It’s twenty years since James Shapiro published 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare, which fused literary criticism with political and social history in bravura fashion. Shapiro vigorously debunked the Romantic notion that Shakespeare was an artist who transcended his own era. At the same time, he challenged the idea that to write about the political and social background against which his plays were staged, the spaces in which they were performed and the ways in which contemporaries responded to them is somehow to diminish him. ‘It is no more possible to talk about Shakespeare’s plays independently of his age than it is to grasp what his society went through without the benefit of Shakespeare’s insights,’ he wrote.

Now here comes Daniel Swift to apply the Shapiro method to Shakespeare’s early career (the debt is acknowledged: Swift’s book is dedicated to Shapiro). The new book ends where Shapiro’s began, on the night in December 1598 when the master carpenter Peter Street took down the timbers from which the Theatre in Shoreditch had been constructed two decades before and carted them away for re-erection in Southwark as the skeleton of the Globe.

The Theatre had been built by James Burbage, a carpenter turned actor, and was home to the troupe of players with whom Shakespeare learned his trade. Swift considers Shakespeare’s career as if he had been a member of a notional worshipful company of playwrights and players, progressing from apprentice to