Summary
Preeminent Shakespeare scholar James Shapiro shows how the tumultuous events in England in 1606 affected Shakespeare and shaped the three great tragedies he wrote that year-- King Lear , Macbeth , and Antony and Cleopatra .
In the years leading up to 1606, since the death of Queen Elizabeth and the arrival in England of her successor, King James of Scotland, Shakespeare's great productivity had ebbed, and it may have seemed to some that his prolific genius was a thing of the past. But that year, at age forty-two, he found his footing again, finishing a play he had begun the previous autumn-- King Lear --then writing two other great tragedies, Macbeth and Antony and Cleopatra .
It was a memorable year in England as well--and a grim one, in the aftermath of a terrorist plot conceived by a small group of Catholic gentry that had been uncovered at the last hour. The foiled Gunpowder Plot would have blown up the king and royal family along with the nation's political and religious leadership. The aborted plot renewed anti-Catholic sentiment and laid bare divisions in the kingdom.
It was against this background that Shakespeare finished Lear , a play about a divided kingdom, then wrote a tragedy that turned on the murder of a Scottish king, Macbeth . He ended this astonishing year with a third masterpiece no less steeped in current events and concerns: Antony and Cleopatra .
The Year of Lear sheds light on these three great tragedies by placing them in the context of their times, while also allowing us greater insight into how Shakespeare was personally touched by such events as a terrible outbreak of plague and growing religious divisions. For anyone interested in Shakespeare, this is an indispensable book.
Author Notes
James Shapiro was born in Brooklyn, New York on September 11, 1955. He earned a B.A. and Master's degrees at Columbia University, and his Ph.D. at the University of Chicago. His work in teaching includes Dartmouth College, Goucher College, Colombia University, and Fulbright lecturer at Bar-llan University and Tel-Aviv University. He served as the Samuel Wanamaker Fellow at the Globe Theatre in London. He has received awards from the National Endowment for the Humanities, The Huntington Library, and the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture. He has written for numerous periodicals such as the Chronicle of Higher Education and the New York Times Book Review. His more recent books include 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare, for which he won the 2006 Samuel Johnson Prize and the 2006 Theatre Book Prize. His book, Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare?, won the 2011 George Freedley Memorial Award. In 2016, his book entitled 1606: Shakespeare and the Year of Lear won the James Tait Black Prizes for biography.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Shakespeare expert Shapiro (Contested Will) delivers a fascinating account of the events of 1606 and how they may have influenced three tragedies the Bard is thought to have written that year or soon afterwards. He starts by acknowledging that writers, including Shapiro himself, have traditionally treated Shakespeare as an Elizabethan playwright instead of a Jacobean one, though some of his greatest plays are from the latter era. Shapiro goes on to trace the Shakespearean implications of a year that included the trial (and execution) of Guy Fawkes for the Gunpowder Plot, plague, European royals visiting England, and family drama. It's an inherently fraught task-"I'm painfully aware that many of the things I'd like to know about him... cannot be recovered"-but Shapiro convincingly demonstrates how closely contemporary events are reflected in the plays. The parties in Antony and Cleopatra that leave Pompey drunk "have no source in Plutarch," so the reports of such events during the visit of Danish King Christian seem a likelier source. The other tragedies explored here-Macbeth and, of course, the titular King Lear-show similar contemporary influences on both plot and theme. Shapiro is as compelling when documenting historical events as when analyzing Shakespeare's text, and his sizable bibliographic essay provides ample fodder for readers wanting to dive deeper into his research. (Oct.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* In a difficult year for England, Shapiro recognizes a fruitful time for the country's greatest playwright William Shakespeare. Indeed, the very difficulties of 1606 incubated the imaginative vigor manifest in the three masterpieces the Bard completed in that year King Lear, Antony and Cleopatra, and Macbeth. The tensions of 1606 arose in part from the push by the new monarch, King James, to unite his Scottish homeland with England, a push raising vexing questions about national identity and about how a divided royalty can strain that identity. Shakespeare embeds these questions in the realpolitik of Lear, so signaling the self-transformation that made a premier Elizabethan dramatist into an iconic Jacobean. Readers detect further evidence of this transformation in Antony and Cleopatra, where the pacific Octavius looks remarkably like the irenic James. True, the peace-loving James became stern after he was almost killed in the blast planned by those who hatched the Gunpowder Plot. But a resourceful Jacobean poet could infuse the fiery royal rhetoric that prosecutors turned against the plotters into King Lear's climactic outburst on the heath. Even the epidemic of plague closing theaters for much of 1606 inspired Shakespeare, who memorialized the tragedy in elegiac lines in Macbeth. An impressively fine-grained Shakespearean inquiry.--Christensen, Bryce Copyright 2015 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
THE LOST TIME ACCIDENTS, by John Wray. (Picador, $18.) In early 20th-century Vienna, a physicist makes a groundbreaking discovery that reverberates through his descendants' lives. The novel leaps across the century to his heirs - including an unremarkable scientist and a pulp science fiction author - and lands on Waldy Tolliver, his great-grandson, who realizes one morning that he has been "excused" from the course of normal time. A PERFECT LIFE, by Eileen Pollack. (Ecco/HarperCollins, $15.99.) Jane Weiss, a scientist at M.I.T. and this novel's central character, has devoted herself to investigating Valentine's disease, a neurogenerative disorder. Her research is motivated by personal tragedy - her mother died of the disease, and there's a 50 percent chance that Jane has it, too - but the story's heft comes from Jane's vocational mastery. MOTHERS, TELL YOUR DAUGHTERS: Stories, by Bonnie Jo Campbell. (Norton, $14.95.) The women here carve out refuges for themselves and one another in brutal circumstances; in the title story, a woman unable to speak after a stroke tries to communicate with one of her children. The tales drill down "to hidden depths of feeling and being, to reservoirs of strength and power that these women hardly know are there," our reviewer, Emily Eakin, wrote. UNITED STATES OF JIHAD: Who Are America's Homegrown Terrorists, and How Do We Stop Them?, by Peter Bergen. (Broadway, $17.) The author, CNN's national security analyst, offers a guide to domestic radicalism post-Sept. 11, looking at why some Americans become jihadists; how society has been shaped by the threat; and the government's (often contentious) response. Our reviewer, the former Homeland Security secretary Janet Napolitano, called this "the best one-volume treatment available on the current state of jihad in America." THE YEAR OF LEAR: Shakespeare in 1606, by James Shapiro. (Simon & Schuster, $18.) A turbulent year in England's political history turned out to be potent creative fodder for three of Shakespeare's greatest plays: "King Lear," "Macbeth" and "Antony and Cleopatra." Keenly aware of the fears and cultural upheavals of the time, Shakespeare translated the era's concerns into enduring, universal works. IN OTHER WORDS, by Jhumpa Lahiri. Translated by Ann Goldstein. (Vintage, $16.) Motivated by a longstanding love for Italian, Lahiri, who won a Pulitzer for her story collection "Interpreter of Maladies," chose to put aside writing in English altogether. These essays chronicle her self-imposed exile, from the physical aspects of her move to Rome, to the literary alienation and self-discovery that accompanies working in a new language. ?
