Shakespeare in America: An Anthology from the Revolution Until Now, ed. James Shapiro, with a foreword by Bill Clinton. New York: Library of America, 2014. ISBN 1598532952 Peterson, Tyler (March 2, 2016). "James Shapiro Wins 9th Annual Sheridan Morley Prize for Theatre Biography". was an epochal year for Shakespeare and England. During that year, Shakespeare wrote four of his most famous plays: Henry the Fifth, Julius Caesar, As You Like It, and, most remarkably, Hamlet; Elizabethans sent off an army to crush an Irish rebellion, weathered an Armada threat from Spain, gambled on a fledgling East India Company, and waited to see who would succeed their aging and childless queen.

The book is really a wonderfully deft interweaving of historical and cultural context, physical and social description, the politics and economics of Shakespeare’s work as a professional actor and co-owner of the Globe theatre.” -- Fintan O’Toole, The Irish Times James Shapiro is an academic who not only teaches Shakespeare, but has also learnt a thing or two himself from the Sweet Swan of Avon about the art of storytelling.His book, Shakespeare in a Divided America, is an unpretentious, fact-filled, lightly-written, meticulously-researched history of seven politically-defining moments that occurred in the US over the past 200 years….There has been so much written about Shakespeare, and a great deal about America's history, but by bringing them together James Shapiro has pulled off a masterstroke and illuminated both in a fresh, vivid, and thoroughly entertaining book." -- Will Gompertz, BBC Cowley said: " 1599 is a remarkable and compelling book. A history of four masterpieces and of so much more, it produces a life of Shakespeare, about whom so little is known, through an ingenious fusion of history, politics, and literary criticism. The result is a poised and original re-imagination of biography. Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare? New York: Simon & Schuster; London: Faber and Faber, 2010. ISBN 1-4165-4162-4 First aired in April 2012 as a BBC4 3-hour documentary: “The King and the Playwright: A Jacobean History." Directed by Steven Clarke. Short-listed for the Grierson Award for the Best Historical Documentary, 2012. Now available as a DVD for North American viewers.An Interview with James Shapiro", The Literateur interviews James Shapiro on the subject of Shakespeare conspiracy theories and authorship. In fact, 1599 might just as easily be described as what Huang called "a chronicle of failure". Henry V has never been as loved or admired as Henry IV. Although middle-aged Shapiro may think that the relationship of Rosalind and Orlando is more "complex" and "real" than the passion of Romeo and Juliet, what actor ever made his reputation by playing Orlando? Nowadays Rosalind may or may not be Shakespeare's "most beloved heroine", but in Elizabethan England Thomas Lodge's "Rosalind" was much more popular than Shakespeare's. Shapiro argues persuasively that Shakespeare welcomed, and may even have provoked, the departure of the great clown Will Kemp from his acting company, but who would rather see Touchstone than Falstaff? The Columbia Anthology of British Poetry Edited with Carl Woodring. New York: Columbia University Press, 1995. ISBN 0-231-10180-5 I]t is a profoundly thoughtful study, and reminds us that, although we imagine that we read great literature, it also reads us, and in our interpretation of it we discover ourselves."—John Carey, The Sunday Times (London)

Toby Mundy, the prize’s director, added: "This has been a 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." Oberammergau: The Troubling Story of the World's Most Famous Passion Play. New York: Pantheon Books, 2000. ISBN 0-375-40926-2 A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare, Shapiro shows how The Bard progressed from his tale of two star-crossed lovers to Hamlet. Shapiro finds one question the most pressing: how did Shakespeare become Shakespeare – one of the greatest writers who ever lived? Lister, David (26 May 2005). "1599: a year in the life of William Shakespeare, by James Shapiro". The Independent . Retrieved 30 April 2023. The Shakespeare of 1599 is a less tormented or dashing figure than the apostate recusant of Michael Wood’s In Search of Shakespeare (2003) or Richard Wilson’s Secret Shakespeare (2004), and in Shapiro’s cautious and sober account of his contributions to The Passionate Pilgrim and their revised reappearance in the 1609 Sonnets he isn’t the honey-tongued lover, bisexual or otherwise, of some contemporary rumour either. Of all the various and contradictory scraps of early biographical hearsay about the playwright which survive, Shapiro is most attracted to John Aubrey’s report that Shakespeare ‘was not a company keeper’ but habitually excused himself from wild nights out on the grounds of ill-health. Shapiro’s hero, though assiduous at keeping up with the news, would rather stay at home at his writing desk with a good book by Plutarch or Holinshed open in front of him and a pen in his hand. Studious, likeable, observant, fluent and very much of his time, this latest version of Shakespeare bears, as ever, more than a passing resemblance to his latest biographer.

Footnotes

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. beat five other books, including British writer Craig Brown’s One Two Three Four: The Beatles in Time, Canadian author Wade Davis’ mountaineering odyssey Into the Silence and Canadian Margaret MacMillan’s history of the post-World War I peace talks, Paris 1919. I hated Shakespeare in high school,” said Shapiro, now regarded as one of America’s leading Shakespearean scholars. “(I) wanted to write a book for people who, like me, didn’t necessarily get what this writer and his books were about. It is when one comes to the essays on Henry V, Julius Caesar, As You Like It and Hamlet– embedded as the climaxes of 1599’s successive seasons – that one starts to have misgivings about Shapiro’s project, not least because these assured sections of the book are likely to become, in paraphrased form, undergraduate lectures at universities throughout the anglophone world. For one thing, Shapiro’s sense that his book is in direct competition with Greenblatt’s biography seems to have inclined him throughout towards treating 1599 not just as a conveniently well-documented 12-month sample of the playwright’s life but as a specially formative year, ‘perhaps the decisive one, in Shakespeare’s development as a writer’. Hence his book, like Greenblatt’s, seeks to explain, as Shapiro puts it in a direct quotation of Greenblatt’s subtitle, ‘how Shakespeare became Shakespeare’. This tends to skew Shapiro’s judgment of the relative significance and artistic achievement of different plays: every work the book discusses in detail is heralded as a major breakthrough, and those already written by the end of 1598 are pervasively undervalued. (The author of Venus and Adonis, Richard III, Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Richard II, King John, The Merchant of Venice and the Falstaff plays would surely occupy a pretty distinguished place in world literature even if he had been run over by a carrier’s wagon that New Year’s Eve.)