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  Contents

  List of Illustrations

  A Note on Quoting the Plays

  Map of Shakespeare’s London c.1606

  Prologue: January 5, 1606

  1. The King’s Man

  2. Division of the Kingdoms

  3. From Leir to Lear

  4. Possession

  5. The Letter

  6. Massing Relics

  7. Remember, Remember

  8. Hymenaei

  9. Equivocation

  10. Another Hell Above the Ground

  11. The King’s Evil

  12. Unfinished Business

  13. Queen of Sheba

  14. Plague

  Epilogue: December 26, 1606

  Photographs

  A Note on Dating the Plays

  Acknowledgments

  About James Shapiro

  Bibliographical Essay

  Index

  Image Credits

  For Mary and Luke

  List of Illustrations

  ILLUSTRATIONS IN THE TEXT

  Shakespeare’s portrait, by Martin Droeshout (1623)

  Title Page of the Quarto of King Leir (1605)

  ‘The Unite’ Coin, minted in 1604

  Title Page of the Quarto of King Lear (1608)

  “Demonic Possession,” Pierre Boaistuau, Histoires Prodigieuses (1598)

  The Monteagle Letter (1605)

  Detail from “A Map of Warwickshire,” by John Speed (c. 1610)

  The Gunpowder Plotters, by Crispijn de Passe the Elder (1606)

  Le Combat à la Barrière, by Jacques Callot (1627)

  Title Page of “A Treatise of Equivocation,” by Henry Garnet (c. 1598)

  Detail from “The Powder Treason” (c. 1620)

  Henry IV of France Touching for Scrofula, by Pierre Firens (c. 1610)

  Lady Anne Clifford as Cleopatra (c. 1610)

  Tomb of Queen Elizabeth in Westminster Abbey, after Maximilian Colt (c. 1620)

  “Lord Have Mercy on Us,” from Thomas Dekker, A Rod for Runawayes (1625)

  Final Page of the Quarto of King Lear (1608)

  PLATE SECTION

  1 King James

  2 A View of London from Southwark

  3 King Christian of Denmark

  4 Queen Anne

  5 The Execution of the Gunpowder Plotters

  6 The Execution of the Gunpowder Plotters

  7 The Powder Treason

  8 Shakespeare, the Chandos Portrait

  9 Ben Jonson

  10 Lancelot Andrewes

  11 Richard Burbage

  12 Robert Cecil, Earl of Salisbury

  13 Sir John Harington

  14 Designs for the First Union Flag

  15 Lucy Russell, Countess of Bedford

  16 Effigy of Catherine of Valois (Queen of Henry V)

  A Note on Quoting the Plays

  Quotations from Shakespeare’s plays—with the exception of King Lear—are cited from David Bevington, ed., The Complete Works of Shakespeare, 6th ed. (New York, 2008). For King Lear I quote from Stanley Wells’s edition, based on a text prepared by Gary Taylor (Oxford, 2000), that derives from the 1608 quarto and so is closer to what was staged in 1606 (and is divided into twenty-four scenes, rather than five acts). Like almost all recent editors, Bevington and Wells modernize Shakespeare’s spelling and punctuation; I’ve done the same with the words of Shakespeare’s contemporaries throughout the book.

  PROLOGUE

  January 5, 1606

  On the evening of January 5, 1606, the first Sunday of the new year, six hundred or so of the nation’s elite made their way through London’s dark streets to the Banqueting House at Whitehall Palace. The route westward from the City, leading past Charing Cross and skirting St. James’s Park, was for most of them a familiar one. Many had already visited Whitehall more than a half dozen times since Christmas, the third under King James, who had called for eighteen plays to be staged there this holiday season, ten of them by Shakespeare’s company. They took their places according to their status in the seats arranged on stepped scaffolds along three sides of the large hall, while the Lord Chamberlain, white staff in hand, ensured that no gate crashers were admitted nor anyone seated in an area above his or her proper station. King James himself sat centrally on a raised platform of state facing the stage, surrounded by his closest entourage, his every gesture scrutinized, rivaling the performers for the crowd’s attention.

