1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare
by James Shapiro
Summary
Shapiro's wager is that the way into the most documented blank in literature, Shakespeare the man, is not the cradle to grave biography, which must pad its gaps with maybe, but a single year read closely, and he chooses the annus mirabilis: 1599, in which Shakespeare finished Henry V, wrote Julius Caesar and As You Like It, drafted Hamlet, and, with his fellow shareholders, dismantled a theatre north of the river and carried its timbers across the Thames to build the Globe.
The method is total immersion in the year itself. The Earl of Essex marches on Ireland with the largest English army in memory and comes home a disgraced conspirator; a Spanish invasion scare empties London's stages; the queen is old, childless and touchy about succession plays; satires are burned by order of the bishops; the East India Company is being invented in city meetings. Shapiro reads the plays against all of it, Henry V's choruses against the Essex expedition, Caesar's assassination debated in a city nervous about deposing rulers, Hamlet's inwardness as something genuinely new being made under commercial pressure, and the effect is to return the plays to their first condition: topical, risky, written fast for a paying crowd by a shareholder with everything staked. The Globe chapters alone, the clandestine winter dismantling of the Theatre while the landlord was away for Christmas, are worth the book.
Around four hundred pages, and it reads like a thriller with footnotes.
Best for readers who want the working Shakespeare, playhouse, politics and deadline, and the best available answer to how the greatest year in authorship actually felt.
Historical Context & Significance
1599 won the Samuel Johnson Prize in 2006, and then, remarkably, won the whole prize again: in 2023, for the award's twenty fifth anniversary, a judging panel named it the Winner of Winners, the best work of nonfiction from the prize's first quarter century. Few books hold both a season's verdict and a generation's.
James Shapiro, a Columbia professor, had found a form as much as a subject: the single year biography became a minor industry after it, and he applied it again himself in 1606, on the Lear year. His Contested Will, on the authorship question, and Shakespeare in a Divided America completed an unusual thing, a scholarly career conducted at bestseller altitude without concession.
The book's deeper effect was on how Shakespeare is popularly imagined: less the timeless bard, more the working playwright reading the morning's politics, and two decades of subsequent writing about him descends from that shift.