A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare by James Shapiro [Book Summary – Review ]


The English writer Ben Jonson once said that Shakespeare “was not of an age but for all time.” It’s difficult to differ with this decision. 

Shakespeare’s work has a general allure that a couple of creators can equal. His extraordinary characters – from Romeo and Juliet to Hamlet, Othello, and Macbeth – wrestle with being human. Their issues are our issues: love, disdain, desire, aspiration, disloyalty, question. All are in a flash unmistakable to contemporary crowds. 

Yet, notwithstanding the comprehensiveness of his subjects, Shakespeare was of age. To comprehend his work, you need to likewise comprehend Elizabethan England and the issues and thoughts that characterized it. In this outline, we’ll set out to do precisely that as we investigate the occasions of 1599 – an achievement in English history just as in Shakespeare’s own life. 

In this rundown, you’ll learn 

  • how an insightful interest in 1599 got Shakespeare’s monetary future; 
  • why Shakespeare left his local Stratford and moved to London; and 
  • how the Protestant Reformation drove England into a struggle with Catholic Spain. 

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Chapter 1 – Londoners cherished the theater, however, there weren’t numerous skilled dramatists during the 1590s.


Tudor London, a city of around 200,000, was acclaimed for its theaters. 

At the end of the sixteenth century, two “playing companies” ruled the city – the Lord Chamberlain’s Men (William Shakespeare’s organization) and their central opponents, the Admiral’s Men. 

The auditoriums in which these organizations performed could oblige somewhere in the range of two and 3,000 observers. If two venues organized plays around the same time, all things considered, about 3,000 Londoners joined in, regardless of whether the performance centers were half-unfilled. Longer than seven days, that figure rose to 15,000 Londoners, implying that right around 33% of the city’s populace paid to see a play every month. 

It was this unprecedented social scene that brought Shakespeare, at that point an eager screenwriter in his twenties, to London in 1585. 

The ubiquity of plays was a shelter for dramatists like Shakespeare, however, it was a cerebral pain for the city’s specialists. 

Theaters were ordinarily found in undesirable territories famous for prostitution, frivolous wrongdoing, and weighty drinking. As London’s administrators, the representatives, saw it, channeling a few thousand riotous theatergoers into these areas was a formula for the inconvenience. 



In the mid-year of 1597, they requested the public authority to close London’s theaters. The stage, they contended, contained “only profane tales.” Worse, such corruption pulled in “transient people, masterless men, cheats, horse stealers, and prostitute mongers.” 

Valid, regular society cherished the theater, however, London’s very much obeyed residents were similarly as enamored with playgoing as their plebeian partners. Theater crowds may have had something reasonable of “masterless men,” yet they likewise contained a lot of youthful honorable men and blue-bloods. It was, at last, the last’s support that saved London’s playhouses from the conclusion. 

Notwithstanding its excitement and huge crowds, the 1590s was a lean decade. The best playwrights of a prior age had left life’s stage. By 1597, ace dramatists like Christopher Marlowe, Robert Greene, and George Peel were all dead. The new age, which included playwrights bound for significance like Ben Jonson, was just barely discovering its voice. 

That left Shakespeare – the lone huge dramatist to ride these two ages. Marked an “upstart crow” by the primary, he was more like a grizzled veteran according to the second. Yet, it was uniquely in 1599 that he set up himself as the best playwright of the day. 


Chapter 2 – Putting resources into a perpetual auditorium got Shakespeare’s monetary future.


London’s playhouses weren’t simply social tourist spots – they were additionally organizations. In 1599, business visionaries expecting to take advantage of Londoners’ affection for the stage put vigorously in new theaters. The Admiral’s Men moved into a reason fabricated performance center called the Fortune right external the city doors. Different settings, similar to the Boar’s Head, showed up in the eastern rural areas. 

The Lord Chamberlain’s Men came up short on a lasting playhouse. Confronted with more tight rivalry than any time in recent memory, Shakespeare and his kindred entertainer investors faced a challenge and chose to put their cash toward building another home – the Globe. 

The expense of developing performance centers like Fortune was covered by financial specialists. Consequently, these financial backers kept a lot of the benefits produced by organizations like the Admiral’s Men. 

The Globe was extraordinary. A big part of the expense of building it – around £700 – was covered by two pioneering siblings, Richard and Cuthbert Burbage. The other half was covered by Shakespeare and four other entertainer investors, who each confused up £70. 



