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Tag: Shapiro

  • Baillie Gifford winner of winners James Shapiro: ‘I draw a very sharp line between fiction and nonfiction’

    Baillie Gifford winner of winners James Shapiro: ‘I draw a very sharp line between fiction and nonfiction’

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    Serendipity dictated that the American writer and academic James Shapiro received the Baillie Gifford prize for nonfiction’s Winner of Winners award, given to celebrate its 25th year, at a ceremony in Edinburgh. In his teens and early 20s, Shapiro tells me as we talk over Zoom the morning after his victory, he would often hitchhike from London to the Edinburgh festival as part of his immersion in the plays of Shakespeare. This period in his life sowed the ground for his acclaimed book, 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare, first published in 2006. He was, he explains, recovering from the “awful experience” of studying the playwright in middle school; every summer for several years, he would save up enough money to come to the UK on a Freddie Laker plane, “where you could fly from New York to London for $100 round trip and sleep in church basements and for 50p see spectacular productions”.

    In London, Stratford and Edinburgh, he’d see 25 plays in as many days, “and they’re all tattooed inside my skull to this day. The greatest one I saw was Richard Eyre’s Hamlet at the Royal Court in 1980 or so. Richard wrote me a note this morning, and it was so moving to me because that’s where it came from, seeing productions like his.”

    Shapiro is passionate about viewing Shakespeare through the lens of performance, the better to understand how central political and social context is to his work. He is currently advising on Tony Award-winning director Kenny Leon’s production of Hamlet for the Public Theater in New York, set in a post-Covid 2021 and starring Ato Blankson-Wood as the prince. It is, says Shapiro, “a Hamlet that speaks to the now. And I have the street cred, as we say in Brooklyn, to tell Shakespeare purists, whatever that means, that these plays have always spoken to the moment. And to think that what Olivier did or Kenneth Branagh for that matter is where Shakespeare stops, is to be as unShakespearean in one’s thinking about Shakespeare as possible.”

    James Shapiro with his Baillie Gifford winning book 1599.
    James Shapiro with his Baillie Gifford winning book 1599. Photograph: The Baillie Gifford Prize

    His vision for 1599, a microscopic look at the critical year in Shakespeare’s life when he was working on Henry V, Julius Caesar, As You Like It and the first draft of Hamlet, was not initially endorsed. His application for a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities in the US in the late 1980s was turned down twice, he remembers. “I wasn’t discouraged by that. I just felt they didn’t understand that I was trying to do something different.” The “something different” was to understand the immense anxieties of the age: the country poised on the brink of invading Ireland with a 16,000-strong force; the fear that Elizabeth I’s reign was approaching its end with no clear successor in sight; the strengthening possibility of another Spanish Armada. It’s no coincidence, says Shapiro, that Hamlet opens with men on the ramparts, nervously watching for hostile forces.

    He was also frustrated with an academic orthodoxy that relied on speculation and anecdote, as well as an outmoded concept of the playwright: “The Shakespeare that existed when I was writing that book was still very influenced by Coleridge’s sense that Shakespeare was from another planet, or Ben Jonson’s line: he was not of an age but for all time. And that just struck me as completely wrong.” Instead, Shapiro wanted to ground Shakespeare in reality, finding out what the weather was each day of that single year, who he met, where he travelled.

    Shapiro is also a judge on this year’s Booker prize for fiction, and he is fascinating on the distinction between his work and that of novelists. He admires “the way that creative minds can tease out things that are less visible to those of us who deal in facts”. How does he feel about historical novelists – indeed, about a work such as Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet, a reimagining of Shakespeare’s family that has just been adapted for stage by the RSC?

    He reveres Hilary Mantel, who was, he says, “a great historian, as well as a great novelist.” And he is, he replies, very happy for O’Farrell: “She deserves great success for that and for her more recent book, but it’s not a book that I can read comfortably, because it’s fiction.”

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    “I draw a very sharp line between fiction and nonfiction,” he adds. “I think that the danger of fiction is to sentimentalise. So that’s one of the things that I’m extremely careful as a Shakespearean not to do. On the other hand, I understand how deeply people want to connect with Shakespeare the man, with Anne Hathaway, with Judith Shakespeare: they lived, they died, their internal lives went largely unrecorded. And it takes a talented writer to bring that to life. But that’s not the stuff that I do. I don’t write that; but somebody needs to.”

