This productive year closed with Shakespeare drafting Hamlet, which transformed the monologue by using it to convey the interior workings of a character’s mind. With As You Like It, the Bard moved toward a mature view of love quite unlike his earlier “honey-tongued” romantic poetry. Falstaff was gone from Henry V, a drama poised on the knife’s edge between patriotism and cynicism that reflected contemporary spectators’ mixed feelings about an unpopular Irish war fears of a Catholic plot to assassinate Queen Elizabeth fueled the Roman characters’ debates in Julius Caesar. He had already established a strong reputation with successful comedies and histories like A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Henry IV, but Shapiro contends that Shakespeare “was restless, unsatisfied with the profitably formulaic.” The departure from the Chamberlain’s Men of Will Kemp, the great comic who played Falstaff, signaled the playwright’s break with an older form of theater rooted in folk traditions. Shapiro (English/Columbia Univ.) identifies 1599, when Shakespeare and his fellow shareholders built the Globe Theatre, as the pivotal year during which the 35-year-old playwright’s style changed and his ambitions grew as he wrote four new plays. An intriguing addition to Shakespeare studies, stressing his immersion in the issues of his time.
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