James Shapiro will speak at the Harvard Book Store, 1256 Mass. Ave, at 6:30 p.m. on Wednesday, Oct. 26.

The 1998 Oscar-winning film “Shakespeare in Love” has made us lust for a glimpse of the Bard’s romantic side. But in “A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare: 1599,” scholar James Shapiro finds no evidence of an amorous element in the playwright’s life at the end of the 16th century. “If Shakespeare was in love in 1599,” Shapiro writes, “it was with words.”

And Shakespeare’s love of words reached a passionate peak that year. In a 12-month span, Shakespeare finished “Henry the Fifth, “Julius Caesar,” and “As You Like It,” on top of which he wrote a draft of “Hamlet.” By year’s end, Shakespeare cemented his reputation as a true genius.

Shapiro, a professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia, is best known for a highly-acclaimed 1996 study, “Shakespeare and the Jews.” In that book, he explores the resonance between Shakespeare’s portrayal of Jewish characters—most famously Shylock—and English attitudes toward Jews in the 16th and 17th century.

Just as the anti-Semitism of the era is reflected in Shylock’s character, the tumult of 1599 can be seen in Shakespeare’s works from that year. Political unrest gripped England, as the aging Queen received threats of assassination without an apparent heir. And the military, led by the doomed Earl of Essex, mobilized in response to rebellions in Ireland.

These unsettling events seem to parallel the themes of “Henry the Fifth” and “Julius Caesar”—and they appear to have sparked Shakespeare’s creativity. However, due to the strict enforcement of censorship in Elizabethan England, Shakespeare could not make overt comparisons to the government. After all, the English court was a patron of his theater company. At the time, authors were sent to the gallows at Tyburn or starved to death in the Tower of London just for subtly criticizing the Queen.

Meanwhile, Shakespeare faced an increase in the number of rival theater companies—giving new meaning to the statement, by Jacques in “As You Like It,” that “all the world’s a stage.” This heightened competition put pressure on Shakespeare to write plays that would be recognized above the other companies’ productions. Moreover, Shakespeare was a shareholder of the Globe Theatre—an unconventional position for a playwright of the time. This partial ownership allowed him more control over what shows his company would put on stage. The combination of these factors inspired and challenged Shakespeare, and spurred his writing to be better than it had ever been.

Shapiro’s opus comes at a high-water mark for the continuous tide of Shakespeare scholarship. Last year, Stephen J. Greenblatt, who holds the Cogan university chair in the humanities at Harvard, penned “Will in the World,” a Pulitzer Prize finalist. While Greenblatt offers a sweeping portrait of the Bard’s life, Shapiro focuses on Shakespeare in the year that the playwright turned 35.

In fact, Shapiro devoted five years of his life to a single year of Shakespeare’s. Like a detective sifting through a historical paper trail, the Columbia scholar squeezed out connections that would explain what catalyzed this year of brilliant writing.

Shapiro immersed himself in the world of Shakespeare by reading every book Shakespeare might have read during 1599. He paid special attention to unpublished materials such as letters, sermons, and diaries. He admits, “a good deal of what I make of [this] information remains speculative,” and his conjecture is gracefully sprinkled with words such as, “probably,” “maybe,” and “likely.”

Shapiro’s half-decade of research and analysis is impressive. But his futile search through the historical record for direct evidence about the Bard’s life turns out to be “Love’s Labor’s Lost.” Shakespeare’s daughter Judith remained alive for half a century after the Bard’s death, and yet there is no record that anyone conducted an interview with her to glean clues about her father. With so much about the Bard’s personality forever shrouded in mystery, the life of Shakespeare is an “E! True Hollywood Story” that can never be made.