When Shakespeare Wrote

1606: Shakespeare and the Year of Lear
by James Shapiro
Simon & Schuster, 2015, 448 pages, $39.99

1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare
by James Shapiro
Faber & Faber, 2006, 464 pages, $19.99

When my generation began teaching and studying Shakespeare we took the editions of the plays for granted. Little or nothing was taught about the Quartos that appeared in Shakespeare’s lifetime or the Folio edition of his plays published in 1623 shortly after his death. I recall one imperious English mistress proclaiming, “We are studying this text”, as though that resolved any inconsistencies in the edition her students were studying. Even less was taught about Elizabethan playing conditions.

At the height of the dominance of the F.R. Leavis doctrines imposed by Professor Sam Goldberg at the University of Sydney in the mid-1960s the emphasis was on close textual analysis leading to the “right” conclusions. This was supposed to encourage “discrimination” but was unsullied by any consideration of historical context. As for Shakespearean studies, the idea that the printing of various editions in Elizabethan and Jacobean England might represent significant alternative versions of the works was barely considered. In a long passage at the end of his “Essay on King Lear” where he discusses the interpretation of the King’s death scene, Sam Goldberg failed even to mention that there is an alternative version of the same scene in the Quarto.

Of course there were splendid open-minded scholars who were masters of close textual analysis who would deftly evoke the historical background of the works they discussed. You just had to find them. Bill Maidment, a formidable critic of Goldberg, was one. He always asked about a work: What did it mean when it was created? What does it mean now? What does it mean? This allowed for both historical criticism and a rich exploration of modern resonances. I took this to heart when I was made responsible for the Shakespeare curriculum as part of a team-teaching program at North Sydney Boys’ High in 1967. It seemed to me that relating the texts that we heard enacted in the splendid Marlowe Society and Caedmon recordings to original stage conditions would enrich our students’ experience of the plays.

Not surprisingly my father—who constructed a scale model of the Globe as a teaching aid—and I were both seduced by the John Cranford Adams and Ronald Watkins theories of staging that had become very influential in the UK and America. Adams had assembled every piece of evidence he could find about theatres in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries to incorporate in a scale model. As we found out later, he had not dated his sources well; but there is no denying Adams created an elegant and beautiful conjectural reconstruction. But the model was in many details inaccurate.

Watkins was a teacher at Harrow who had persuaded the school to build a stage based on Adams’s conjectures after a flying bomb hit the school’s speech room in 1940. Here he put on school productions recreating Elizabethan staging. Watkins wrote Moonlight in the Globe and On Producing Shakespeare based on these productions. Adams and Watkins made valuable contributions to our understanding of Shakespeare’s stagecraft, as much by provoking scholars such as Leslie Hotson, Bernard Beckerman, Richard Hosley and J.L. Styan to come up with alternatives as through their own ideas. Watkins was, however, brilliant in his discussions of the language of the plays.

For a young teacher it was very exciting. As well as introducing an innovative method of teaching Shakespeare, at least for Australia, I was adjusting my arguments to the new conjectures about Elizabethan theatres being debated in England and America. When I came to teach a stagecraft course at Mitchell CAE my father constructed another model based on the new evidence and a few conjectures of our own. These experiences led me to believe that the best way to approach an artist is through his own period. This is why I find James Shapiro’s 1606: Shakespeare and the Year of Lear and its predecessor 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare so fascinating.

Each book is an intellectual and artistic biography of a single year in the life of the playwright interwoven with a detailed narrative of the events of 1599 and 1606 as they might have influenced Shakespeare. 1606 deploys a wealth of research about the theatrical companies and performances at court including a magnificent description of Queen Elizabeth’s palace at Whitehall, where many of the plays were staged. Using contemporary anecdotes and surviving law court records Shapiro describes the personalities and turbulent adventures of some of the other playwrights and actors.

Shapiro observes that one of the reasons these encounters were so deadly was that they were of necessity skilled fencers. Indeed, although it is not mentioned in the book, there is reason to believe Shakespeare might have been a formidable swordsman himself. In Romeo and Juliet he is clearly familiar with Italian fencing and the climax of the duel in Hamlet is the Prince’s execution of a difficult manoeuvre to disarm Laertes and seize his baited rapier. Did perhaps Shakespeare choreograph the fights himself? The original direction—“in scuffling they exchange rapiers”—seems perfunctory; there would have had to be a lot more to the action to satisfy an audience that included trained swordsmen.

According to Shapiro, any idea about what Shakespeare might have been like as a man was lost in the late seventeenth century when his daughter died. But you can, he argues persuasively, try to understand how he thought. Shakespeare would have been present at the great preacher Lancelot Andrewes’s sermon justifying Essex’s campaign in Ireland. Two strands of Andrewes’s argument found their way into the play Shakespeare was writing to open at the Globe five weeks later: “the theological justification for an aggressive offensive war and the need for those who go off to war to purge themselves from sin”. “Can I with right and justice make this claim?” asks Henry V of the Archbishop of Canterbury. The reply is a long legalistic sermon that in the right actor’s hands can be very impressive. But as we know from the previous scene, the Archbishop wants to distract the King from implementing a bill to take over church land and go off to war. Indeed Shapiro insists Henry V has to be understood against the background of the Irish expedition. There is no exact equivalence—Henry is not the Earl of Essex—but there are subtle resonances.

