A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare summary

London’s playhouses weren’t just cultural landmarks – they were also businesses. In 1599, entrepreneurs hoping to cash in on Londoners’ love of the stage invested heavily in new theaters. The Admiral’s Men moved into a purpose-built theater called the Fortune just outside the city gates. Other venues, like the Boar’s Head, appeared in the eastern suburbs.

The Lord Chamberlain’s Men lacked a permanent playhouse. Faced with tighter competition than ever before, Shakespeare and his fellow actor-shareholders took a risk and decided to put their own money toward building a new home – the Globe.

Before we continue with our narrative, we need to rewind back to the 1530s – one of the most important decades in England’s history. 

In the 1520s and ’30s, England was still a Catholic country, meaning that, in religious matters, it took its cue from the pope in Rome. But religious change was on the horizon. In the late 1520s, Henry VIII, England’s king, expressed his wish to annul his current marriage and marry another woman – a union that the pope forbade. Despite the pope’s interdict, Henry pressed ahead. Church and king were now at odds.

When the Globe opened in July 1599, England was in a state of panic. English forces in Ireland had suffered multiple defeats and were stalemated in the Netherlands. The treasury meanwhile was running dry.

In Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, a play completed around this time, Brutus bitterly reprimands Cassius, another Roman senator, for withholding “gold to pay my legions.” It was a reference Shakespeare’s audience would have understood immediately. All summer, rumors circulated that English soldiers in Ireland were about to mutiny “for want of pay and scarcity of victuals.” 

Julius Caesar was one of the first plays staged in the newly opened Globe, and it appears that Shakespeare wrote it with this occasion in mind.

Many viewers find the play lopsided because its pivotal moment – the assassination of Julius Caesar by his former allies, Brutus and Cassius – occurs so early in the first act. The second and third acts, by contrast, examine the aftermath of his death.

The Reformation wasn’t just a drama played out on the stage of world history by a cast of kings and queens, empires and armies. In provincial towns throughout the country, humble subjects also contributed to the changes sweeping through Elizabethan England.

Take Shakespeare’s native Stratford, a market town around 100 miles northwest of London. In 1571, when Shakespeare was seven, crowds gathered in front of Stratford’s church to watch a glazier knock out its stained windows – a hated symbol of popery. It was a statement: Stratford would not return to the Catholic fold.

At the beginning of 1599, Shakespeare was a productive and successful playwright. His work pleased audiences and sold well, albeit usually in anonymous volumes.

By the end of the year, that had changed. His name was now a draw in itself. One entrepreneur even collected his poems in a book padded out with knock-offs by lesser poets. It sold out within days. Shakespeare’s contemporaries also noticed this growing popularity, mocking the young men who searched Shakespeare’s work for pick-up lines and from whose “lips doth flow / nought but Juliet and Romeo.”