  This evening’s entertainment was more eagerly anticipated than any play. They were gathered at the old Banqueting House to witness a dramatic form with which conventional tragedies and comedies now struggled to compete: a court masque. With their dazzling staging, elegant verse, gorgeous costumes, concert-quality music, and choreographed dancing—overseen by some of the most talented artists in the land—masques under the new king were beyond extravagant, costing an unbelievable sum of three thousand pounds or more for a single performance. To put that in perspective, it would cost the crown little more than a hundred pounds to stage all ten of the plays Shakespeare’s company performed at court this Christmas season.

  The actors in this evening’s masque, aside from a few professionals drawn from Shakespeare’s company, were prominent lords—and ladies too. The entertainment thus offered the added frisson of watching women perform, for while they were forbidden to appear on London’s public stages, where their parts were played by teenage boys, that restriction didn’t apply to court masques. Those lucky enough to be admitted to the Banqueting House saw young noblewomen perform their parts in breathtaking outfits designed by Inigo Jones, bedecked in jewels (one onlooker reported that “I think they hired and borrowed all the principal jewels and ropes of pearl both in court and city”). For many of these women, including those who had commemorative paintings done of them wearing these costumes, this chance to perform in public would be one of the highlights of their highly constrained lives.

  The building in which they performed was perhaps the only disappointment. Back in 1582, when the Duc d’Alençon had come courting, Queen Elizabeth ordered that a temporary Banqueting House be constructed in time for his reception. From a distance the large building, “a long square, 332 foot in measure about,” looked imposing, constructed of stone blocks with mortared joints. But as visitors approached they would have seen that a trompe l’oeil painting disguised what was actually a flimsy structure, built of great wooden masts forty feet high covered with painted canvas. As the years passed, Elizabeth saw no reason to waste money replacing it with something more permanent, and by the time that James succeeded her, the temporary frame that had stood for a quarter century was in disrepair.

  Shakespeare knew the old venue well and had played there fourteen months earlier on November 1, 1604, when his last Elizabethan tragedy, Othello, had had its court debut. Over the years he had performed often at Whitehall and would have recognized many of those in attendance. We can tell from the impact this masque had on his subsequent work that Shakespeare had secured for himself a place in the room that January evening. There probably wasn’t a better vantage point for measuring the chasm between the self-congratulatory political fantasy enacted in the masque and the troubled national mood outside the grounds of James’s palace. Insofar as most of his plays depict flawed rulers and their courts, he may have been as intent on observing the scene playing out before him as he w
as in viewing the masque itself.

  The new king hated the old building; it was one more vestige of the Tudor past to be swept away. A few months after this masque was staged James commanded that it be pulled down and a more permanent “strong and stately” stone edifice, befitting a Stuart dynasty, be built on the site. In the short term, while there was little he could do about its rotting frame, James could at least replace Elizabeth’s unfashionable painted ceiling. She favored a floral and fruit design; he had it re-covered with a more stylish image of “clouds in distemper.”

  King James was no less committed to repairing some of the political rot his predecessor had left behind, and this evening’s masque was part of that effort. Five years had passed since Queen Elizabeth had put to death her one-time favorite, the charismatic and rebellious Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex. His execution still rankled Essex’s devoted followers, and their further exclusion from power and patronage under James had left them bitter and alienated. Essex had left behind a young son, now fourteen, who bore his name and title, around whom they might rally. Essex’s militant followers had to be neutralized in order to forestall division within the kingdom. But James couldn’t simply restore them all to favor (as he had with the most prominent of them, the imprisoned Earl of Southampton), even if there were enough money, offices, and lands to do so, for that would unsettle the balance of favorites and factions at court. And he couldn’t imprison or purge them all either. That left one solution: binding enemies together through an arranged marriage. James would play the royal matchmaker, marrying off Essex’s son, now a ward of the state, to Frances Howard, the striking fifteen-year-old daughter of the powerful Earl of Suffolk, who had served on the commission that had sentenced Essex to death. That evening’s masque, intended to celebrate their union, doubled as an overt pitch for the political union of England and Scotland, a marriage of the two kingdoms that James eagerly sought and knew that a wary Parliament would be debating later that month.

