1606: William Shakespeare and the Year of Lear: beware the ides of ‘nothing’

1606: William Shakespeare and the Year of Lear

Author: James Shapiro

ISBN-13: 978-0571235780

Publisher: Faber

Guideline Price: £20

The year 1606 was an odd one for William Shakespeare. He had been steadily prolific since the early 1590s, but for the first time since 1593 nothing by the Bard had appeared in print. We will probably never know why. But, as James Shapiro explores in his informative and exciting new book, 1606 was a significant, epoch-defining time that formed the background to two of Shakespeare greatest tragedies, King Lear and Macbeth, as well as Antony and Cleopatra and Timon of Athens.

The repercussions of the Gunpowder Plot were still not quite clear. Nothing had actually happened apart from the execution of a few traitors, but the propaganda war had enormous significance. There was a horrible outbreak of plague. And the king’s subjects were becoming ever more conscious of James’s obsessive interest in witchcraft.

As Shapiro argues, Shakespeare may well have considered himself fortunate to have survived to 1607, and perhaps these times sparked his last phase of creativity when he began to experiment more, developing a new dramatic writing style, and producing plays that were ever more challenging.

King Lear is often regarded as Shakespeare's greatest play, narrowly overtaking the Romantics' favourite, Hamlet, because its bleak vision is closest to our understanding of the dark nature of humanity. Even so, it may have been a box-office disaster, far too radical and confrontational for its audience, which is one possible reason why it was rewritten for the folio of 1623.

One of Shakespeare's great skills was his ability to adapt and refigure familiar material. Lear is based on the anonymous chronicle play, King Leir, a well-plotted but often uninspired work that Shakespeare transformed into a disturbing masterpiece.

The earlier play was written against the background of the succession crisis that dominated English politics in the last years of the childless Elizabeth’s reign. Shakespeare’s appeared in the wake of James’s desire as a Scottish king on the English throne to unite the kingdoms of the British Isles.

The English, however, were less than convinced – Parliament threw out James' bill, and Scottophobia, then as now, was rife in the capital. In fact, Ben Jonson, Shakespeare's great contemporary, was in hot water just before Lear was produced, for his comments on greedy Scots taking over everywhere in the comedy, Eastward Ho!.

Kingdom divided

Shakespeare’s play imagines the division of the kingdoms rather than their unification, as the old king splits his island kingdom between his three daughters, an oblique but obvious take on current events. As Shapiro points out, in trying to force a union James had “foisted upon his subjects an identity crisis where none had existed before”, and the English had to wonder whether they could ever really consider themselves British.

Shakespeare transforms this anxiety into an existential fear, making the word “nothing” dominate the action and substance of the play. Lear and the Fool quibble repeatedly on the word; when the king admonishes his sidekick with “Nothing can be made out of nothing”, the audience is acutely aware of the meaning: Lear’s actions have managed to make nothing out of something and set in train a series of events that will only end with the death of his favourite daughter as he carries her on stage “dead as earth”.

In the pagan world of ancient Britain, such ominous words signalled the possibility that mankind would simply return to dust, with no hope of resurrection. It is hardly surprising that Samuel Johnson, in intensely moving words, confessed that he could not bear to read the play. For most of its stage history before the second World War, Lear was performed with a happy ending.

King Lear is not a play that can be reduced to one topical issue. James is often caricatured as the most superstitious of monarchs, but, in fact, he was convinced of his ability to uncover the truth behind cases of demonic possession, determining which were real and which were fake.

James was proud that he had been able to help expose a young woman from a village near Oxford who had pretended to be possessed but was faking symptoms at the bidding of her father. The king was able to make jokes to his courtiers about the superstitious nature of his subjects who were foolish enough to believe that eclipses predicted strange events.

Portend no good

At the beginning of Lear, the Duke of Gloucester argues that recent eclipses of the sun and moon "portend no good to us" and the result will be divisions between friends, lovers and families. For Shapiro, Shakespeare is deliberately probing a "cultural fault-line between natural and supernatural explanations" early in the play, contrasting the credulity of Gloucester to the cynicism of his illegitimate son, Edmund.

While Gloucester imagines that supernatural forces shape human destiny, Edmund dismisses such logic as “excellent foppery of the world” and determines to seize the day himself. Shakespeare stages the question but does not provide the answer.

As this suggests, the great strength of Shapiro’s book is that he is able to combine acute literary criticism with substantial historical knowledge so reader always know why something is relevant and how a particular detail works in a play. He is at his best when writing about equivocation, the Jesuit defence of sly verbal trickery when confronted by a hostile enemy.

Traitor defined

In Macbeth, Lady Macduff and her son, defenceless in their unprotected castle, discuss treachery. The son asks if his father was a traitor, which precipitates an uncomfortable exchange. Lady Macduff confirms that he was, defining a traitor as "one that swears and lies".

It is a chilling moment. On the one hand, swearing an oath of obedience to the state and lying about it by placing barrels of gunpowder under the Houses of Parliament is a capital crime; on the other, we all know that everyone swears and lies a bit. Shakespeare is showing that in equivocal times, when nothing means quite what it should do, such ambiguities can be exploited to murderous effect.

Lady Macduff is equivocating here, and moments later Macbeth's soldiers rush in and demand to know where her husband is before killing both mother and son. Given her definitions, she is guilty: but no one who has ever seen Macbeth thinks so. Shakespeare shows us just how terrifying life was for many in 1606.

Andrew Hadfield is a professor of English at the University of Sussex and editor of The Oxford Handbook of English Prose, 1500-1640 (Oxford University Press)