This was an impressive entirety. To place it into viewpoint, an independent screenwriter got around six pounds for a play while a day worker was fortunate on the off chance that he made over ten pounds in a year. 

So for what reason did Shakespeare and his associates face this challenge? All things considered, if the Globe succeeded, they would, as well. Not at all like the entertainer investors of different organizations, they’d each have a 10 percent stake in the performance center’s future benefits.

Given Londoners’ unquenchable hunger for the stage, that could mean as much as £100 per year per partner – a pay sufficiently huge to get their spot in the wealthy working class. 

The Globe, a wooded structure built around a stage finished off with a covered rooftop, was arranged in a crude neighborhood outside the city’s southern cutoff points. This area, Bankside, advanced into Shakespeare’s plays. 

In the Twelfth Night, for instance, one character is encouraged to hold up in the “South rural areas, at the Elephant” – a reference to a Bankside massage parlor as of late changed over into a hotel that more likely than not brought knowing grins up in the Globe’s crowd. 

The Globe was because of open in July. Before that, however, Shakespeare expected to compose another play to stamp the event. Contemporary occasions would offer a lot of motivation. 


Chapter 3 – Elizabethan England has secured a religious and military fight with Catholic Spain.


Before we proceed with our story, we need to rewind to the 1530s – quite possibly the main a long time in England’s set of experiences. 

During the 1520s and ’30s, England was as yet a Catholic nation, implying that, in strict issue, it followed the pope in Rome. In any case, strict change was not too far off. In the last part of the 1520s, Henry VIII, England’s best, communicated his desire to repeal his present marriage and wed another lady – an association that the pope prohibited. Regardless of the pope’s forbid, Henry, squeezed ahead. Church and lord were presently in conflict. 

This question, initially political, started to take on an additional religious measurement. On the off chance that the English ruler could resist the pope, didn’t that mean he was the most noteworthy strict expert in England? A progression of acts passed during the 1530s set up that, making Henry the top of the English church. This was the initial salvo of the English Reformation, a branch of the Protestant Reformation in Europe. 

Henry VIII launched England’s change to Protestantism, yet it was Elizabeth I who finished the “English Revolution,” as it came to be called. In 1559, Elizabeth, who had risen to the seat in 1558, presented another philosophy that drew intensely on Protestant reformers like Luther and Calvin. This demonstration put her on an impact course with Europe’s biggest Catholic force – Habsburg Spain. 



The Spanish realm was immense, extending from Latin America to Italy and the present Philippines. The Spanish lord around then, Philip II, wasn’t only an ardent Catholic – he additionally considered himself to be a safeguard of Catholicism, which he accepted to be under danger from Protestant progressives like Elizabeth. 

He wasn’t completely off-base. In the Netherlands, another Spanish state, Protestant progressives were battling for autonomy from Spain. Elizabeth upheld these agitators and sent English soldiers to help them. In counter, Philip supported Catholic dissidents battling contrary to English standard in Ireland. In any case, Philip and Elizabeth’s conflict wasn’t restricted to simple intermediary wars. It before long swelled into the direct clash. 

In 1588, Philip chose to topple Elizabeth and return England to the Catholic overlap. That year, he dispatched an armada, or task force, of 130 boats conveying Spanish soldiers to England. Terrible climate and the English naval force’s utilization of exceptionally flexible vessels against Spain’s intensely loaded ships hindered this bid to dismiss Elizabeth, yet it was just a transitory respite for the English sovereign. 

By 1599, with English soldiers secured in battling in the Netherlands and Ireland, England was indeed helpless against intrusion – Spain’s new ruler, Philip III, and Elizabeth both knew it. 


Chapter 4 – Shakespeare caught the disposition in London as the city arranged for a Spanish attack.


At the point when the Globe opened in July 1599, England was in a condition of frenzy. English powers in Ireland had endured various losses and were stalemated in the Netherlands. The depository in the meantime was running dry. 

In Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, a play finished around this time, Brutus harshly criticizes Cassius, another Roman congressperson, for retaining “gold to pay my armies.” It was a reference Shakespeare’s crowd would have seen right away. Throughout the late spring, tales flowed that English fighters in Ireland were going to revolt “for the need of pay and shortage of victuals.” 

There was additionally talk in London of another Spanish task force. By mid-July, there were reports that 57 boats bearing 25,000 warriors were being prepared for takeoff in Andalusia. 

Elizabeth dispatched the powers that stayed in England to vital guarded positions. A large number of fighters filled London, a city made helpless by the Thames, a wide and profound stream that takes care of into the North Sea. 

