1606: William Shakespeare and the Year of Lear by James Shapiro (Faber & Faber, £20)
Biographies of William Shakespeare tend to be unsatisfying because the playwright left so few traces of his personality in the records. Another, more fruitful, approach taken by scholar James Shapiro in this probing and original book is to examine the turbulent political events he lived through and how he responded to them in his work. Shakespeare saw the transition from the Tudor era to the Stuart, and as a servant to King James I, observed court life at close hand. By 1606, he was writing plays that tapped into the anxieties about James’s uncertain early reign.
As James was pushing to unite England and Scotland, Shakespeare produced King Lear, a play about a British king who destroys his kingdom (and his sanity) by dividing it. Key to the work is political authority and who has the right to wield it.
This was not a theoretical question for Jacobeans. At the end of 1605, the failed Gunpowder Plot hatched by disaffected Catholics was a naked challenge to royal authority. In Macbeth, written soon afterwards, a Scottish king is assassinated by an ambitious underling—and then assassinated in turn. Often seen as a play designed to appeal to James (Banquo was his ancestor), Shapiro argues that the play is equivocal. The arguments for toppling the tyrant Macbeth echoed those of the plotters against James.
Unlike his rival Ben Jonson, who wrote sycophantic masques for the king, Shakespeare wrote popular plays that dramatised the issues of the day without taking sides. Shapiro shows how he was not only for all time, but also very much of his age.
Biographies of William Shakespeare tend to be unsatisfying because the playwright left so few traces of his personality in the records. Another, more fruitful, approach taken by scholar James Shapiro in this probing and original book is to examine the turbulent political events he lived through and how he responded to them in his work. Shakespeare saw the transition from the Tudor era to the Stuart, and as a servant to King James I, observed court life at close hand. By 1606, he was writing plays that tapped into the anxieties about James’s uncertain early reign.
As James was pushing to unite England and Scotland, Shakespeare produced King Lear, a play about a British king who destroys his kingdom (and his sanity) by dividing it. Key to the work is political authority and who has the right to wield it.
This was not a theoretical question for Jacobeans. At the end of 1605, the failed Gunpowder Plot hatched by disaffected Catholics was a naked challenge to royal authority. In Macbeth, written soon afterwards, a Scottish king is assassinated by an ambitious underling—and then assassinated in turn. Often seen as a play designed to appeal to James (Banquo was his ancestor), Shapiro argues that the play is equivocal. The arguments for toppling the tyrant Macbeth echoed those of the plotters against James.
Unlike his rival Ben Jonson, who wrote sycophantic masques for the king, Shakespeare wrote popular plays that dramatised the issues of the day without taking sides. Shapiro shows how he was not only for all time, but also very much of his age.