    His next work is called Playbook, and will focus on America’s Federal Theatre Project of the 1930s, a progressive attempt to bring drama to mass audiences that was targeted by the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Then, as now, and as in the 16th century, theatre is powerful, and Shapiro intends to do everything he can to defend it.

    • 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare by James Shapiro (Faber & Faber, £14.99). To support The Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

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    ( With inputs from : www.theguardian.com )

  • James Shapiro wins Baillie Gifford anniversary prize with ‘extraordinary’ Shakespeare biography 1599

    James Shapiro wins Baillie Gifford anniversary prize with ‘extraordinary’ Shakespeare biography 1599

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    A book about a pivotal year in William Shakespeare’s life has been named the Baillie Gifford Winner of Winners in a special announcement to mark the 25th anniversary of the prestigious nonfiction prize.

    James Shapiro’s 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare originally won the award in 2006, when it was known as the Samuel Johnson prize. He has been honoured again at a ceremony at the National Museum of Scotland, Edinburgh, and will receive £25,000. The chair of judges, the New Statesman’s editor-in-chief Jason Cowley, said it was a “poised and original reimagination of biography”.

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    1599 by James Shapiro.
    1599 by James Shapiro. Photograph: Faber

    In 1599, Shakespeare completed Henry V, wrote Julius Caesar and As You Like It, and produced the first draft of Hamlet. In his book, Shapiro, who is professor of English at Columbia University, looks at how the political and social context of the time influenced the work.

    Cowley was joined on the panel by Shahidha Bari and Sarah Churchwell, both authors and academics, and biographer Frances Wilson. Churchwell said Shapiro’s book had made her “look at four major plays in totally different ways; that is an extraordinary achievement”.

    1599 was chosen from a shortlist of six that also included Craig Brown’s 2020 winner One Two Three Four: The Beatles in Time, Wade Davis’s Into the Silence: The Great War, Mallory and the Conquest of Everest, which won the prize in 2012, Barbara Demick’s Nothing to Envy: Real Lives in North Korea, which won in 2010, 2021 winner Empire of Pain by Patrick Radden Keefe and Margaret MacMillan’s 2002 winner Paris 1919, which was originally published under the name Peacemakers.

    The prize has been won by 16 men, including one person of colour, and eight women in its history. This gender balance was reflected in the shortlist for the Winner of Winners. Churchwell said the fact that Shapiro was a white man writing about a white author wasn’t something that the judging panel would hold against it, given that it was “a remarkable book”. But she said the judges did discuss the prize’s historical bias – which reflected the landscape of nonfiction publishing – saying the “vast majority of the [previously winning] books were by white men about western themes and subjects”.

    “Over time the prize has been reflecting that changing sense of values and perspectives,” she added. “There have been many more women who have won in recent years; it’s still an overwhelmingly white cohort of winners.”

    Churchwell said each book had to be judged on its merits, but added: “We also had to recognise there were structural inequalities, in bookselling, in publishing, over the last 25 years that were being reflected.”

    In 2022 the prize was won by author and academic Katherine Rundell for Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne, who was up against four other women and one man on the shortlist.

    Earlier this year, the Women’s Prize Trust announced it would be launching a nonfiction award to sit alongside its long-running fiction prize, after research found that female nonfiction writers are less likely to be reviewed or win prizes than their male counterparts.

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    ( With inputs from : www.theguardian.com )

  • No Democratic Bench? Josh Shapiro and Wes Moore Are Ready To Step Up

    No Democratic Bench? Josh Shapiro and Wes Moore Are Ready To Step Up

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    maryland governor inauguration 61349

    However, the more revealing presence on stage may have been that of somebody few recognized, Lt. Col. Jamie Martinez (Ret.). Martinez took the microphone to remind an audience that included Eric Holder, Chris Tucker and Cal Ripken that the 44-year-old Moore isn’t just a political phenom: he was also a fellow soldier from the 82nd Airborne who led troops in Afghanistan.

    Both new governors reached deep into their states’ past to evoke America’s promise and trumpet their own. Shapiro recalled William Penn’s credo of religious tolerance and Moore reminded his audience that while they stood just up the hill from docks where slaves were brought the inauguration was no “indictment of the past” but rather “a celebration of our collective future.”

