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COPYRIGHT 2005 The Spectator Ltd. (UK)
1599: A YEAR IN THE LIFE OF WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE by James Shapiro Faber, 16.99 [pounds sterling], pp. 429, ISBN 0571214800 [telephone] 14.99 [pounds sterling] (plus 2.25 [pounds sterling] p&p) 0870 800 4848
There is little enough we do know--or, rather, far too much we don't--about Shakespeare to make him easily susceptible to biography. There have been various attempts to solve this problem. Some have collected the bare extant facts for scholarly use. Others have created more or less romantic portraits of the man, making imaginative inferences from the works to demonstrate that he spent, say, his 'lost years' at sea, and with much use of, in James Shapiro's words, '"perhaps", "maybe", "it's most likely", "probably", or, the most desperate of them all, "surely"'. Still others have given up and written biographies of someone else altogether: the Earl of Oxford, say.
Shapiro's excellent book follows a variation of the second of these two approaches. Having assured us that his book is based as heavily as humanly possible on what facts there are, he puts himself at liberty to make educated guesses, and dispenses with the prose-clotting weasel words; we must take them as read. And, believing firmly that Shakespeare was Shakespeare, he has written a biography not of someone else, but of something else: not a man, but a single year in the Tudor England in...
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