The Year of Lear Page 2
Not long after witnessing that masque, Shakespeare finished King Lear, which he had been working on through the autumn. Before the year was out he would also write two more plays, Macbeth and Antony and Cleopatra. He had his own ideas about union, both marital and political, and about much else that was ignored or suppressed in the glittering display at court that evening, ideas that would shape these three tragedies. This book is about what Shakespeare wrote in 1606 and what was taking place at that fraught time, for the two are so closely intertwined that it’s difficult to grasp the meaning of one without the other.
Though it would have been impossible to tell from reading a contemporary account of that evening’s masque, exactly two months earlier most of those who gathered to see it were almost killed in what we would now call a terrorist attack, one that had been prevented at the last moment. A group of disaffected Catholic gentry had plotted to blow up Parliament, kill the king and the country’s entire political leadership, then roll back the Protestant Reformation begun under Henry VIII. Thousands of other Londoners would also have died in the explosion and ensuing fires. Remembered today as the Fifth of November, the Gunpowder Plot, exposed in late 1605, reverberated powerfully through the ensuing winter and spring, when the captured plotters were tortured, tried, and then publicly executed. It’s less well known that after the plot was thwarted there was a short-lived armed uprising in Warwickshire. The plot and its aftermath in the Midlands touched close to home for Shakespeare; some of his neighbors were implicated, for his hometown abutted the safe houses where the plotters met, weapons for the intended uprising were stored, and a supply of religious items for the hoped-for restoration of Catholicism were hidden.
Because nothing actually happened on that fateful day—only the plotters would suffer and die—the meaning of the Fifth of November turned on competing narratives, especially on how well the authorities could succeed in getting the nation to imagine the tragic death of a monarch. Shakespeare, who understood such plotting as well as anyone, had been inviting audiences to imagine the deaths of kings and queens for his entire career, and would do so again this year. Shakespeare also grasped the dramatic potential of popular reaction to the plot: a maelstrom of fear, horror, a desire for revenge, an all-too-brief sense of national unity, and a struggle to understand where such evil came from. This too profoundly shaped the tragedies he was now writing.
The fallout from the Gunpowder Plot led to a heightened anxiety over Jesuitical equivocation (a recent term, picked up by Shakespeare, that more than any other defined the hysteria of the moment), as well as to anti-Catholic legislation that included the scrutiny of everyone’s mandatory church attendance. The old Elizabethan compromise in which the government agreed not to “make windows into men’s souls” was now a thing of the past. The search for “recusants”—those who steadfastly maintained their Catholic faith and refused to participate in Protestant worship—extended to every shire in the land and by Easter would implicate the godparents of Shakespeare’s twins as well as his elder daughter. A loyalty oath instituted this year in response to the perceived Catholic threat would create a stir that angered the Vatican and marked a fundamental realignment of political and religious authority. And in a year in which actors were jailed for seditious drama, Parliament enacted legislation against the players for using profanity onstage, a measure that would have an immediate impact on what Shakespeare would write, while requiring that every play that he had already written be retroactively sanitized.
Even as the buried shards of religious division once again rose to the surface, so too did political ones when King James again pressed Parliament to secure a Union of Scotland and England. To James, this outcome had seemed inevitable: as the King of Scots who had inherited the English throne, he embodied in his own person the union of the kingdoms. But for his subjects on both sides of the border the increasingly bitter debate over Union raised troubling questions about what it really meant to be English or Scottish, or for that matter British, creating identity crises where none had been before. This too was grist for Shakespeare’s mill. Under Elizabeth he had written English history plays; in 1606 under James he would shift his attention to British ones in both King Lear and Macbeth. It was also a year in which King James called for and oversaw a second Hampton Court Conference to resolve disagreements with his Scottish clergy over the absolute authority of kings.
