1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare: Winner of the Baillie Gifford Winner of Winners Award 2023

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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 winner was announced by chair of judges Jason Cowley, at a ceremony hosted at the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh on 27th April. The one-off award marks the 25th anniversary of The Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction by crowning the best work of non-fiction from the last 25 years. This in a sense is Shapiro's sequel to 1599, but there's nothing jaded in the performance; few serious academics marshal their research so elegantly, and few synthesis literary and historical elements to such powerful effect' Andrew Motion, TLS 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) There is fascinating new research in Contested Will, whereby Shapiro aims his question - why did they believe this ridiculous conspiracy theory? - at a number of distinguished anti-Stratfordians. In every case, his answer is psychologically intriguing and entirely convincing." (Jonathan Bate, Sunday Telegraph)

A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare is a 2006 book by James S. Shapiro about the life of William Shakespeare in the year 1599. [1] [2] [3] 1599 was the year Shakespeare finished writing Henry V, and wrote Julius Caesar and As You Like It. [3] In addition to detailing Shakespeare's life, Shapiro "delv[es] into evocative details of social, political, and artistic life in London in 1599." [4] Critical reception [ edit ] By giving us an account of what Shakespeare must have read, heard and seen that year, Shapiro goes further than any other biographer in accounting for the relationship between those words and his life.”-- Frances Wilson, The Daily Telegraph I draw a very sharp line between fiction and nonfiction,” he adds. “I think that the danger of fiction is to sentimentalise. So that’s one of the things that I’m extremely careful as a Shakespearean not to do. On the other hand, I understand how deeply people want to connect with Shakespeare the man, with Anne Hathaway, with Judith Shakespeare: they lived, they died, their internal lives went largely unrecorded. And it takes a talented writer to bring that to life. But that’s not the stuff that I do. I don’t write that; but somebody needs to.”In 1599, Shakespeare completed Henry V, wrote Julius Caesar and As You Like It, and produced the first draft of Hamlet. In his book, Shapiro, who is professor of English at Columbia University, looks at how the political and social context of the time influenced the work. James Shapiro excels at bringing Shakespeare's works and worlds to life for our time. Now, in this fascinating book, he ingeniously explores how unending disagreements over the plays illuminate our national past as well as the present. Selecting powerful stories where history and literature meet, he spares his readers none of America's violent passions-or Shakespeare's." -- Sean Wilentz Peter Singlehurst, partner at Baillie Gifford, commented: "The strapline for the Baillie Gifford Prize is ‘all the best stories are true’. But it is not necessarily their factfulness that makes these books so special, it is the stories about people, ordinary and extraordinary. Choosing one book seems an impossible task and we thank the judges for taking on the unenviable responsibility.”

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 Shapiro’s book is… authoritative, lucid and devastatingly funny, and its brief concluding statement of the case for Shakespeare is masterly.” (John Carey, Sunday Times) SHAKESPEARE IN AMERICA: A LITERARY ANTHOLOGY FROM THE REVOLUTION TO NOW, ed. by James Shapiro with a foreword by President Bill Clinton Shakespeare in a Divided Americashows that no writer has been more closely embraced by Americans, or has shed more light on the hot-button issues in our history. Indeed, it is by better understanding Shakespeare's role in American life, Shapiro argues, that we might begin to mend our bitterly divided land. The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606. New York: Simon & Schuster, October 6, 2015. ISBN 1416541640verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{ In his often fascinating book, Mr Shapiro explores specific plays and productions that have reflected national concerns at fraught moments in the country's past….These cases, Mr Shapiro argues, show how Shakespeare alerts Americans to the "toxic prejudices poisoning our cultural climate". Whether they salve such antagonisms as well as exposing them is another matter. Sometimes the plays function like Rorschach tests that reveal and confirm whatever viewers want to see. " – The Economist

