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Description
Shapiro, James. 2005. A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare 1599. New York: HarperCollins Publishers. $27.95 hc. 394 pp.
Perhaps the greatest biographer of Shakespeare has observed that the public nature of the facts known about the poet "afford no insight into the interior life of the artist, wherein resides the chief fascination of literary biography." It is ironic that these words of Samuel Schoenbaum (1971, 1) find their echo in the last sentence of Shapiro's sterling book, clearly the most important work on Shakespeare's life among many since Schoenbaum's A Documentary Life (1975). Though able to open "the hearts and minds of others," Shapiro concludes, Shakespeare "kept a lock on what he revealed about himself" (333). Still, Shapiro's deft ability to zoom in and out on Shakespeare's life in English society in 1599 does seem to make the bard take on flesh and blood especially in the silences that Shapiro allows us to hear in the form of what Shakespeare did not--or dare not--write. Despite the beautifully written thick description that Shapiro offers of one year in Shakespeare's life unfolding season to season, we still do not know how he felt about the basic... |
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