Plainly, one would rather have Shakespeare in context than out of context—but what is his context, or contexts, and how should one place him in it, or them? This course takes three recent critical books, all acclaimed and in two cases popular best-sellers, that powerfully offer a context and considers what they do and how useful it is.
James Shapiro’s 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare (2005) insists on chronology, isolating what Shapiro argues to be a critical year that “changed not only his fortunes but the course of literature” and saw him “go from being a talented poet and playwright to become one of the greatest writers who ever lived” (jacket blurb). The repossession of the timbers of the Theater and their reconstruction as the Globe serves as a prompt for consideration of the plays almost certainly first performed in that year—Henry V, As You Like It, and Julius Caesar—with Hamlet somewhat tendentiously added to justify the claims being made.
Charles Nicholl’s The Lodger: Shakespeare on Silver Street (2007) insists on place, backtracking from court papers of 1610 that identify Shakespeare’s lodgings on Silver Street in 1604–06, and his landlord. His interactions with the landlord’s family relate to All’s Well that Ends Well, and more generally there are the people he would or could have known as neighbours, and the sights then to be seen both in and around Silver Street, and on the probable routes from it to the Globe and other places Shakespeare is known to have been.
Lukas Erne’s Shakespeare and the Book Trade (2013) insists on the economy and commerce, strongly challenging the received view that Shakespeare’s appearances and sales in print were of very limited interest to him, and persuasively contending that whatever his interest in the book trade, the book trade’s interest in him was considerable and sustained.
Each approach, via chronology, place, and contemporary commerce, has real strengths and attractions, but also opportunity costs and weaknesses. Jointly, though, they map helpful contexts in illuminating ways.
