385 ç 2006 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0026-8232/2006/10303-0004$10.00 REVIEW ARTICLE Browsing through the small gift shop at the British Library this summer, I stumbled across two recent Shakespeare books marketed for both the scholarly and the general reader: James Shapiro’s 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare and Richard Wilson’s Secret Shakespeare: Studies in Theatre, Religion and Resistance. Though sitting side by side, these books represent two profoundly different methodologies and per- spectives. Shapiro’s elegant book offers a Shakespeare we are bound to feel comfortable with, in part because of Shapiro’s detailed and credible construction, but also because he avoids speculating too much “about how Shakespeare might have felt” (xx). Instead of structuring his book around a single governing thesis, he has organized it within the parameters of a single year: 1599, the year in which the construc- tion of the Globe theater vastly advanced the playwright’s theatrical and financial security, and in which he wrote and produced three new plays and drafted a fourth. (For some reason, American publishers have thought it fit to reverse the title, calling it instead A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare: 1599.) Like Stephen Greenblatt’s popular though controversial Will in the World, 1599, with its absence of notes and congenial, informative, and occasionally imaginative style, aims to be accessible to a large readership. 1 Wilson’s Secret Shakespeare, on the other hand, is a heavily annotated, argument-driven book, which claims that historical and literary evidence allows us to understand a great deal about the poet’s hidden interior. Wilson’s is a Shakespeare of whom, 1. Stephen Greenblatt, Will in the World (New York: Norton, 2004). Speculative Shakespeares: The Trials of Biographical Historicism THOMAS FULTON Rutgers University In this article, I will consider the following books: James Shapiro, 1599: A Year in the Life of Shakespeare (London: Faber & Faber, 2005), and Richard Wilson, Secret Shake- speare: Studies in Theatre, Religion and Resistance (Manchester University Press, 2004). Ref- erences to these works are cited by page number in the text.