The Year Of Lear
"The year 1606 would turn out to be a good one for Shakespeare and an awful one for England," Shapiro writes. He starts his tale in 1605, when Shakespeare would have been reading an anonymous play called King Leir, and then on November 5 the Gunpowder Plot was exposed. Plague would also wreak havoc through London. During the summer of '06, theaters were closed depending on how many people died of the disease that day--if it was over 30, they were closed.
King James had taken the throne in 1603, and Shapiro notes how this changed Shakespeare's subject matter. He stopped writing historical plays about the English and instead focused on British, as James was from Scotland and the talk of unity was in the air. King Lear was an ancient British king, and Macbeth, of course, was Scottish.
Since Shakespeare rarely invented his own plots, he usually took existing work and made it better. This is what happened with King Leir, which became King Lear. For one thing, he changed the ending, in which he had Cordelia dying in Lear's arms, who died himself. Audience-goers were shocked. Later, the ending would be changed to a happy one, which would be the standard until the 1800's.
Macbeth, as I wrote about it my review of Witches And Jesuits, contained many references to the Gunpowder Plot, when a group of Catholic revolutionaries wanted to blow Parliament to kingdom cum, with most of the royal family in it. Shapiro goes over this plot, and how references in the plays, especially Macbeth, refer to it. One of the key elements is equivocation, which for Catholics was a way to lie under oath--if they told a lie, but believed in their mind that it was the truth, it was not a sin. The word pops up a lot in Macbeth, and there is a lot of equivocation in the language, such as the line "fair is foul." Shapiro notes that before Macbeth, Shakespeare had used the world equivocation only once.
Antony And Cleopatra was a sequel to Julius Caesar: "A surprisingly high proportion of plays in the 1590s, including Shakespeare’s, were sequels. During the first half of his career Shakespeare frequently imagined his next play as a follow-up to the last one and even wrote about such plans in an epilogue to The Second Part Of Henry The Fourth."
Shapiro notes: "Antony And Cleopatra is a tragedy of nostalgia, a political work that obliquely (for there are never reductive and dangerous one-to-one correspondences between ancient and modern figures) expresses a longing for an Elizabethan past that, despite its many flaws, appeared in retrospect far greater than the present political world."
Beyond the Shakespeare stuff, the book is also of interest to historians, as it gives us a snapshot of what life was like in England in that year. The ramifications of the Gunpowder Plot lingered, King Christian of Denmark, James' brother-in-law, paid a state visit, which was a rare thing, and of course there was the plague. The incidents of it tended to rise during hot and humid months. The doctors of the day had no idea what caused it. Dogs tended to be the culprit: "As grim as plague was for humans, it was worse for dogs; erroneously convinced that dogs spread plague, London authorities had them rounded up and slaughtered."
It's an interesting book, but I found the prose occasionally clunky and the transitions awkward at times. As Shapiro notes, so little is known about Shakespeare that any attempt to glimpse his creative process is welcome. "For the Jacobean Shakespeare, who had struggled to find his footing in the early years of the reign, no year’s output would be more extraordinary than that of 1606. The three tragedies he finished this year—King Lear, Macbeth, and Antony And Cleopatra—form a trilogy of sorts that collectively reflect their fraught cultural moment."
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