With little to do however hang tight for the appearance of the Spanish, these men probably invited the interruptions offered by London’s playhouses. While we can’t be certain how Shakespeare spent his mid-year, all things considered, the Globe did an energetic exchange those months. 

The collection of the Chamberlain’s Men surely contained plays fit to the occasion. One was Shakespeare’s own Henry V, a festival of English military brilliance. At that point, there was A Larum for London, a play about the fall of Antwerp to Spanish powers in 1576. A bloody piece in which regular citizens are butchered, virgins compromised with assault, and Englishmen tormented, it would have sent shudders down the spines of watchers expecting the appearance of Spanish warriors in their city. 



Eventually, the Spanish never showed up, however plainly this climate of panicky assumption left a blemish on Shakespeare. Take Othello, a play composed a couple of years after the fact, which opens with officers restlessly examining clashing reports on the size of moving toward adversary armada. “My letters say 107 galleys,” says one. “Mine hundred and forty,” another state. “Also, mine,” adds a third, “200 . . .” 

Additionally, the primary scene of Hamlet, written in 1599, portrays nervous fighters standing protection from an imperceptible foe. “Why,” one asks, “this equivalent severe and most attentive watch/So daily works the subject of the land?” This dull state of mind, loaded up with questionable dangers, would have been generally very natural to Londoners who encountered that late spring. 


Chapter 5 – The death was one of the extraordinary political inquiries in 1599.


Julius Caesar was one of the principal plays arranged in the recently opened Globe, and apparently, Shakespeare composed it given this event. 

Numerous watchers discover the play unbalanced because its significant second – the death of Julius Caesar by his previous partners, Brutus and Cassius – happens so right off the bat in the primary demonstration. The second and third demonstrations, conversely, analyze the fallout of his demise. 

This wasn’t an oversight or poor plotting on Shakespeare’s part, however. Albeit the play is set in antiquated Rome, Julius Caesar isn’t a contemplation of Roman history. Or maybe, it’s about the political inquiries that distracted Elizabethan crowds, overall the aftermath from political brutality. 

Shakespeare’s Brutus and Cassius legitimize their choice to execute Caesar by engaging an ethical contention. Caesar, they guarantee, was becoming progressively whimsical and oppressive; if they hadn’t halted him before it was past the point of no return, he’d have driven Rome to its ruin. 

In their view, a ruler might be fairly ousted on the off chance that he surpasses his legitimate powers or compromises the interests of the state. It follows, at that point, that subjects just owe their reliability to great rulers. Awful rulers are owed nothing – not even their lives. 

This line of thought is a vital board of republicanism, a political philosophy establishes in antiquated Greece and Rome which was rediscovered by revolutionaries in Elizabethan England. It would assume a critical part in the English common conflict during the 1660s, which finished with conservatives defending their execution of an English lord in words that repeated those of Shakespeare’s Brutus and Cassius. 



Conservative extremists weren’t a genuine danger to the English sovereign, however – it was Catholic professional killers she dreaded. In 1570, the pope suspended Elizabeth. This implied that Catholics faithful to Rome could, in the great soul, support her death and even work toward that point. Many did exactly that, and there was a spate of assaults on Elizabeth, one of which included an inaccessible relative of Shakespeare. 

Yet, Shakespeare’s point in Julius Caesar isn’t to legitimize or censure some group – it’s to remark on the human condition. Honorable demonstrations of whatever stripe, he shows, have unintended results. 

Like all professional killers, Brutus and Cassius wanted to be quoted as “sacrificers, however not butchers,” yet they wound up carrying the very turmoil to Rome that they had planned to forestall. Britain, Shakespeare proposes, would do well to regard this exercise. 


Chapter 6 – Shakespeare wasn’t only a poet – he was additionally a financial specialist.


The Reformation wasn’t only a show worked out on the phase of world history by a cast of rulers and sovereigns, realms, and armed forces. In commonplace towns all through the nation, humble subjects likewise added to the progressions moving through Elizabethan England. 

Take Shakespeare’s local Stratford, a market town around 100 miles northwest of London. In 1571, when Shakespeare was seven, jams assembled before Stratford’s congregation to watch a glazier take out its stained windows – an abhorred image of popery. It was an assertion: Stratford would not re-visitation of the Catholic overlap. 

There were different changes, as well. Before, going entertainers had halted to act in Stratford. Presently, the Puritanical town specialists gave fines to anybody found facilitating “players.” How did Shakespeare, the renowned dramatist, fit into this image? 