    If it all felt like a highly-choreographed preview of future ambitions, campaigns and perhaps swearing-ins, well, I wasn’t the only one with the same premonition.

    “This won’t be the only inauguration with him we go to,” Holder told me as we waited for the festivities to get under way in Annapolis, saying of Moore that “he’s got that thing.”

    As Democrats bemoan their political bench there’s a frequent glass-is-half-empty refrain about the most-often mentioned prospects waiting behind the 80-year-old in the White House: Kamala Harris can’t win a general election, Pete Buttigieg can’t win a primary and there’s no way Michelle Obama will run, will she?

    I find it mystifying. And especially after the midterms.

    Senators Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.) and Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.), an actual astronaut and the actual pastor of Martin Luther King’s Ebenezer Baptist Church, paired their sterling bios with a demonstration of their electoral chops, winning in a pair of formerly red states that just now happen to pivotal presidential battlegrounds. In another show of strength, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer won re-election in Michigan, ever the Electoral College prize, by over 10 points.

    And then there are the new three Democratic governors from the northeast, Shapiro, Moore and Maura Healey of Massachusetts, who all thrashed MAGA’fied Republicans, were all born after 1970 and all have law enforcement or military credentials.

    Which of them would be willing to run, or viable if they did, should President Biden change course and not seek reelection is another story. But there’s no lack of traffic at the foot of that bridge the president promised he’d be to the next generation of Democrats.

    Just beginning their governorships now, it may be too soon for Shapiro and Moore to run next year, and allies of both suggested to me they would be unlikely to run for president so soon.

    Yet as I made my way around Harrisburg and Annapolis last week, I was struck by the air of expectations, or really the operating assumption, that both new governors would run for president.

    “That was quite a speech,” Rep. Mary Gay Scanlon (D-Pa.) told me after Shapiro’s inauguration, failing to suppress her knowing smile as she said her longtime friend from the Philadelphia suburbs “has a good vision for the whole country.”

    It all feels a bit familiar.

    An aging Democratic leadership in Washington, a cadre of up-and-coming governors and the question is only when and who among this next generation seeks the presidency: in the 1980s, it was a group of Southerners, not northeasterners, that included Chuck Robb of Virginia, Jim Hunt of North Carolina, Richard Riley of South Carolina and then Louisiana’s Buddy Roemer, Mississippi’s Ray Mabus and, first in his class, Arkansas’s Bill Clinton.

    Just as many of these governors benefited from the Reagan defense build-up, with federal dollars flowing to their states, the new crop of Democratic chief executives find themselves taking office with every governor’s favorite two words: budget surplus.

    Between the spending on Covid relief, the infrastructure bill, the Inflation Reduction Act and the CHIPS legislation, to say nothing of the $1.7 trillion government funding bill Congress passed in December, states are seeing a flood of money come from Washington.

    Thanks in part to the aid, Moore and Shapiro will craft their first budgets with the chance to play Santa rather than the Grinch. Notably, though, what animates each of them is less any sort of spending wish list than a pair of non-ideological initiatives that just happen to be broadly appealing to general election voters.

    For Shapiro, it was an executive order making it easier for Pennsylvanians without college degrees to work for the state and for Moore it’s his vow to offer young Marylanders a service year option after high school. Both know what sort of message these proposals send about their party, and themselves, at a moment Democrats are fending off charges of elitism.

    The two are eager to reclaim patriotism, faith and family, which were all on display at their inaugurations, mostly vividly through the presence and participation of their children.

    Shapiro, especially, can’t understand how Democrats get tripped up on these topics.

    When I spoke to him at the Democratic Governors Association meeting shortly after his 15-point win, he said there should be a focus on what binds all Americans — “we cherish our democracy, we love our freedom and we embrace this country.”

    Before I could even get to the education wars, he continued.

    “And we should be teaching our kids about that,” said Shapiro. “We should be teaching them about the good and the bad. And we should be teaching them in a way that doesn’t pit one of them against each other but rather teaches them to love this nation, love one another even more.”

    If you thought that was an echo of Barack Obama, or Bill Clinton, deftly decrying the false choices of our political culture, well, Moore had more of the same in his inaugural address.

    “I know what it feels like to have handcuffs on my wrists,” he said, recalling a police encounter when he was only 11. “I also know what it’s like to stand with families and mourn the victims of violent crime. We do not have to choose between being a safe state and a just one. Maryland can and will be both.”

