By Germaine Greer for NewStatesman, 6 October 2015
Having had a great success in 2005 with 1599: a Year in the Life of William Shakespeare, James Shapiro has provided his many admirers with an account of another year, 1606: William Shakespeare and the Year of Lear. Literary biography is a tricky genre, and not made more straightforward by slicing it into year-long tranches. The chosen year began in the middle of the ongoing drama of the Gunpowder Plot, which itself was a response to the king’s persecution of his beheaded mother’s co-religionists. The effects of the Essex Rebellion of 1601 were not yet played out but continued with the shockingly elaborate and costly celebration of the contrived marriage of the 14-year-old son of the executed earl and the 15-year-old daughter of the Earl of Suffolk, which would mire the court of James I in scandal, treachery and ultimately the murder of Sir Thomas Overbury, a full seven years later.
Shapiro’s new book is a collection of short, interconnected essays about the literary and historical context of the three great plays WiLear, Macbeth and Antony and Cleopatra. The project is daring, perhaps even foolhardy, because Shakespeare’s 42nd year is one of the most mysterious in his mysterious life. Shapiro is surprised that Shakespeare is seldom understood as a Jacobean dramatist, when his greatest works were written after James’s accession. In fact, Shakespeare is an Elizabethan dramatist, rather than a Jacobean. King’s Man or no (he had no choice but to appear at court), his stage is still the earth, his roof is still the sky. He is not a city dramatist, but Shapiro cannot imagine him anywhere but in London.
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