James Shapiro, 1606, William Shakespeare and the Year of Lear (Faber)If I learned nothing else from my negligible study of Philosophy, it was how philosophers point out loopholes in the work of their predecessors and then replace them with others of their own, to be seized upon by the next generation. A similar thing happens in Shakespeare Studies where biographers point out how much of their peers' work is supposition and likelihood, rather than fact, and then provide other guesswork and probablities instead. Thus much of Shakespeare's life takes place in the subjunctive mood for us.
James Shapiro, despite being the highly acclaimed scholar that he is, is prone to that same habit and, as far as I know, Samuel Schoenbaum was one of the very few to resist the temptation to imagine his own bard and stuck to documentary evidence.
As early as page 9, Shapiro has re-asserted the traditional assumption that Judith was Shakespeare's daughter and Hamnet, who died young, his son. A friend of mine has an unpublished play and I have written up a precis of a longer essay here that stack up a respectable case for thinking that those twins were fathered by Hamnet Sadler, in Stratford, but while every other detail of the biography goes through variant interpretations, we seem to be the only ones who think otherwise. But that is how this branch of academia works, there have been about 70 suggestions as to who wrote the plays but nobody questions who fathered the children.
Shapiro's title here puts more emphasis on the year, 1606, than the name of Shakespeare. Not even the most imaginative literary historian could fill 359 pages with glimpses of Shakespeare walking to work, passing St. Paul's and buying a copy of a play, The True Chronicle History of King Leir, and other entirely plausible but equally unevidenced episodes. The book explains the political situation, immediately after the Gunpowder Plot, with King James trying to establish the Union of England with Scotland and all the associated religious and political tensions that came with them, which were in no way soothed by taking place in a time of plague. And then we wonder why this was such a rich period of English Literature when nowadays our leading poets spend so much time on pensionable salaries teaching Creative Writing and daring to present papers at conferences.
Although very successful in the theatre industry by 1606, the accession of James brought new doubts about the future of patronage for Shakespeare, and everybody else, but through circumstances identified by Shapiro as 'powerful brokers', it was Shakespeare's company of actors who were appointed The King's Men.
Then, as now, the question of union or not between England and Scotland was a prominent issue and the theme of the division of the kingdom in Leir was one that was perhaps more important to the contemporary audiences of Lear than it has since become. In his Epilogue, Shapiro points out how each age finds what it will in Lear, and in the C20th, with visions of holocaust and apocalypse, and then family, fatherhood and dementia, other themes in the play have seemed more relevant but might not have seemed so in 1606. One telling statistic, though, is how often Englishness is mentioned in Shakespeare in Elizabethan plays and how often Britishness has replaced it in Jacobean plays. Academic work is more worthwhile when based on solid, empirical reference to the text like that, when it proves its point by showing us something real.
More good work, and Shapiro becomes more impressive as such valid points accumulate, is seen when Ben Jonson's masque, Hymenaei, is staged at enormous expense, not quite Shakespeare's sort of thing, and Shapiro doubts that Shakespeare's 'Our revels now are ended' in The Tempest was ever a valediction to the theatre. There were still at least three more plays after The Tempest and lines like,
the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces
could be commentary on the pageantry and shallow grandness of the masque.
But equivocation was something very much in vogue as inquisitors sought out suspicious recusants, subversives and adherents to the old religion. When questioned by the zealous pursuers of thought criminals, it was necessary to answer their questions only partially sometimes.
Macbeth is not only a play about the murder of a Scottish king, invloving witchcraft, and whether evil is a product of birth or culture but,
a nightmare world where words belie intentions and honest exchange is no longer possible.
Ben Jonson was brought before the courts (not for the first time) in early 1606 to explain his religious convictions and in uncharacterstic short order soon produced Volpone with its plot of duplicitous humanity and the culprits suffering unduly harsh treatment. Meanwhile, in Stratford, the apparently much-favoured Susanna Shakespeare was one who refused to receive communion. There was a fine line to be found between being true to one's beliefs, being honest, sensible and keeping your head attached to your torso, your entrails inside you and not being set on fire.
Antony and Cleopatra is the third major play written in 1606, Shapiro pointing out that the rhythm of Shakespeare's productivity goes in bursts of activity interspersed with fallow periods. Unlike the other big tragedies, this has no soliloquies as such, is based almost entirely on one source, Plutarch, but Shapiro finds deeper theatrical irony hidden by Shakespeare in "Some squeaking Cleopatra', reminding
Jacobean playgoers that they themselves are listening to some squeaking cross-dressed boy speak these lines
and allow them to see past the limitations of the stage,
to a world in which the hyperbolic and paradoxical can register a deeper truth.
That point may have been made before, I don't know. Neither do I know how far Shapiro's appreciation of Shakespeare is ahead, or behind, that of Shakespeare's contemporary audience but the same might be said of opera and Monteverdi's Orfeo, often regarded as the first opera as we know it, was first produced in 1607.
I was glad to read again of the outrageous debauchery that took place during the state visit of King Christian of Denmark, part of the family tree but differentiated from James in levels of drink consumption, attitude to hunting, and lechery. But I'm disapponited in Shapiro that he casts doubt on the first-hand documentary evidence for it on the grounds that it was reported in possibly unsent letters meant as a lterary device more than reportage. Earlier, Shapiro has also cast doubt on Shakespeare's affair with Jeanette Davenant in Oxford, an episode I'm particularly keen on. I mean, you give these academics the possibility of a good story and then they take against it.
But the plague returns before Christmas, the tolling of funeral bells so constant that Londoners no longer ask who it tolls for. Quite amazingly, Shapiro refuses to note that John Donne was by that time in London but nobody wants to speculate on Shakespeare's relationship with Donne, either personally or through a coming vogue for 'metaphysical' poetry. God only knows why not.
It's a brilliant book, of course, piecing together the impulses behind the plays that have come to look different to audiences since. It is remarkable, though, how Shakespeare is reconstructed for us on such fragile premises, utterly convincing as a playmaker beyond one's wildest dreams but only on the say so of the astute academics who draw their own conclusions on our behalf.