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

This is an interesting concept: focusing on one year of Shakespeare's life. After all, books written on Shakespeare can fill up several rooms, so one has to find a new angle. 1599 isn't just any year. It was during this time Shakespeare supposedly wrote Henry the Fifth, Julius Caesar, As You Like It, and Hamlet.

I say "supposedly" because the fact is, we don't know exactly when Shakespeare wrote his plays. Mr Shapiro needs to write with confidence that Hamlet was written in 1599, otherwise his book would appear to have been built on sand. In reality, it's a whole lot of guesswork when it comes to dating Shakespeare's plays.

If that's all there is in terms of shaky facts, I would have loved the book still. It is full of rich historical details, and scholarly insights. I've read Julius Caesar, and studied As You Like It, and Hamlet in high school (in Toronto), so it's quite interesting to learn what was behind their creation. Unfortunately, there are a few other problems which prevented me from fully enjoying the book.

One is that, reading the analysis on Shakespeare's text, I was reminded of all that I hated about literature classes in school. While reading is a pure pleasure, the exercise of finding double, triple meanings in a particular choice of words, meanings that the author himself mostly likely never dreamt of, is ridiculous. In the case of Shakespeare, it is even more absurd to dwell and dig since his plays were published years later by people who worked with him; who knows how accurate the final result was.

Another problem is I came upon a small mistake made by Mr Shapiro regarding English history. On page 90 (Harper Perennial Edition 2006), second paragraph, the part about Cambridge being unfairly passed over is all wrong. Now, one can argue that Mr Shapiro specializes in literature, not history. Fine. I'm not saying that the whole book is worthless because of one mistake. It's just that if I noticed this mistake because I happen to have an interest in English history, how many other inaccuracies are there in areas that I'm ignorant of?

Ah well. I know it's foolish of me to use maths standards on an arts book. I'm not, actually. The fact is, the arts world has no standards at all, which brings me back to John Carey's book What Good Are the Arts?...