Shakespeare visited his better half and youngsters in Stratford about once every year. He didn’t return in the appearance of a versifier – he came as a wise financial backer and man of extensive abundance. 

Take an episode from 1598. Richard Quinney, one of Stratford’s most noticeable residents, was down on his karma and required an advance of £30. He didn’t go to his neighbors for help, however. All things considered, he kept in touch with Shakespeare, his “cherishing old buddy and compatriot” in London. 



We couldn’t say whether Shakespeare gave Quinney the cash or turned him down, however, it’s not difficult to perceive any reason why Quinney thought he had the cash. Indeed, even before his interest in the Globe in 1599, Shakespeare seems to have been monetarily secure. In 1597, for instance, he purchased an enormous Stratford house called New Place flaunting ten rooms, three stories, two nurseries, two plantations, and two stables. It cost him £120. 

Shakespeare at that point made another speculation, purchasing 80 bushels of malt. This was a costly product that was just beneficial when purchased in mass. At the point when he made his buy, malt was hard to find. 

This lack was serious to the point that the public authority attempted to drive individuals like Shakespeare to sell it on the open market and along these lines forestall famous discontent. 

Shakespeare, notwithstanding, took his risks with Stratford’s displeased poor, who at this point were murmuring about hanging hoarders like the writer “on gibbets at their entryways.” Having kept the grain off the market and assisted drive with increasing the cost, Shakespeare sold his malt at an attractive benefit. 


Chapter 7 – The Globe assisted Shakespeare with solidifying his standing as the best producer of the day.


Toward the start of 1599, Shakespeare was a gainful and effective dramatist. His work satisfied crowds and sold well, but ordinarily in unknown volumes. 

Before the year’s over, that had changed. His name was presently an attract itself. One business visionary even gathered his sonnets in a book cushioned out with thump-offs by lesser artists. It sold out in practically no time. Shakespeare’s counterparts likewise saw this developing ubiquity, ridiculing the young fellows who looked through Shakespeare’s work for conversation starters and from whose “lips doth stream/nothing however Juliet and Romeo.” 

Like that unlicensed assortment of sonnets, this presumably bothered Shakespeare, yet it was a noteworthy issue: he was presently a perceived brand. 

The Globe was basic to Shakespeare’s prosperity. Before it opened its entryways, London’s auditoriums all arranged a similar collection of plays. Londoners didn’t go to the theater; they went to a theater – whichever one turned out to be nearest. 

In any case, if you needed to see a holding authentic dramatization like Henry V or a finely made effective play like Julius Caesar, you needed to go to the Globe. That wasn’t simply down to Shakespeare’s composition – it was likewise an impression of his capacity to spot capable entertainers equipped for playing the parts he composed for them. 



Theater in London could never go back again. Different organizations understood that they, as well, needed to switch to stay aware of the Chamberlain’s Men. The Admiral’s Men even recruited the developer who had regulated the Globe’s development to assemble their new playhouse. At the point when it opened, it additionally highlighted a program that couldn’t be found elsewhere in the city. 

Shakespeare was presently 35, partially through what the Italian artist Dante called “the excursion of life.” He’d composed and teamed up in the composition of more than 20 emotional works, averaging two plays per year. Thinking back for the year at Christmastime, Shakespeare may have felt that his creative standing and monetary position were presently secure enough to hinder a bit. 

At any rate, he composed only two plays – Twelfth Night and Troilus and Cressida – between mid-1600 and the demise of Queen Elizabeth in the spring of 1603. In his last years, he added three extraordinary misfortunes to his labor of love: King Lear, Macbeth, and Anthony and Cleopatra. 

Shakespeare passed on rashly at 52 years old in 1616. The Elizabethan world to which he’d had a place was immediately quenched. Britain was before long dove into a merciless common conflict, bringing hardline Puritans into power. One of their first demonstrations was to shut London’s theaters and pull down the Globe.


A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare: 1599 by James Shapiro Book Review


Tudor London was a city celebrated for its playhouses and theatergoing public, which is the thing that carried Shakespeare to the English capital. In 1599, as of now tolerably effective, Shakespeare put resources into a perpetual auditorium for his organization, a choice that got his monetary situation forever. 

It was there that he organized his most recent works, a progression of dramatizations and misfortunes investigating the extraordinary inquiries of the day like strict clash and death. Before the year’s over, Shakespeare had become a perceived brand and was broadly respected as the best playwright of the day.


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