A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare: 1599 (P.S.)

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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. 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) 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.” Furthermore, the view briefly set out in Shapiro’s preface – that until recently accounts of the relationship between Shakespeare and history were dominated by facile assertions of timelessness, that there was, in effect, no historicism before New Historicism – simply won’t stand scrutiny. Shakespeare was already usefully and provokingly out of date by the time he ‘became Shakespeare’, which was some time after his death: however topical some details of these four plays may have looked at their premieres, the vast majority of their admirers have experienced them not as symptoms or relics of a particular historical moment, or as works outside history altogether, but as texts productively suspended between then and now and engaged with both, as contending voices from a lost and outlived past which can nonetheless vividly and disconcertingly animate and interpret the present. SHAKESPEARE IN AMERICA: A LITERARY ANTHOLOGY FROM THE REVOLUTION TO NOW, ed. by James Shapiro with a foreword by President Bill Clinton

Shapiro treats us to one deep-dive vignette after another, most of which center on Shakespearean nuggets from America's past that have vanished from view even among seasoned fans of this country's neglected cultural curios."--Tom Carson, Bookforum Together they selected a shortlist from the 24 previous winners of the prize (announced on 9 March), before choosing an overall winner. The winner was announced on 27 April at an event held at the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh.

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In a narrative arching across the centuries, James Shapiro traces the unparalleled role of Shakespeare's 400-year-old tragedies and comedies in making sense of so many of these issues,on which theAmerican identity has turned. Reflecting on how Shakespeare has been invoked—and at times weaponized—at pivotal moments in our past, Shapiro takes us from President John Quincy Adams's disgust with Desdemona's interracial marriage to Othello,to Abraham Lincoln's and his assassin John Wilkes Booth's competing obsessions with the plays, up through the fraught debates over marriage and same-sex love at the heart of thecelebrated adaptationsKiss Me,KateandShakespeare in Love.His narrative culminates in the 2017 controversy over the staging ofJulius Caesarin Central Park, in which a Trump-like leader is assassinated.

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 ."--Booklist This has been an 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. It’s wonderful to think that, thanks to these judges, a new generation of readers can discover James Shapiro’s timeless classic.’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”. In Shapiro as in Huang, so-called barbarians threaten the empire's edges. Shapiro exposes the "incoherence and neglect" of Elizabethan policy in Ireland and the disastrous consequences of the Queen's "muddled and half-hearted strategies" for dealing with the Earl of Tyrone's insurgency. Ireland casts a long shadow over 1599. The year begins with the death of Edmund Spenser, only a few weeks after he returned to London from the destruction of his Irish estate. At his burial in Westminster Abbey, his hearse was carried by poets -Shakespeare perhaps among them - and afterwards their "mournful elegies and poems, with the pens that wrote them, [were] thrown into the tomb". The anniversary was also marked by a one-off documentary – All The Best Stories Are True – which explores the very best in non-fiction writing over the past 25 years. From nail-biting moments to life changing stories, the documentary uncovers how the prize started out as the non-fiction rival to the Booker, and what the next 25 years hold for readers and writers in a world now steeped in ‘fake news’. It is available to watch on the Baillie Gifford Prize YouTube this February. Lister, David (26 May 2005). "1599: a year in the life of William Shakespeare, by James Shapiro". The Independent . Retrieved 30 April 2023.

James Shapiro’s 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare won the Baillie Gifford Prize Winner of Winners award on Thursday. It was crowned from a field of six finalists drawn from the 24 winners of the Baillie Gifford Prize, which marks its 25th edition this year.The Guardian's Robert McCrum described 1599 as "an unforgettable illumination of a crucial moment in the life of our greatest writer". [3] An Interview with James Shapiro", The Literateur interviews James Shapiro on the subject of Shakespeare conspiracy theories and authorship. His next work is called Playbook, and will focus on America’s Federal Theatre Project of the 1930s, a progressive attempt to bring drama to mass audiences that was targeted by the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Then, as now, and as in the 16th century, theatre is powerful, and Shapiro intends to do everything he can to defend it.