In a brief change from the fiction I usually read, another of James Shapiro's
histories of the events that influenced Shakespeare's writing. After
1599, we
get
1606: William Shakespeare and the Year of Lear, with the plays that
premiered that year being
King Lear,
Macbeth and
Antony and
Cleopatra. There's lots of outside elements big and small that seem to be
reflected in those plays but inevitably most of them come back to the Gunpowder Plot
of the previous year. I knew that
Macbeth carried a lot of echoes of that,
but Shapiro also finds possible links in
King Lear, which would probably have
been written by November 1605, but might have had amendments before it reached the
stage, acknowledging some of the current events everyone was paranoid about at the
time (the anonymous letter Edmund plants to frame Edgar might have given people flashbacks to one
that revealed the plot to Parliament in time for it to be stopped.) The two very
different versions of
Lear in quarto and folio form are also discussed,
changes which might have been made as the parameters of what was and wasn't
appropriate to be staged changed.
There's also a little-known story of an alleged assassination of James I, a rumour
that spread with amazing speed throughout the country and sounds uncannily like the
many false celebrity death rumours that make the rounds nowadays. Overall I found
much interesting stuff here, especially since, as Shapiro points out in the opening,
people seem less interested in exploring Shakespeare as a Jacobean playwright
despite the fact that his company had a much closer relationship with James than with his
predecessor.
