1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare
by James ShapiroFaber £16.99 pp429
A heavy snowstorm shrouded London on December 28, 1598. Through it a group of men bristling with swords and axes closed in on a building in the city’s northern suburbs. The building was The Theatre — London’s oldest playhouse, once the scene of full-blooded dramas by Christopher Marlowe and Thomas Kyd, but empty for the past two years since the Chamberlain’s Men whose base it was had quarrelled with their cantankerous landlord, Giles Allen. Now, while Allen unsuspectingly spent Christmas in the country, members of the troupe gathered to dismantle the playhouse which (unlike the leased land it stood upon) technically belonged to them. Carted away and ferried across the Thames, its timbers would be re-erected as a new theatre, The Globe. Among those taking part in this rushed and risky act of reclamation were the company’s star tragedian Richard Burbage, its celebrity-comic Will Kemp and its 35-year-old resident playwright William Shakespeare.
For Shakespeare the next 12 months would be momentous. 1599, James Shapiro compellingly displays, was his annus mirabilis: the year that, deepening and complicating his imagination, took him from outstanding accomplishment to unsurpassed genius. That genius, romantically disposed commentators such as Coleridge have maintained, was “of no age” but arose from “the unfathomable depths of his own oceanic mind”. Shapiro, who can be breathtakingly acute at fathoming Shakespeare’s mind, couldn’t disagree more. Shakespeare’s creativity, he contends, was decisively fuelled and fired by contemporary events — and never more so than in his four great artistic undertakings of 1599: the completing of Henry V, the writing of Julius Caesar and As You Like It, and the drafting of Hamlet.
The move to The Globe proved crucial to his breakthrough. Becoming a shareholder in the theatre (an unprecedented role for an actor or playwright), he increased his control over what was staged. Soon, this showed itself in the seeing-off of the attention-hogging comic turn, Will Kemp. When Shakespeare failed to write a part for him in Henry V, he quit the company (and a year later was still spluttering about “Shakerags”). Kemp’s exit cleared the way for playwright-centred, not performer-centred drama — though Shakespeare, Shapiro demonstrates, always played to the strengths of his troupe. The presence of two exceptionally talented boy-actors, for instance, is testified to by the pairs of female characters (especially Rosalind and Celia in As You Like It and Gertrude and Ophelia in Hamlet) that Shakespeare provided for them.
Outside the sphere of The Globe, Shapiro argues, political crises impinged tellingly on Shakespeare’s imagination. Prominent among them was the Earl of Essex’s ill-fated expedition to suppress rebellion in Ireland. Shakespeare’s preoccupation with this can surface at unlikely moments in his re-conquest drama, Henry V. A slip of the pen has the French Queen greeting the monarch as “brother Ireland” when what’s clearly intended is “brother England”. In a jolting leap across the centuries and (unique for Shakespeare) a direct address to the audience about a contemporary event, the Chorus likens Henry’s triumphant return from France to the jubilations that will ensue if Essex returns victorious from Ireland.
The perilous Irish situation feeds into a pervading sense of shuddery precariousness in 1599. Rumours of the approach of another Armada, combined with fears of invasion while English troops are overseas in Ireland and the Low Countries, put the kingdom at arms. More than 25,000 men are mustered to defend London. There are plans (wisely discarded) to blockade the Thames with scuttled ships. It’s no accident, Shapiro feels, that Hamlet — written during this edgy time — opens with jittery sentinels and preparations to withstand military attack. Heightening the atmo-sphere of jeopardy was the Queen’s vulnerability. A spate of attempts on her life broke out in the months preceding Shakespeare’s writing of his political assassination play, Julius Caesar. In any case, Elizabeth was ageing, and with her death would come the demise of the Tudor dynasty. Apprehension of an impending plunge into the unknown was widespread.
As a playwright, Shapiro notes, Shakespeare was compulsively drawn to “epochal moments”, periods when the familiar was dramatically changed. One such moment had earlier left its scars everywhere around him. An image the book returns to is the painting-over of the medieval wall-pictures in Stratford’s Guild Chapel during the Reformation. Through the whitewash, Shapiro suggests, outlines of what had gone would probably be still visible. For him, double layers distinguish Shakespeare’s mature work. Brilliantly teasing apart “the blurring of Roman past and Elizabethan present” in Julius Caesar, he shows how urgent contemporary concerns are superimposed on a classical scenario.
Overlay, it’s stressed, was one of Shakespeare’s fortes as a playwright. Behind Henry V stands The Famous Victories of Henry V, the triumphalist old play it displaced. Behind Hamlet is the superannuated (and now lost) anonymous revenge play of the same name. In Shakespeare’s infinitely more sophisticated dramas, enormous new possibilities are opened up, Shapiro believes, by a probing of “fault-lines” (between military swagger and the unglamorous actualities of war in Henry V, within a psyche wrestling with moral issues in Hamlet).
How Shakespeare pushed forward his advances in complexity is rivetingly explored in sections about his habit not just of reworking other people’s plays but assiduously revising his own. Far from being an author of godlike facility who “never blotted out a line”, Shapiro’s Shakespeare is an “obsessive tinkerer” (as a fine analysis of his re-writing of one of his sonnets exhibits). There’s a persuasive account of how (helped by the emergence of the essay form) he elaborated the soliloquy to suit his search for further psychological and emotional subtlety. Most gripping of all is a masterly examination of the differing versions of Hamlet he penned — and of the confusion caused by the standard practice of conflating them. (Like the Arden editors currently working on this project, Shapiro thinks they should be published as three distinct plays.)
Much of Shakespeare’s life remains obscure. Tantalisingly, although his daughter Judith was still alive in Stratford almost half a century after his death, nobody bothered to seek her out. One antiquary made a note in his diary to do so but, by the time he got round to it, she had taken her knowledge of her father with her to the grave. There are lost plays by Shakespeare. Nothing is known for sure about his “lost years”, the decade between his leaving school in Stratford and appearing in London. Beyond vague memories of his playing old man roles, no reports survive of him as an actor. As a private individual (“not a company keeper”, a contemporary remarked), he is even less visible. The only two authentic portraits of him are posthumous.
All the more marvellous, then, that Shapiro’s superb book — the product of marathon scholarship, inspired insight, narrative flair, astute surmise and searching intelligence — brings Shakespeare’s outer and inner worlds, and the interplay between them, alive with such thrilling immediacy.
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