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

Product Information

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. Shakespeare in America'...offers amazing variety--genres, authors, styles, and contexts--all placed in conversation with each other. The result is a wide-ranging of America's ongoing relationship with Shakespeare, uses and abuses alike."

Rival Playwrights: Marlowe, Jonson, Shakespeare. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991. ISBN 0-231-07540-5Winkler, Elizabeth (May 2023). Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies. Simon & Schuster. p.326. ISBN 9781982171261. But is this self-revising Shakespeare compatible with Shapiro's claims for the pivotal importance of 1599? Even if Shakespeare began Hamlet in that year, he didn't finish - and probably had not even begun - revising it until 1600 or even 1601. When Shapiro claims that the play's famous soliloquies are "not even hinted at in Shakespeare's sources", he is momentarily forgetting that the most important source for Shakespeare's Hamlet was another popular play on the same subject, written in 1589 or earlier, probably by a different playwright. That play might have contained a Hamlet even more soliloquy-prone than Shakespeare's. "We just don't know," as Shapiro is fond of saying about Shakespeare's love life. 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."

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. Inevitably, like Greenblatt, when Shapiro writes about an age before newsprint and photographs, there is an air of speculation about his reconstruction. Much as he may want to reach the common reader, Shapiro must also protect his scholarly reputation with here a defensive 'perhaps', there a prudent 'maybe'. None the less, his intuitions, especially about the crucial influence of Marlowe on Shakespeare's development, are deeply persuasive.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) The entry for "1599", in my edition of the Hitchhiker's Guide, says only that it is the title of a popular song by The Artist Formerly Known as Prince Hamlet. Shapiro's guide to 1599 is much more encyclopedic and reliable, but even the best guides occasionally get lost in the Forest of Shakespeare. 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 By giving us an account of what Shakespeare must have read, heard and seen that year, Shapiro goes further than any other biographer in accounting for the relationship between those words and his life.”-- Frances Wilson, The Daily Telegraph

Shapiro was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, where he attended Midwood High School. He obtained his B.A. at Columbia University in 1977, Master's degree in 1978 and Ph.D. at University of Chicago in 1982. After teaching at Dartmouth College and Goucher College, Shapiro joined the faculty at Columbia University in 1985. He taught as a Fulbright lecturer at Bar-Ilan University and Tel Aviv University (1988–1989) and served as the Samuel Wanamaker Fellow at Shakespeare's Globe in London (1998). 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. A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare: 1599 by James Shapiro". Publishers Weekly. 2005-07-18 . Retrieved 2023-07-03. The Library of America has brought out a volume dedicated, unusually, to the influence on America of a non-American figure. . . . The collection is delightfully varied. . . . It makes an implicit argument for a distinctly American Shakespeare.”Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare? New York: Simon & Schuster; London: Faber and Faber, 2010. ISBN 1-4165-4162-4

As usual," Shapiro declares, "Shakespeare managed to have it both ways." Whether or not that was true of Shakespeare, it does ring true of Shakespeareans. When Shakespeare wrote a play such as Julius Caesar, which "ravished" contemporary audiences, Shapiro cites that immediate popular success as proof of Shakespeare's genius - and proof of the importance of 1599. When Shakespeare wrote a play such as As You Like It, which seems not to have been revived or praised for more than a century, Shapiro claims that Shakespeare was "ahead of his time", thereby turning the play's apparent failure into proof of Shakespeare's genius - and proof of the importance of 1599. Impeccably researched, the book focuses on how key figures in American history have experienced Shakespeare... A thought-provoking, captivating lesson in how literature and history intermingle."-- Kirkus Peterson, Tyler (March 2, 2016). "James Shapiro Wins 9th Annual Sheridan Morley Prize for Theatre Biography".Graham, Nicholas (2014-01-01). "A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare: 1599". Library Journal . Retrieved 2023-07-03. It is often said that we know very little about Shakespeare. The truth is that, in jigsaw form, we know a lot. There is a mass of microscopic documentary evidence. Moreover, his work is surrounded by hundreds of extant chronicles, plays, poems and stories, all of which fed the river of his imagination. In addition, there are countless contemporary letters and diaries still yielding secrets.