1599: a reviewer thinks aloud

The latest edition of the LRB has a review of 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare (somewhat belated, as ever with the LRB, and not online) in which you can almost hear the reviewer, Michael Dobson, changing his mind as he goes along.

"1599 sells itself primarily as biography rather than criticism, a fresh attempt on the undergraduate-and-general-reader market tapped with such undeserved commercial success by Stephen Greenblatt's Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare. As such it undeniably knocks Greenblatt's effort, not to mention Peter Ackroyd's generalising and overlong Shakespeare: The Biography, into a cocked jester's cap.  The ploy of concentrating on the events of a single exciting year neatly leaves out much of what can make the average cradle-to-grave life of Shakespeare seem turgid and off the point - all that stuff about infant mortality rates in Warwickshire and the ecclesiastical rules governing marriage licences; all those guessing games about how, when and where young William got out of the glove-making and wool-dealing business and into the theatre - and allows Shapiro to get straight to the much more interesting question, often skimped, in such books, o what Shakespeare's working life, the bit that made him matter, actually consisted of from one week and month to the next."

"..it makes for a terrific read - there are few other biographical studies of Shakespeare as easily consumed at a single sitting - and 1599 displays a range of reading and inquiry which make it as good an introduction as one could hope for to all sorts of unexpected aspects and details of Shakespeare's life and world.  Shapiro is particularly good on the wayward transmission of news and rumour around 16th-century London, on the forms of non-literary culture on which Shakespeare's writings could draw: not just sermons and pamphlets and unpublished plays, but also the artworks and curiosities on display at Whitehall Palace."

So far, so laudatory.  But then the reviewer actually decides that looking solely at 1599 and singling it out as the decisive year in Shakespeare's artistic development leads Shapiro to a skewed judgment of the relative merits of the plays, with those written in 1599 being over-valued.  That sounds sensible but not a heinous crime.

The other criticism is that Shapiro is too wedded to the idea that the plays are best understood as "searching responses to their historical moment, and that they remain of interest to the extent that the concerns of that moment are still ours."  This says the reviewer is "fundamentally to misapprehend how they have gone on working for generations of readers and audiences with precious little interest in the fortunes of Essex or the progress of enclosure."

"One of those aspects, which Shapiro’s emphasis on topicality fatally elides, is his sheer oddity, the impression his plays manage to give of being at once in excess of any scheme or context which one might use to analyse or fix them and at a peculiar tangent to it. The overwhelming impression I get from looking at contemporary non-Shakespearean texts and then at these four plays – with their profusion of miscellaneous dramatic energies, their cascading, protean metaphors, which won’t even stay still long enough to be paraphrased, and their overriding commitment to being at once with us in the present tense of the theatre and somewhere profoundly elsewhere – is that they probably looked as excitingly anachronistic and as teasingly obscure around the edges in 1599 as they do now, although some of what looked obscure then looks vitally present now, and vice versa."

Well whatever the criticisms, I have to say the book still sounds excellent and it's teetering on top of the TBR pile.

Comments

[Stefanie]

My husband is about to read this book in prepartion for his "year of Shakespeare". I told him he'd have to come visit your site since you are such a Bard fan. :)

[Sandra]

A year of Shakespeare sounds like such an amazing idea. You really MUST get him to blog it.

Does he have a plan or target or is it just to be a year of immersion?

[Stefanie]

He is going to blog it and will start soon with 1599. He's planning out the blogging thing since he's not done it before and is working on a plan for reading. He's going to do all the plays and when last I checked he was going to read them in the order in which they were written. He hasn't decided on what edition to use. I keep urging Penguin on him but he is leaning toward Oxford. Stubborn man ;)
He may or may not be reading the sonnets. I hope he does since I think they are nearly as wonderful as the plays. But it's his thing, though I am finding it hard to keep my paws out of it :)

[Sandra]

That sounds like a great plan. I'm with him on resisting Penguin (not enough explanation and context). The sonnets are a 'must'. I can see why you're finding it hard not to interfere, it really is a very exciting idea.