In The Moment, Again

I really should be reading Descartes's Meditations. An old Everyman edition of his writing primarily featuring A Discourse on Method is my main designated reading of the moment, and I read said Discourse quite happily a couple of weeks ago, assuming I would race through the Meditations, having become familiar with them long ago in my first year at university. But I've found reading them again extremely laborious, to the point of wondering whether I'd read them in a highly edited version back in 1974, or skipped all the troublesome bits in youthful impetuousness.

Anyway, it's not difficult to distract me from reading our French friend, and James Shapiro managed to do so effortlessly through his wonderful 1599 - A Year in the Life of Shakespeare. I first read this in its year of publication in paperback, 2006, and knew then that I'd go back to it one day - specifically if I were to be teaching any of the four plays Shapiro features: Henry V, Julius Caesar, As You Like It and, best of all, Hamlet. Since Hamlet is on the cards for one of my classes next year I felt I had to pick it up again and remind myself of Shapiro's very convincing thesis on the likely revisions of the great play. 

In fact, pretty everything Shapiro suggests regarding the Bard's output in 1599 is intuitively convincing. The notion that the lived experience of the social and political ups and downs of the period is central to Shakespeare's dramas, rather than the conventional notion of the influence of literary 'sources', just feels so right that you begin to take for granted that Shapiro's hunches and suppositions are spot on.

And what an astonishing run of plays it was. Each one brilliant in its way, and entirely individual.