    Such language, of course, prompts questions about the politics of the two men, how they’ll govern and position themselves for the future.

    That will in part be shaped by the differences in their states. If a handful of special elections turn out as expected next month, Shapiro will find a one-seat Democratic House majority and a six-seat GOP Senate majority. Moore, on the other hand, enjoys Democratic supermajorities in both chambers of Maryland’s legislature.

    Shapiro will have to negotiate to find consensus with Republicans while Moore must navigate his party’s factional disputes, between center-left and progressives.

    Shapiro’s task will be easy enough when it comes to bolstering spending on vocational and technical education or hiring more police officers. Where he’ll be tested — and offer an insight into his long-term thinking — is on the question of whether Pennsylvania will remain in the northeast’s greenhouse gas compact, which caps CO2 emissions.

    Shapiro dodged the question during the campaign, not wanting to alienate his party’s environmentalists or workers in the state’s energy industry.

    “How he chooses to move forward or not I think will set a very, very significant tone for the outset of his administration,” the state’s Republican Senate Majority Leader Joe Pittman told me about Shapiro’s decision.

    Dispensing with any subtlety, Pittman said of the governor, “It’s no secret that his dream is to be President of the United States” and energy policy presents a crossroads for Shapiro: “govern in a purple state or whether he moves more toward the progressive base of his party.”

    What was striking about my conversations with Pittman and Republican state Sen. Kim Ward, the Senate President Pro Tempore – besides their matter of fact assumptions about Shapiro’s ambitions – was how optimistic they were about being able to work together with a Democratic governor.

    That’s partly because they see a fellow political animal – Shapiro was a congressional staffer before rising in elected office – and somebody who knows from deal-making.

    It’s also because he’s reached out to them privately and put together a bipartisan cabinet, including Al Schmidt, the former Philadelphia elections official who became famous for defending his city’s ballot integrity after the 2020 presidential race.

    “He doesn’t sound like he is going to govern from the far left,” Ward told me shortly after Shapiro’s inaugural speech.

    When I asked the then-governor-elect at the DGA event what he sees as his legacy, he all but said as much, pointing to the GOP votes he won in the election.

    “If I can show those Republicans that it wasn’t just a vote in an election but actually what they created was a new dynamic for governing, where I can actually get big things done with Republicans and Democrats together, that would be probably be the most important thing I can accomplish,” said Shapiro.

    It may not sound like a recipe for winning a Democratic primary, but, then, 2020 demonstrated the party’s voters can be more practical-minded than ideologically driven.

    While Shapiro is a known commodity to the Harrisburg crowd, Moore is a blank slate to much of Annapolis.

    Last year’s election was his first bid for office and he has spent much of his professional life in New York City, as an investment banker at Citigroup and then as head of Robin Hood, the anti-poverty organization.

    These connections were made clear by the presence at the inauguration of two well-known New Yorkers, former Mayor Bill de Blasio (who was in the audience) and Chelsea Clinton (who was in the second row on stage).

    Yet just as in Pennsylvania, the Maryland Republicans in attendance made no attempt at arguing Moore was a left-winger pretending to be a centrist.

    “I think he really, really is more of a moderate,” William Folden, a GOP state senator from Frederick County told me after Moore’s speech, pointing to the “grounding” impact of the governor’s military service.

    While Shapiro is faced with a decision on the climate compact, Moore will quickly be confronted with whether, or how much, to constrain a Democratic legislature eager to pursue an expansive agenda after eight years of being held back by a Republican governor, Larry Hogan.

    Though I’m not sure it’s wrangling with the mandarins of the Maryland General Assembly that Winfrey had in mind when she excitedly said “there’s so much more to come” for Moore because “he’s just getting started.”

    It makes Tom McMillen wince.

    McMillen is the former University of Maryland basketball great who, like Moore, went on to become a Rhodes Scholar. He later served in Congress from Maryland.

    He’s fond of Moore, but as McMillen walked toward the inauguration last week he suggested the new governor should be more focused on the crabs of the Chesapeake more than the Clyburns of Carolina.

    “He’s got to be a good governor,” said the old power forward, looking down from his 6’11” frame to offer a stern lesson from the past. “That’s how Clinton got defeated after his first term in Arkansas, Wes has got to stay very focused.”

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    ( With inputs from : www.politico.com )