To hold a mirror up to his nature

Publish date: 2021-01-30
The ObserverBiography booksReviewJames Shapiro gets under Shakespeare's skin in his forensic biographical survey, 1599, says Robert McCrum

1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare
by James Shapiro
Faber £16.99, pp416

The film Shakespeare in Love has a lot to answer for. The Oscar-winning movie cut a swath through the tranquil meadows of Shakespeare scholarship. First, there was the idea that the poet's life was, after all, a proper subject for biographical speculation. Then there was the notion that by linking scraps of documentary evidence with a careful scrutiny of clues buried in the plays, it was possible, even desirable, to compose a plausible narrative about the life and times of a great Elizabethan that might also appeal to a 21st-century audience.

Stephen Greenblatt, a renowned Shakespearean scholar who was also an adviser on the film, was perhaps the first brilliantly to transplant the groves of academe to Hollywood with his bestselling Will in the World. Now, James Shapiro, less elegant but more forensic, has pulled a similar stunt, providing a long and absorbing footnote to both the film and the bestseller.

In 1599, perhaps the decisive year in Shakespeare's life, art and politics collided to an extraordinary degree. The Tudor state had to crush an Irish rebellion and see off another armada threat from Spain. And, if you happened to be in London, there was an annus mirabilis in the playhouses.

In the course of the year, Shakespeare completed Henry V, wrote Julius Caesar and As You Like It in short order. Shapiro convincingly demonstrates that 'it is no more possible to talk about Shakespeare's plays independently of his age than it is to grasp what his society went through without the benefit of Shakespeare's insights'. An epigraph to this fine book would be Hamlet's famous observation that plays and players were alike the 'abstract and brief chronicles of the time'.

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.

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.

The story of 1599, then, is an enthralling one that includes the rebuilding of the Globe; the fall of Essex; the death of Spenser; a complicated publishing row about the Sonnets; the sensational opening of Julius Caesar; rumours of the Queen's death; the completion of a bestselling volume of poetry The Passionate Pilgrim; and finally, the extraordinary imaginative shift represented by the first draft of Hamlet.

Partly, 1599 is a rediscovery of the worlds that shaped the poet's development and which, in his maturity, were becoming lost - the bloody Catholic past; the deforested landscape of Arden; a dying chivalric culture. Partly, it is a record of a writer reading, writing and revising to meet a succession of deadlines.

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.

Perhaps he will get roasted in the scholarly journals for stretching a point or two, but so what? He has got under the skin of a writer who worked harder than most, while opening the hearts and minds of his audience, to keep a lock on what he told us about himself. 1599 is an unforgettable illumination of a crucial moment in the life of our greatest writer. Shakespeare lovers everywhere will be grateful for it.

ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7tbTEoKyaqpSerq96wqikaJqfpLi0e5FpZ25nmqq7cHyUaJmip5enrrG02GeqoZmbmsCxscCrnA%3D%3D