  Though he was now the most experienced dramatist in the land, Shakespeare had not written the masque and, had he been invited to do so, had said no. It would have been a tempting offer. If he cared about visibility, prestige, or money, the rewards were great; the writer responsible for the masque earned more than eight times what a dramatist was typically paid for a single play. And on the creative side, in addition to the almost unlimited budget and the potential for special effects, the masque offered the very thing he had seemingly wished for in the opening Chorus to Henry the Fifth: “princes to act / And monarchs to behold the swelling scene” (1.0.3–4). That Shakespeare never accepted such a commission tells us as much about him as a writer as the plays he left behind. There was a price to be paid for writing masques, which were shamelessly sycophantic and propagandistic, compromises he didn’t care to make. He must have also recognized that it was an elite and evanescent art form that didn’t suit his interests or his talents. If this was a typical Jacobean masque, the evening’s entertainment devolved into serious drinking and feasting after the closing dance. By then, I suspect, Shakespeare was already back at his lodgings, doing what he had been doing well into the night for over fifteen years: writing.

  Or trying to. For the last few years, certainly since the beginning of the new regime, his playwriting wasn’t going as well as it once had. The extraordinary productivity that had marked his Elizabethan years, where writing three or even four plays in a year was not unusual, now seemed a thing of the past. His sonnets and narrative poems were behind him. So too were twenty-eight comedies, histories, and tragedies—though only five of these had been written since he had finished Hamlet at the turn of the century. Things had begun to look more promising with his first effort under the new king, Measure for Measure, finished by 1604, a darkly comic world of court, prison, convent, and brothel, starring an intellectual ruler who, like the new monarch, enjoyed stage-managing how things worked out. But another fallow period followed. In the three years since King James had come to the throne Shakespeare had written only one other play, Timon of Athens. With Timon he went back to something that he hadn’t tried since his earliest years in the theater: working in tandem with another writer. He coauthored this tragedy of a misanthrope—a play about extravagance and its embittering consequences in which the hero, if you can call him that, withdraws from the world and dies cursing—with the up-and-coming Thomas Middleton. It was a smart choice. Middleton, sixteen years younger than Shakespeare, was already a master of those satiric citizen comedies to which sophisticated audiences were flocking. But if the version of that play published in the 1623 folio is any indication, their collaborative effort remained unpolished and perhaps unfinished. Young rivals may well have begun whispering that Shakespeare was all but spent, a holdover from an earlier era whose no longer fashionable plays continued to be recycled at the Globe Theatre and at court.

  One of the challenges of writing about so pivotal a year in Shakespeare’s creative life is that he kept such a low profile, preferring to remain in the shadows. Unlike most other leading dramatists at this time, he chose not to write civic or courtly entertainments in praise of the king. And unlike other authors, he even demurred when it came to writing a dedicatory poem (the equivalent of modern-day blurbing) in praise of a fellow writer’s play. The only act of literary fellowship on Shakespeare’s part that we know of during these Jacobean years occurred after-hours, at the famous Tabard Inn in Southwark, favored by actors. There, Shakespeare had “cut” or carved his name on the paneling, alongside those of Ben Jonson, his fellow actors Richard Burbage and Laurence Fletcher, and—according to the anonymous writer who recorded this in the 1640s—“the rest of their roistering associates in King James’s time.”