Choice Review
As he did in A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare, 1599 (2005), literary historian James Shapiro (Columbia Univ.) here offers a "slice of a writer's life," this time focusing on 1606, the year Shakespeare first staged King Lear. Shapiro brings to life the events in England around this time, connecting cultural events to Shakespeare's life and plays. Shapiro admits that connecting these historical influences to the Bard "both impedes and enables this effort: to draw Shakespeare out of the shadows demands considerable effort and imaginative labor." Even though Shapiro admittedly speculates about these influences, the study is scholarly, and his ideas are well grounded in solid research. The bibliographic essay that takes up the last 40 some pages of the volume offers sources, documents, historical context, texts, textual issues, staging, and entries for each chapter. Shapiro further draws on dialogues and considers the historical influences on many plays, but he focuses on Macbeth, King Lear, and Antony and Cleopatra. The tone is conversational, immediate, and humorous, so even inexperienced readers will find the book easy to follow. By contextualizing Shakespeare's life and works, Shapiro reveals how the "multifaceted plays brilliantly reflect ... the fears and aspirations of [Shakespeare's] times." Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty. --Jane S. Carducci, Winona State University
Kirkus Review
Shakespearean scholar Shapiro (English/Columbia Univ.; Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare?, 2010, etc.) links the tumultuous events of 1605 and 1606 to three of the Bard's greatest works. The author examines King Lear, Macbeth, and Antony and Cleopatra, all written in 1606. For readers seeking the nitty-gritty of historical connections and sources, Shapiro does not disappoint. Adjusting to the new Scottish king, James I, Elizabethan playwrights had to forego being English for British. Unfortunately, the union of crowns wasn't official without the consent of Parliament. It was a sensitive issue both in England and Scotland, and artists presenting plays had to tread carefully. The plot to blow up Parliament in 1605 and a rumor of the king's murder created a fraught atmosphere. The recurring plague transformed Shakespeare's company, his competition, and the audiences to which they played, requiring further alteration to his plays. Shakespeare knew to disguise any events that spoke of broken kingdomsnot only in Lear, but also in Macbeth and Antony and Cleopatra. He used the latest buzzwordse.g., "equivocation" and "allegiance"to expose the darkness in men's (and women's) hearts. King James was fixated on demonology, and Shakespeare used Samuel Harsnett's A Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures to describe demonic possession and to reflect on social ills and the reasons people commit evil acts. Shakespeare adapted Lear from an older play staged 10 years before, and he strongly leaned on Plutarch's biography for Antony, often using dialogue verbatim. He also used Plutarch's account of a soothsayer in Macbeth, although his main source was Holinshed's Chronicles. Shapiro points out the connections of Shakespeare's plays to his own earlier work but also to whatever was at hand. Shapiro's discoveries of long-lost sources and missed connections make this a fascinating tale. His well-written, scholarly exploration will stand as an influential work that is a joy to read. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
While often cited for their eternal qualities, William Shakespeare's plays were very much rooted in a specific time and place. Following his successful A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare: 1599, Shapiro (Larry Miller Professor of English, Columbia Univ.; Contested Will) looks at the momentous year of 1606, during which Shakespeare wrote three of his great tragedies: King Lear, Macbeth, and Antony and Cleopatra. As with any full-length biographical work on Shakespeare there is a good amount of conjecture, but Shapiro builds on the few established facts of the playwright's life (1564-1616) by taking a broader look at the political and social factors that influenced his work. There was a lot going on in 1606: the proposed union of Scotland and England under King James; the aftermath of the infamous Gunpowder Plot that nearly wiped out the Royal Court and Parliament in a single blow; and the continued persecution of English Catholics. Shapiro effectively shows how the beliefs, fears, and politics of Shakespeare's day were reflected in his plays. VERDICT Highly recommended for readers interested in Shakespeare or British history. [See Prepub Alert, 4/24/15.]-Nicholas -Graham, Univ. of North Carolina, Chapel Hill © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
