The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606

This is a very old-fashioned book (and, yes, that is a high compliment). It is built upon serious scholarship and it examines a very important subject—the historical setting in which Shakespeare wrote three of his greatest plays: King Lear, Macbeth and Antony and Cleopatra. The year is 1606, one fraught with perilous events—the gunpowder plot, James I's attempts to unify the kingdom, visitations of the plague, a visit from the King of Denmark (James's brother-in-law), and so on. The author argues that while many try to understand Shakespeare's plays by examining his mental states (about which we know absolutely nothing, except by circular inference from what he was writing), we would do much better to examine the historical events that had to have influenced him (and whose influence can actually be seen within the plays themselves). He is clearly correct on this and he is clearly equipped to undertake the task. The bibliographical essay which accompanies the main text indicates the daunting range of materials on which the book is built.How old-fashioned is this? So-called 'new historicism', which predates the current academic obsessions with race/class/gender and the attendant victimology actually sought/seeks to see literature within its historical context, but often in service to a political agenda, e.g., the 'demonstration' that some great artist was in thrall to contemporary capitalism or colonializing government. This book is mercifully free of such political special pleading and focuses upon history as a backdrop for art, art with the kind of capital A that we can associate with such monuments as King Lear and Macbeth.The privileging of art over politics is the precise dividing line between old-fashioned (some would say 'authentic because disinterested') scholarship and that which is practiced today. The book's method, however—homing in on a special, unique year of literary art embedded in human history—is even more old-fashioned than the great literary scholarship of the years between the end of the war and the dawning of the late 1960's. If one walks through the stacks of the University of Illinois library one finds a set of dissertations directed by the formidable Shakespearian, T. W. Baldwin. Principally known for his masterpiece, William Shakspere's Small Latine and Less Greek (1944), Baldwin was an expert on all things Shakespeare but particularly his education and the manner in which it prepared him for his literary life. These dissertations by Baldwin's students examined individual years during Shakespeare's time and, presumably, attempted to do something like what James Shapiro is doing in The Year of Lear.Bottom line: this is a fascinating work of scholarship and very important for our understanding of three of Shakespeare's great tragedies. It is dense with learning and relevant for all Shakespeare scholars but it is lucid and straightforward and completely accessible to all serious readers, even when it gets down to such technical details as the dramatic differences between the quarto version of Lear and the version in the first folio (a perennial subject of serious scholarship).Highly recommended.(P.S. for all Illinois alumni/ae who worked in the distinguished Rare Book Room of the Illinois library: That collection includes Baldwin's books, some 5,800 of them.)

If you're interested in the background of what was happening in London while Shakespeare wrote Antony and Cleopatra, Macbeth, and King Lear, there's good stuff here. However, there was some speculation that wasn't labeled as such. I wouldn't call this book essential to Shakespearean Scholarship, not at the level of Nicholl's The Lodger Shakespeare, but it's still a useful book for a collection, and does track down some interesting stories (such as whether or not "The Scottish Play" was considered cursed because Hal Berridge died at the first royal performance).

One of the best recently published books on Shakespeare has less to do with this year’s quadricentennial celebration and more to do with what happened a little more than 400 years ago – 1606 to be precise. “The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606” by James Shapiro, the Larry Miller Professor of English at Columbia University, is a wonder of recreation of that year in Shakespeare life.At the time, Shakespeare had been rather out of the picture for writing plays. The death of Queen Elizabeth I (1533-1603), the last of the Tudors, might have been a dampening influence on Shakespeare’s writing and producing new plays.But in 1606 came King Lear, Macbeth, and Antony and Cleopatra. What Shapiro does in “The Year of Lea6r” is provide a convincing portrait of how the plays fit into the context of the social and political events happening at the time. It’s quite a feat of scholarship, because Britain’s most famous playwright left behind precious little documentation of his life, other than his plays.Shakespeare would likely have been writing “King Lear” in late 1605, when the news of the Gunpowder Plot – the plan to blow up the royal family and Parliament on Nov. 5 – rocked the country. The trials of the conspirators continued in early 1606, and Shapiro shows how the plot affected Shakespeare’s writing of the great tragedy of Lear. He also includes a delightful discussion of the theme of “nothing” as a powerful factor in the play. (Little did I know that “Something Good,” sung in “The Sound of Music” by Maria, and includes the lines “Nothing comes from nothing, nothing ever could” is likely borrowed right out of King Lear; that’s my observation, by the way, not Shapiro’s).The Gunpowder Plot also touched rather close to Shakespeare’s home in Stratford. A number of the conspirators were from Warwickshire, and had hoped to stage an uprising at the time Parliament and the king were killed. Many of them were actually captured just a few miles from Shakespeare’s home town.Other significant events of 1606 that would have been influencing Shakespeare with all three plays were the desire by King James for union between England and Scotland, a desire that would be frustrated for another century; the always simmering religious controversy, bubbled to the surface by the Gunpowder Plot which was often called the “Jesuit Treason;” various cases of suspected witchcraft (James I had written a book on the subject); and recurring outbreaks of the plague.Of particular interest is the word “equivocation,” a relatively new word in Shakespeare’s day used over and over again in “Macbeth.” How it was understood in Shakespeare’s day is as a means devised by Jesuit priests to help hidden Catholics in England essentially lie their way to safety. In fact, a loyalty oath was devised to make equivocation impossible; one of the people who initially refused to take the oath was Susanna, one of Shakespeare’s two daughters.Shapiro knows his Shakespeare. He’s the author of “A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare” (2009), about the year 1599; “Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare?” (2010); and “Shakespeare and the Jews” (1986; reprinted in 2016). He also served as editor of “Shakespeare in America: An Anthology from the Revolution to Now” (2014).“The Year of Lear” is a masterful account of how Shakespeare wrote the three tragedies, including two of his most important works – “King Lear” and “Macbeth.” And it is a masterful account of how his contemporary context shaped what he wrote, how he wrote, and why he wrote.