Similarly, the dispute about the ruler’s responsibility for the souls of his followers in the haunting scene when Harry goes among his soldiers in disguise (“A little touch of Harry in the night”) comes direct from the sermon. However, in the play the issue is never quite resolved. Moreover, the fact that in 1599 England was at war not just in Ireland but facing the threat of another Spanish Armada shapes the plays that Shakespeare was to write later in the year. Shapiro includes a splendidly lucid account of the Irish expedition and its implications for Shakespeare that segues into a powerful chapter on the invisible Armada. As Shapiro puts it, describing August 1599, “the time is out of joint, the threats multiple and uncertain”. This was the atmosphere Shakespeare evoked for the opening of Hamlet.

The play was of course familiar—a ghost, a revenge plot, but with a series of extraordinary soliloquies revealing the main protagonist’s dilemmas. Just what the Elizabethan audiences saw at any particular time remains a mystery. Shapiro believes the two existing versions, both the second Quarto and the Folio, are too long to have been performed in public theatres of the time. Moreover, Shakespeare had second thoughts. The climax of the great soliloquies is, “How all occasions do inform against me,” with Hamlet observing Fortinbras’s army and concluding he has to act like a beast to achieve his overdue revenge. Shakespeare came to believe, Shapiro argues, that this was too dark. So he cut the soliloquy and toned down the disturbing Fortinbras, who in the Second Quarto is as irresponsible and dangerous as Claudius describes. In the Folio there is a softer, more accepting Hamlet. In Shapiro’s words for the character, “death is both certain and inevitable”.

This is cutting-edge scholarship. According to Shapiro there are at least two valid versions of the play and since 1599 appeared, the two-volume Arden edition has been published. Here all three surviving versions, including the garbled so-called Bad Quarto, are given immaculate editing. Still the debate continues. Some scholars still believe a single edition of the play can be created; and what happens when the two good texts are conflated? Nearly twenty years ago Kenneth Branagh did exactly that in his script for arguably the greatest film Hamlet to date. Personally I could have done without Ophelia’s drenching and the nineteenth-century setting. But with an open director/actor like Branagh who registers every detail of the dramatic action you get a richer, more complex work than even Shapiro envisaged. Nevertheless, 1599 is both good criticism and excellent Tudor history.

Better still, there is now a successor, 1606: William Shakespeare and the Year of Lear (US title, with better design and reproduction of illustrations: The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606). 1606 chronicles the year during which Shakespeare created King Lear, Macbeth and Antony and Cleopatra. Shapiro begins with the composition of King Lear, which he believes began in January when the King’s Men, as they now were, needed new plays for the Court.

The first recorded performance of King Lear was at Whitehall on Boxing Day 1606. Like so many of the plays that year it was influenced by the Catholic plot to blow up the Houses of Parliament. Shapiro argues that Edmund’s use of a letter to discredit his brother Edgar may have been influenced by the letter warning of some kind of catastrophe that led to the search of the cellars of the Houses of Parliament and the arrest of Guy Fawkes. Intercepted letters are a major plot device in the play, with the villainous Edmund making his fortune with one letter and being unmade by another. Dividing or uniting kingdoms was a major issue for the new King James. He wanted to unite his former realm with Britain but the English Parliament was proving obdurate. Just where Shakespeare stood on the issue can’t really be deduced from Lear’s misguided division of his kingdom. Here the play is more a domestic tragedy although, like so much of Shakespeare’s best work, pointedly relevant to his audiences.

However, the play most influenced by contemporary events was Macbeth. When I was trying to teach Shakespeare historically, the link between the treatise on equivocation found in the papers of Father Garnet, the Jesuit confessor to the conspirators, and the Scottish play was particularly relevant. But until I read Shapiro I did not realise how relevant. Throughout much of 1605 there had been a continuing debate about whether mental reservations or half-truths were lying. This occurred not only at Garnet’s trial but also at the trial of another Jesuit, Father Galloway. Their adversary was the Attorney-General, the formidable Sir Edward Coke. The Jesuits were brave men but no match for Coke’s forensic skills, and he was able to argue persuasively that an equivocator could never be believed. The jury agreed and both men were hanged, drawn and quartered.

Shapiro points out that there was also a significant link between Coke and Shakespeare. As propaganda for his ill-fated rebellion Essex had commissioned a performance in the Globe of Richard II. Coke had been called upon to examine the play for treasonable material and had exonerated both the playwright and the actors. It is therefore not surprising that Shakespeare found in equivocation a powerful symbol of deception and evil for Macbeth. The Porter even parodies the evidence from the Garnet trial, sharpening the original audiences’ awareness of Macbeth’s equivocations a few moments later. And of course the temptations of the Weird Sisters “palter with us in a double sense”.

Again this is good criticism and perceptive Jacobean history. Shapiro is right to see these plays as reflecting and commenting on the bleak despair of England in 1606. There is even reason to believe at least one play was found too dark for its audiences. The First Quarto of King Lear, with the old King dying in despair at the death of Cordelia, is believed to be the version played at court. The Folio seems to embody a revision, with Lear in his last moments believing Cordelia is alive.

The book closes with Shakespeare at last completing Antony and Cleopatra. According to Shapiro, the love story was initially thought to be too close to Elizabeth and Essex. By a delicious irony, in 1606 the new play reflected something of the nostalgia for the great days of the old Queen.

We can be grateful to James Shapiro for illuminating how in 1599 and 1606 a great playwright created a succession of masterpieces unparalleled in the history of English literature.