As usual," Shapiro declares, "Shakespeare managed to have it both ways." Whether or not that was true of Shakespeare, it does ring true of Shakespeareans. When Shakespeare wrote a play such as Julius Caesar, which "ravished" contemporary audiences, Shapiro cites that immediate popular success as proof of Shakespeare's genius - and proof of the importance of 1599. When Shakespeare wrote a play such as As You Like It, which seems not to have been revived or praised for more than a century, Shapiro claims that Shakespeare was "ahead of his time", thereby turning the play's apparent failure into proof of Shakespeare's genius - and proof of the importance of 1599. The Columbia Anthology of British Poetry Edited with Carl Woodring. New York: Columbia University Press, 1995. ISBN 0-231-10180-5 Graham, Nicholas (2014-01-01). "A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare: 1599". Library Journal . Retrieved 2023-07-03. As he conducts us through the pretensions of the Baconians, the Marlovians, the Oxfordians, and on through the latest internet conspiracy theories, larded with pompous quasi-legal language about "reasonable doubt" and "prima facie case", Shapiro sprinkles his text with glinting, steely facts, about the actors of Shakespeare's company, about Elizabethan printers and their methods, about what Shakespeare's manuscripts reveal about how his plays and stagecraft worked. These details, in the chapter which he devotes to Shakespeare himself, are the most riveting part of his book…. Shapiro does not waste words on the preposterous, but he does uncover the mechanism of fantasy and projection that go to make up much of the case against Shakespeare. His book lays bare, too, assumptions about the writing life that come to us from the 18th-century romantics. Those who made Shakespeare a demigod have much to answer for.” (Hilary Mantel, The Guardian)A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare: 1599 by James Shapiro". www.publishersweekly.com . Retrieved 30 April 2023.

Esquire columnist Stephen Marche at 'Wouldn’t It Be Cool if Shakespeare Wasn’t Shakespeare?,' in The New York Times Magazine, 21 October 2011.p.2: "If you want to read the definitive treatment, there is James Shapiro’s more recent Contested Will, although that book is nearly as absurd as its subject, because using a brain like Shapiro’s on the authorship question is like bringing an F-22 to an alley knife fight." Shapiro was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, where he attended Midwood High School. He obtained his B.A. at Columbia University in 1977, Master's degree in 1978 and Ph.D. at University of Chicago in 1982. After teaching at Dartmouth College and Goucher College, Shapiro joined the faculty at Columbia University in 1985. He taught as a Fulbright lecturer at Bar-Ilan University and Tel Aviv University (1988–1989) and served as the Samuel Wanamaker Fellow at Shakespeare's Globe in London (1998).In this case, what Shapiro does is create a biography about one of the greatest writers who ever lived, about whom we know almost nothing. And he does that without ever cheating, by actually marshalling this huge amount of evidence to uncover not the life of the person, but the life of a mind.” James Shapiro's 1606: William Shakespeare and the Year of Lear (Faber) brings to dazzling life the world from which sprang the best crop of new plays in theatre history. ' Nicholas Hytner, Observer Most Shakespeare experts have a lot to say about the conspiracy theorists who deny Shakespeare’s authorship of his own plays – but very little of it is printable, let alone as readable as James Shapiro’s Contested Will….[T]he application of Shapiro’s detective skills to the piles of pseudo-scholarship from the past century and a half yields valuable results. Contested Will isn’t just the most intelligent book on the topic for years, but a re-examination of the documentary evidence offered on all sides of the question.” (Michael Dobson, The Financial Times) His writing has appeared in the London Review of Books, the Guardian, the Telegraph, the New Statesman, the Financial Times, the Times Literary Supplement, the New York Times, the New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, the Los Angeles Times, the Wall Street Journal and the Atlantic. He has also co-written and presented a pair of BBC documentaries: The King and the Playwright: A Jacobean History (2012) and T he Mysterious Mr. Webster (2014). Peterson, Tyler (March 2, 2016). "James Shapiro Wins 9th Annual Sheridan Morley Prize for Theatre Biography".