I spent a lot of time backpacking overseas in my teens and twenties and ended up spending a good deal of that time in England, where it was possible to see extraordinary actors taking on Shakespeare. What changed my mind was seeing terrific productions. You said that you hated Shakespeare in grade school. It’s less about theory than fantasy and invention, what biographers have to supply when the facts of the life, especially the inner life, haven’t survived. Well, that’s the subject of my talk on “Unravelling Shakespeare’s Life.” So come to the talk where I’ll address this-and will answer any questions you might have after. What amount of theory do you think is appropriate in a biography? Where is the line?
In several interviews you have hinted that biographers of Shakespeare are drifting toward fiction in their work. It can get frustrating-and happily it’s not the only project I work on at one time, or I’d go mad. Slowly but surely, over time, and with enough dogged research, the pieces of the puzzle start fitting together. I started another year book-on 1606, the year of King Lear and Macbeth, five years ago-and don’t expect to finish it until 2016.
I started working on 1599 in 1988 and didn’t publish it until 2005. With relatively little information to work with from the beginning and end of Shakespeare’s life, how do you piece together his life? How Elizabethan playwrights did it without caffeine-neither coffee nor tea were available yet in England-makes that achievement even more remarkable. Thomas Dekker either wrote or collaborated on ten plays that same year. But we do well to remember that playwrights turned out plays then fairly quickly. The pressure of drawing audiences to his company’s new theater, The Globe, must have had something to do with it as well in 1599. He seemed to have written plays in inspired bursts. Shakespeare somehow managed to finish Henry V, write As You Like It and Julius Caesar in quick succession, and draft Hamlet in the course of that year. How did Shakespeare, an actor himself, find the time to write such masterful works? In your book 1599, you focus on a year in Shakespeare’s life in which he wrote five plays. Cultural Compass spoke with Shapiro about his research, the sparse data on Shakespeare’s early life, and his favorite play. Shapiro specializes in Shakespeare and Elizabethan culture and is the author of Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare and 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare. James Shapiro, a professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, speaks Thursday night at the Ransom Center about Shakespeare’s “life” as currently written.
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