This could work equally well for family history. Shapiro starts with the winter of 1598 and refers to events before and after 1599 to illuminate a single year. Shapiro's book marries both threads together to create an intimate picture of what life must have been like for Shakespeare and the influences that fed into his writing. This was the year in which the playwright completed Henry V, wrote Julius Caesar and As You Like It and drafted Hamlet, but also a year of great excitement in England - an aging Queen faced the threat of invasion by Catholic Spain, rebellion in Ireland and intrigue at court. Alexander Masters turned the traditional form on its head in Stuart, A Life Backwards by telling the story in reverse chronological order.Īnother approach is to focus on a distinct period, as James Shapiro does in 1599, A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare. One solution is to condense your treatment of the less exciting years but this can be difficult to achieve without making the book seem unbalanced. The downside is that it can appear plodding - especially if you're writing about someone who had an action-packed early life but whose later days were tame. The advantage of this approach, which could equally apply to the history of a family, is that it is easy to follow. ![]() ![]() A biography typically starts with the subject's birth (it's surprising how many begin with a description of the weather) and continues in a roughly chronological order until their death.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |