wrote "Julius Caesar" and "As You Like It", and produced the first draft of "Hamlet". In his winning book, Shapiro shows the Bard’s progression from his tale of two star-crossed lovers to "Hamlet", exploring how Shakespeare became Shakespeare.

Shapiro won the 2006 Samuel Johnson Prize as well as the 2006 Theatre Book Prize for his work 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare, which Robert Nye described as "powerful" in Literary Review, set apart by Shapiro's precise and engrossing commentary on the sea-change in Shakespeare's language during the year 1599. [2] [3] In 2023, the book won the Baillie Gifford Prize's "Winner of Winners" award. [4] [5] Shapiro presents eight cases of Shakespeare's impact in a perpetually culture-clashing U.S. … Filling out each chapter with vivid context, Shapiro could hardly be more engaging ."--BooklistJames Shapiro's 1606: William Shakespeare and the Year of Lear (Faber) brings to dazzling life the world from which sprang the best crop of new plays in theatre history. ' Nicholas Hytner, Observer 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." Shapiro has received awards from the National Endowment for the Humanities, The Huntington Library, and the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture for his publications and academic activities. He has written for numerous periodicals, including The Chronicle of Higher Education, The New York Times Book Review, the Financial Times, and The Daily Telegraph. In 2006, he was named a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellow as well as a Fellow at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. 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