1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare

1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare is a work of narrative history by American Shakespeare scholar James Shapiro, published in 2005. It reconstructs the single year in which Shakespeare wrote Henry V, Julius Caesar, As You Like It and Hamlet, and is studied in HSC English Extension 1's elective on Shakespearean worlds.

James Shapiro's 1599 solves a biographical problem by an unusual method. Rather than writing a cradle-to-grave life of a man whose documentary record is thin, it narrows the lens to a single decisive year and reconstructs the world around it - the fear of Spanish invasion, the politics of an ageing childless queen, the building of the Globe, the fall of the Earl of Essex, the books Shakespeare was reading - to explain how, in twelve months, a working playwright wrote Henry V, Julius Caesar, As You Like It and Hamlet.

The book moves season by season. Winter opens on a nation braced for invasion and an army sent to Ireland, the mood to which Henry V responds with its warrior king and its self-conscious apologies for the bare stage. In spring the Chamberlain's Men dismantle their old playhouse and raise the Globe across the river, and Julius Caesar, probably the first play staged there, becomes a drama of conspiracy in a state uneasy about its own succession. Summer retreats into the Forest of Arden with As You Like It, a pastoral escape still saturated with the year's preoccupation with role and performance. The year darkens with the disgrace of Essex, and against that disillusion Shapiro places the writing of Hamlet, an old revenge play re-made into something unprecedentedly inward.

The calendar shape is the thesis: great writing grows out of the pressures of its moment, and Shapiro's own reconstruction, four centuries later, is itself an act of appropriation that changes how the plays are read.

The founding idea of 1599 is that Shakespeare's genius is a genius for re-vision. Shapiro's Shakespeare does not invent from nothing; he takes what the year hands him - Holinshed's chronicles, Plutarch's lives, Montaigne's essays, an outdated revenge play - and remakes it under pressure. The remaking is deliberate risk: "Rather than searching for the lowest common denominator, he decided instead to write increasingly complicated plays that dispensed with easy pleasures and made both sets of playgoers work harder than they had ever worked before." The antithesis sets the easy option against the hard one Shakespeare actually took, so that revision upward, not compromise downward, becomes the mark of his art.

Context, in Shapiro's method, is the maker of meaning. An ancient Roman line like "the choice and master spirits of this age" carries an unmistakably Elizabethan charge of faction and ambition, the past appropriated to speak what a censored present could not say directly. The argument reaches its climax with Hamlet: "By wrenching this increasingly outdated revenge play into the present, Shakespeare forced his contemporaries to experience what he felt and what his play registers so profoundly: the world had changed." The verb "wrenching" makes adaptation an act of force, not gentle homage, and the reader shares the dislocation - "Audiences at the Globe soon found themselves, like Hamlet, straddling worlds and struggling to reconcile past and present."

Against the legend of effortless genius, Shapiro sets the labour of revision, anchored in the testimony of a rival. Ben Jonson's insistence that a poet who would "write a living line, must sweat" strips writing of its glamour, and his paradox that "a good poet's made, as well as born" concedes talent only to insist on craft. The manuscript of Hamlet itself is described in Shakespeare's own borrowed phrase as "a thing a little soiled with working", the trace of labour become the mark of authenticity.

Above all, the book holds two acts of appropriation in one frame. Shakespeare remakes his sources, and Shapiro remakes Shakespeare, reframing Julius Caesar against the inherited model of tragedy and reading Hamlet's inwardness through the imported form of the essay. The Chorus of Henry V, pleading for "a muse of fire" to fill the "wooden O" of the new playhouse, thematises the whole method: a re-vision that admits it is a re-vision, completed only in the audience that receives it.

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