#280: SHAKESPEARE, OF AN AGE.  William Shakespeare in the year 1606 wrote King Lear, Macbeth, and Antony and Cleopatra.  (The satiric songwriter Tom Lehrer once said “There are people who really make you realize how little you’ve accomplished.”  And added: “By the time Mozart was my age he had been dead for four years.”)  In his book A Year in the Life of Shakespeare 1599 James Shapiro did a canny job of connecting Shakespeare’s work for that year--Henry V, Julius Caesar, As You Like It, and Hamlet—with the political events of the day.  Now, in The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606, we are out of the Elizabethan world into the Jacobean, with the efforts of the newly arrived King James to effect the union of Scotland to England, the tightening of Protestant norms over the older Catholic faith, a visitation of the plague, and the terrors and lingering trauma of the Gunpowder Plot.  These events shaped Shakespeare’s work in ways that remind us of the topicality, the lost references obscured by four hundred years’ distance.  Shapiro’s book restores the plays to a time when an indiscreet or irreverent reference, a perceived criticism of royal rule, could cost you not just your patronage but your freedom, perhaps your life.  An invitation to visit the Tower came with no guarantee you were going to get back out.

     It’s good to have, in Shapiro, so close a reader of Shakespeare’s texts, and one with so vivid a sense not just of the history but of Shakespeare as a man of the theatre.  With the tighter control of irreverence and bawdry in public speech, Shapiro spots the sudden disappearance of certain exclamations and oaths—the “s’bloods” and “troths” that litter the earlier plays.  And we see Shakespeare shifting the later plays to pagan and non-Christian settings—getting them out of harm’s way, so to speak.  In Macbeth, about the assassination of a Scottish king, Shakespeare makes great point of the characters’ use of equivocation, that term having become a buzz-word during the Gunpowder trials and the attempts to sort out suspected recusant Catholics.  With Antony and Cleopatra—very much a play of retrospection, as Shapiro points out—there is an elegiac echo of the past glories of the Elizabethan reign.  The most terrible and reverberant of echoes, though, come with King Lear, wherein the dismemberment of a realm brings down cataclysm.  Lear’s titanic presence begins Shapiro’s book and ends it.  In his epilogue, he takes wise advantage of the recent scholarship on the texts of the play, with their wild variations, so many of which seem to reflect our desperate hopes to look away from “the most painful and apocalyptic ending imaginable.”  We have no record of  James’s response to the performances.  Any monarch who could face the possible fate of his realm in Shakespeare’s play would have been a brave man indeed.

      There’s a consistent modesty in Shapiro’s approach, which amplifies but never pretends to encompass the plays.  In Contested Will he questions the biographical approach to Shakespeare’s creations, scanting as it does Shakespeare’s imaginative abilities.  In Shakespeare in a Divided America he details what our country has made of the plays, reminding us that they still have the ability to produce ruckus as well as reflect it.  Jonson memorably told us Shakespeare was “not of an age but for all time”; in The Year of Lear, Shapiro demonstrates he was both.

     Will Tosh in his book Straight Acting: The Hidden Queer Lives of William Shakespeare charges head-first into a topic still prone to producing embarrassment, denial, hysteria, and charges of agenda.  He delves into the instances of homoeroticism and male-male attachments that surface (or linger subsurface) in the plays and the early poems, and that take forthright center stage in many of the sonnets.   He writes about attitudes of the day towards theatre in general (always out at the boundaries of respectability, and suspected of fostering all sorts of bawdry and licentiousness), the all-boy troupes (certainly expected to bring in, shall we say, a certain clientele), the court of King James and his favorites, and exactly how much you could and couldn’t say out loud.  He pulls from the shadows—probably the most interesting surprise of the study—the forgotten poet Richard Barnfield, who took homoerotic content out of its classical disguises and put it right on the contemporary page—and falling through a social trap-door that, Tosh suggests, may have affected Shakespeare’s long delay in publishing the sonnets.  He’s good on the social context of publishing in the day—the reliance on manuscript circulation, which set the boundaries on the audience for any given work.  There’s a bit of first-person noise in the prose and some imagined scenes that made me roll my eyes, and inevitably, I suppose, he has to get onto was-he-or-wasn’t-he: Tosh settles on Shakespeare being bisexual which, given the evidence, seems pretty reasonable (not that we’re ever really going to know).  Still, it’s a fascinating topic, and it often gave me the sense that I was seeing freshly certain things that had been staring me in the face—all those girls dressed as boys and the romantic confusion therein.  And, noise or not, it’s intelligent and valid and, thank God, readable—you don’t have to drag yourself through it (pardon the phrase).  Here again is Shakespeare as part of his age, but a fresh light on the part of it that was so long whispered about and left in shadow

By James Shapiro:

The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606.  Simon & Schuster, 2015.

A Year in the Life of Shakepeare 1599.  Harper Collins, 2005.

Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare?  Simon & Schuster, 2010.

Shakespeare in a Divided America: What His Plays Tell Us About Our Past and Future.

      Penguin Press, 2020.

Straight Acting: The Hidden Queer Lives of William Shakespeare, by Will Tosh.  Seal 2024.