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Tuesday, August 21, 2007

JUST FINISHED: A Year In The Life of William Shakespeare: 1599 by James Shapiro. For some reason, this one called out to me from the Barnes & Noble cut-out table, and since Shakespeare looms large on the list (remember the list? I know I sure do...), I felt that it was worth a tumble.

My big issue with Shakespeare biographies is that for concrete info about his life, we're left with a long string of dates, comings and goings, births and deaths...and that's pretty much it. Biographers might as well be writing speculative fiction. Shapiro's approach in today's book makes more sense: to choose a year (in this case he chose 1599, arguably the turning point of Shakespeare's career), look into its events, cut it open and climb inside it, then use that knowledge to dig into that year's plays. As it turns out, there was a lot going on in Elizabethan England that year. The queen appointed the Earl of Essex, a former court favorite whose charm had curdled, to quell an Irish rebellion (lots of easy parallels with the current US situation if you look into the details), culminating in a meeting which Shapiro calls "the end of chivalry in England". Meanwhile, the threat of a new Spanish Armada gave the capital a special kind of war jitters, and the London merchants, responding to the economic threat of the Dutch merchant fleets, established the East India Company, the true starting point of the British Empire and the birth of globalism. Also, a new kind of literature, the personal essay, was beginning to insinuate itself among the inteligencia.

Shapiro did well the job he chose to do; the material relating Shakespeare's world to his work was very involving. The only part that didn't quite pull me in, oddly enough, was the chapter about his relations (or lack thereof) with his family. Here's where the absence of solid biographical details hurts the most; the refrain "we just don't know" rings louder than in any other section.

That aside, A Year In The Life is an involving read for people interested in the plays and the times, and it definitely doesn't hurt that it's geared for the non-academic reader. Like the man says in the introduction, if you've seen Shakespeare In Love, this book will help you meet Shakespeare at work.

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|| Eric 7:08 AM#

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