Stung into poetry

Biography: In the preface to his engaging and illuminating account of what he believes to be a crucial year in Shakespeare's development, James Shapiro wins the reader's trust by acknowledging how little he, or anyone else, can ever know.

"We don't," he acknowledges, "know very much about what kind of friend or lover or person Shakespeare was." In what might be a well-aimed dart at the best-known recent attempt at a biography, Stephen Greenblatt's Will in the World, he notes how "those committed to discovering the adult Shakespeare's personality in his formative experiences end up hunting for hints in the plays which they then read back into what little can be surmised about his early years (and since the plays contain almost every kind of relationship and experience imaginable, this is not as hard to do as it sounds.)"

Shapiro chooses a different and much more productive way of filling the great gap between the curiosity aroused by Shakespeare's importance to posterity and the paltry vestiges of personal information he left to the scholars and biographers of the future. We may know little about Shakespeare's life, but we know quite a lot about his times. The pressure of his contemporary world is felt on every line that he wrote, and Shapiro's aim is to provide a barometer that allows us to measure it. Taking as a model Ray Huang's classic account of the late Ming dynasty, 1587: A Year of No Significance, he gives us an account of the world as it must have appeared to the playwright in the year in which he started Hamlet: 1599. With a remarkable combination of easy-going narrative and formidable textual scholarship, he creates a genuinely informative and convincingly argued account of the intersection between an omnivorously curious artist and the social and political world that, to borrow Yeats's phrase, "stung him into poetry."

The need to create a dramatic narrative does, admittedly, force even the scrupulous Shapiro into a few little cheats. Because, for his purposes, 1599 has to be a pivotal year in which Shakespeare was transformed from a great writer into an everlasting genius, he rather downplays the extent of his previous achievements. Shapiro's quest, as he puts it, is to discover "how in the course of little over a year he went from writing The Merry Wives of Windsor to writing a play as inspired as Hamlet". But such a formulation could just as easily be rigged in the opposite way: how did Shakespeare go from the dark brilliance of Henry the Fourth Part 2 (written at the same time as The Merry Wives of Windsor in 1597) to the comparative flippancy of As You Like It (written in 1599 or 1600)? Some of what he wrote before 1599 (Richard III, A Midsummer Night's Dream) is better than some of what he wrote after that year (Cymbeline, Pericles). And in any case, Hamlet probably continued to take shape until as late as 1601.

Fortunately, however, the whole "turning-point" thesis is more the excuse for, than the centre of, Shapiro's account. The book is really a wonderfully deft interweaving of historical and cultural context, physical and social description, the politics and economics of Shakespeare's work as a professional actor and co-owner of the Globe theatre and the quiet hours of a mysterious man putting words on paper. As such, it simultaneously strikes a blow against bardolatry by situating Shakespeare within a recognisable human world and makes the mystery of his creativity all the deeper. To see Shakespeare as businessman, actor, court flatterer and political operator, to get a sense of how much he absorbed from the political and literary climate of his time, is not to reduce him to his environment but to make all the more amazing his capacity to both embody and transcend it.

"Hamlet," Shapiro writes, was "born at the crossroads of the death of chivalry and the birth of globalisation". It is this context - the petering out of a feudal worldview and the beginnings of imperial modernity - that he evokes so thoroughly and so vividly. Shakespeare could write great tragedies from 1599 onwards because he could create protagonists who exist simultaneously in two worlds, each with opposing values. With his eye for telling detail and his broad sweep of erudition, Shapiro conjures for the reader the forces that are cracking open the feudal order, from the conflict between Catholicism and Protestantism and the threat of a Spanish invasion to the explosion of literary culture and the exploration of the New World. He relates them to the plays written in 1599 - Henry V, Julius Caesar, As You Like it and Hamlet - with a subtle wit that avoids historical reductionism.

For Irish readers, Shapiro's book is especially fascinating because he places O'Neill's great rebellion at the heart of Tudor anxieties, and gives by far the best account yet written of the relationship between this island and Shakespeare's work.

To show the unsettling impact of the rebellion on the Elizabethan mentality, he quotes a contemporary English description of O'Neill's victory at the Battle of the Yellow Ford as "the greatest loss and dishonour the Queen hath had in her time". The hysterical atmosphere in which some of the most civilised people in England (Edmund Spenser, John Donne) were baying for Irish blood, the corruption attendant on the raising of armies for the Irish war, the rough conditions endured by those English troops and the Earl of Essex's desire to be a conquering hero, all seep into the plays of 1599 especially, and in one of his consistently sharp-eyed readings of mistakes in the drafting of the plays that tend to be silently corrected by editors, Shapiro notes how, in Henry V, the Queen of France means to greet Henry as "brother England", but in fact calls him "brother Ireland". That the slip occurs in a passage dealing with a "mixed" marriage, "makes the error all the more revealing, for anxiety over pure and hybrid identity runs through the play even as it preoccupied those who wrote about England's Irish problem".

Shapiro argues that Spenser's death in London, after his flight from the Irish rebellion, may have copper-fastened Shakespeare's belief that the old chivalric world of which Spenser was the poetic ideologue in chief was itself all but dead.

Shakespeare occupied Spenser's epic and pastoral modes with Henry V and As You Like It, but pushed them into darker, more uncertain and more self-consciously modern territory. In that sense, to return more fully to Yeats's phrase, "mad Ireland" stung him into poetry too.

Fintan O'Toole's White Savage: William Johnson and the Invention of America will be published in August