  His published work was certainly less visible. In 1600, a theatergoer wishing to purchase some of his recently published plays could have chosen from the two parts of Henry the Fourth, Richard the Second, Richard the Third, Romeo and Juliet, Henry the Fifth, The Second Part of Henry the Sixth and The Third Part of Henry the Sixth, Love’s Labour’s Lost, The Merchant of Venice, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Much Ado About Nothing. His plays were everywhere. But a return visit to London’s bookstalls six years later would have turned up only two other late Elizabethan works, The Merry Wives of Windsor and Hamlet. In 1606, for the first time since his writing began to be published in 1593, not even a poem or a reissue of an earlier play appeared in print. That could in part be explained by his diminished output, but it was also the result of a decision by Shakespeare or his playing company to hold back from publishing his more recent work—why, we don’t know.

  And he was no longer so familiar a face on the Globe’s stage either. Those long accustomed to watching Shakespeare act every day would not be seeing him so often. While records are scarce, there are none that identify him performing at the Globe after 1603 (the last time his name appears on a play’s cast list), and the omission of his name from a 1607 fee list of “players of interludes” that identifies the other leading members of his company further suggests that by 1606 he was no longer acting on a daily basis, though he would have been available to perform when needed, and would have joined his company for performances at court.

  There’s no question, though, that his name was by now a byword for literary accomplishment. A little-known letter that survives from this time, written by a young English gentleman, helps confirm this. John Poulett posted his letter from Paris in late 1605; in it, the nineteen-year-old describes to his uncle what he has been up to in his foreign travels. Showing off a bit, the former Oxford student slips into the rhythms of blank verse: “We for to pass the winter’s bitter cold, so with a javelin chase the bristled boar, and sometimes, mounted on a foaming curtal, do rend the woods to hound the furious bull.” Poulett then explains that “the danger in these sports makes them seem good; men seem in them as actors in a tragedy, and methinks I could play Shakespeare in relating.” It’s a wonderfully revealing remark: a young man feels the drama of the hunt and in the
act of describing it excitedly imagines that he could “play Shakespeare,” that is to say, reach the very heights of dramatic storytelling. But like many compliments this one was double-edged, for the style young Poulett emulates is that of early Elizabethan Shakespeare, the poet of Venus and Adonis rather than the grittier one of Troilus and Cressida or Measure for Measure.

  The year 1606 would turn out to be a good one for Shakespeare and an awful one for England. That was no coincidence. Shakespeare, so gifted at understanding what preoccupied and troubled his audiences, was lucky to have begun his career during the increasingly fractured years of Elizabeth’s decline. His early work had delved especially deeply into the political and religious cracks that were exposed as a century of Tudor rule neared its end. But it would take some time for him to speak with the same acuity about the cultural fault lines emerging under the new and unfamiliar reign of the King of Scots. In the months leading up to that evening at the Banqueting House, their contours were already becoming more sharply defined for him, and his steadier grasp of the forces shaping this extraordinary time would result in one of his most inspired years.

  Shakespeare turned forty-two in 1606. In an era in which people lived on the average until their midforties, Shakespeare knew that he couldn’t count on too many years left to write. In such plague-ridden times, who could? Though his parents had lived unusually long lives, only one of his four sisters survived childhood, and only one of his three brothers made it to his forties. As a shareholder in a profitable playing company and part owner of the Globe Theatre, Shakespeare had amassed a small fortune, most of it invested in real estate, including a leasehold interest in land on the outskirts of Stratford-upon-Avon that he had obtained for £440 the previous July, an outlay equal to what a Jacobean schoolmaster earned over twenty years. He had more than enough money to retire comfortably to Stratford, where his wife, Anne, who had recently turned fifty, lived with their two unmarried daughters, Susanna and Judith. A decade had passed since the death of their only son, Hamnet, and Anne was now beyond childbearing years. Shakespeare’s fortune would have to be passed on to the husbands that his daughters might someday marry; his recently acquired status as a gentleman would die with him, and the sword that went with that rank given away. But in 1606 Shakespeare wasn’t ready to retire or rest on his past achievements; he still had more to say and hadn’t yet tired of the grueling writing regimen that had defined his life since his midtwenties.