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Review: Genius at workA fascinating look at Shakespeare's day-to-day lifeBy L.D. Meagher  '1599' YOUR E-MAIL ALERTS(CNN) -- An advertising executive once noted, "People forget how fast you did a job -- but they remember how well you did it." Columbia University professor James Shapiro is reminding us how quickly a certain job was done. Four jobs, actually. And they were done historically well. The jobs in question are "Henry V," "Julius Caesar," "As You Like It" and "Hamlet." All of them -- four pillars of English literature -- were conceived and/or completed in a single year. They are the focus of "A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare: 1599." Shapiro does not explain how the Bard managed to create so many immortal plays in such a relatively short period of time. In the first instance, the "how" of genius is ever elusive. In the second instance, neither Shakespeare nor those who knew him left any record of his work process. Instead, Shapiro examines the environment out of which Shakespeare's plays grew. In England, 1599 was a remarkably eventful year. Queen Elizabeth dispatched the Earl of Essex to put down a rebellion in Ireland. The Spanish threatened to send another armada to the British Isles. And on the south bank of the Thames, just past the foot of London Bridge, a new theater was under construction. It would be called the Globe. Pivotal momentsUsing contemporary documents and extensive scholarship, Shapiro picks up the threads of Shakespeare's life during that year. The author finds his subject performing with the troupe the Chamberlain's Men, making appearances with them at court, planning the new theater and undoubtedly helping launch it with a brazen daylight theft on a grand scale. Family duties took him away from London for some weeks to his hometown of Stratford-upon-Avon, where he was considered a "local boy done good." And even with all that going on, he still crafted four of his greatest plays. Shapiro digs into their texts and unearths the influences that shaped them. "From the start of his career as a dramatist and poet," Shapiro writes, "Shakespeare was compulsively drawn to epochal moments, to what it meant to live through the transformation of so much that was familiar. His early Roman tragedy, 'Titus Andronicus,' ends with the empire tottering on its last legs, the Goths already at Rome's gates. ... When in 1599 he turned again to Rome in 'Julius Caesar,' he addressed a pivotal moment in the empire's (if not the world's) tumultuous history. But even as he was writing about Rome, he felt and reimagined these stories as a Christian Elizabethan." Shapiro puts Shakespeare into context. While writing of a tryst in the Forests of Arden, he was also gaining increased celebrity, not only as a playwright but as a poet. His first book of sonnets appeared that year, though Shakespeare had little to do with it. The rather impromptu nature of the publishing business in those days is another thread woven into the tapestry of his life. Everything, down to and including the dust kicked up by volunteer (and not-so-volunteer) brigades drilling in the streets, reverberates in his works. "A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare: 1599" breathes life into the literature produced during that singular year. Shapiro shows us the man, at the height of his creative powers, and the kind of life he and his fellow Londoners lived. The narrative is lively, drawing on history, biography, even a bit of philosophy and psychologist to round out a portrait of a genius at work. 
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