Winner of the Baillie Gifford Prize’s 25th Anniversary Winner of Winners award
What accounts for Shakespeare’s transformation from talented poet and playwright to one of the greatest writers who ever lived? In this gripping account, James Shapiro sets out to answer this question, "succeed[ing] where others have fallen short." (Boston Globe)
1599 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.
James Shapiro illuminates both Shakespeare’s staggering achievement and what Elizabethans experienced in the course of 1599, bringing together the news and the intrigue of the times with a wonderful evocation of how Shakespeare worked as an actor, businessman, and playwright. The result is an exceptionally immediate and gripping account of an inspiring moment in history.
James Shapiro, aprofessor at Columbia University in New York, is the author of Rival Playwrights, Shakespeare and the Jews, and Oberammergau.
What People are Saying About This
Nicholas Hytner
“a brilliantly readable and revealing narrative.”
Stanley Wells
"[P]assionately written study, the product of deep scholarship and acute critical thought... fascinating." —Editor of The Oxford Shakespeare
William E. Cain
“Very distinguished...captivating...Shapiro succeeds where others have fallen short.”
Christopher Rush
“a stunning exhibition of scholarly intelligence by an academic deeply committed to arriving at the truth.”
Andrew Motion
"Quite brilliant....It gives a whole large picture of his life, times, and achievement. Wonderful."
—Poet Laureat (England)
Francis Wilson
“Shapiro gives us a Shakespeare who chronicles his age, in a biographical form that speaks clearly to our own.”
Sam Leith
“Excellent book....superbly illuminating....Shapiro deserves whoops of applause.”
Jacques Barzun
"Mr. Shapiro has given us by his encyclopedic scholarship and lucid narrative a hitherto unknown Shakespeare." —author of From Dawn to Decadence
Ian McKellen
“As a yarn, this is up there with The Da Vinci Code but in 1599 it’s all true!”
David Scott Kastan
"Shapiro's scrupulous scholarship has given us a Shakespeare both for his time and our own." —General Editor, The Arden Shakespeare
Jeremy Treglown
“If Will in the World is essentially an extremely good historical novel, [YLOWS] is history itself”
Ian McKellan
"As a yarn, this is up there with The Da Vinci Code but in 1599 it's all true!"
Alexandra Alter
“Only an extraordinary scholar could illuminate Shakespeare’s singular genius by demonstrating how much his work owes to Elizabethan cultureandsociety.”
Fintan O'Toole
“For Irish readers...by far the best account yet written of the relationship between this island and Shakespeare’s work.”
Robert McCrum
“an unforgettable illumination of a crucial moment in the life of our greatest writer.”
David Lister
“deliciously vivid....Shapiro weaves a tantalising narrative.”
Peter Kemp
“Superb—the product of marathon scholarship, inspired insight, narrative flair, astute surmise and searching intelligence.”
Jonathan Bate
“[This] is one of the few genuinely original biographies of Shakespeare.”