Much more would take place during these hectic months. Nearly eclipsed in all this was a Star Chamber investigation of faked demonic possession. England also experienced the first state visit of a foreign monarch to its shores in living memory. And in a year that witnessed a growing disaffection with their Scottish king and an increasing nostalgia for the late Queen Bess, Londoners would see their old queen dug up from her grave in Westminster Abbey, her bones dumped on top of those of her half sister, Queen Mary, and a new monument raised over them. It was also the year in which the Union Jack was designed and first flown, as well as a signal one in the history of the British Empire, for in December 1606 ships sailed from London’s docks to found the first permanent colony in America, at Jamestown. If all this were not enough, plague would return to London, the worst outbreak since the terrible devastation of 1603, arriving in late July and lasting until late autumn, striking especially close to home for Shakespeare himself.
At many points during 1606, English men and women must have felt overwhelmed. In an age in which there were as yet no newspapers (let alone radio, movies, television, or an Internet), the theater was the one place where rich and poor could congregate and see enacted, through old or made-up stories, a refracted image of their own desires and anxieties. The stories Shakespeare told this year enabled his playing company to rise to this challenge. There’s a paradox, then, at the heart of a book about so remarkable a year in Shakespeare’s creative life: even as the playwright himself recedes from view, the ways in which his writing was able to give, in Hamlet’s words, “the very age and body of the time his form and pressure” (3.2.23–24) would never be greater, though it would test the resources of a dramatist as gifted as Shakespeare to make sense of a year like 1606.
Another challenge faced in writing about this time in Shakespeare’s life is that we still tend to think of him as an “Elizabethan” writer, even though the last decade of his career was spent as a King’s Man under James. I’m as guilty as anyone of having done so. It’s a difficult habit to break; try imagining a version of Shakespeare in Love that ends with a cameo appearance of the Scottish king rather than the Virgin Queen. His contemporaries certainly didn’t think of him in this way. When Ben Jonson celebrated his rival’s achievements in 1623 in his poem “To the Memory of . . . Shakespeare,” he recalled how his plays had pleased both monarchs:
Sweet swan of Avon! What a sight it were
To see thee in our waters yet appear,
And make those flights upon the banks of Thames,
That so did take Eliza, and our James!
(5.642)
It hasn’t helped that modern historians, novelists, and filmmakers have so enthusiastically embraced the Tudors while mostly spurning King James, despite his reign’s consequential legacy. Whether you admire James as Britain’s most intellectual ruler or dismiss him (as Anthony Weldon did in 1650) as “the wisest fool in Christendom,” it’s hard to understand what a Jacobean Shakespeare was writing without a deeper knowledge of what life was like during James’s reign. Compounding this problem, cradle-to-grave biographers have always tilted heavily toward the Elizabethan Shakespeare, given their interest in his formative experiences. Open any of their books to what Shakespeare was doing after James came to the throne in 1603 and there usually aren’t many pages left to read. What the Jacobean Shakespeare was experiencing at one of the pinnacles of his writing career—which ought to matter hugely to those who study his life—is given short shrift, and biographers who have paused at 1606 often spend these pages fruitlessly speculating (based on gossip that circulated decades later) whethe
r Shakespeare carried on an illicit affair with a handsome innkeeper’s wife in Oxford.
Having spent much of the past quarter century researching and writing about Shakespeare’s life, I’m painfully aware that many of the things I’d like to know about him—what his political views and religious beliefs were; whom he loved; how good a father, husband, and friend he was; what he did with his time when he wasn’t writing or acting—cannot be recovered. The possibility of writing that sort of biography died by the late seventeenth century, when the last of those who knew Shakespeare personally took their stories and secrets with them to the grave. Modern biographers who nonetheless speculate on such matters, or in the absence of archival evidence read the plays and poems as transparently autobiographical, inevitably end up revealing more about themselves than they do about Shakespeare.
While Shakespeare’s emotional life in 1606 may be lost to us, by looking at what he wrote in dialogue in these times we can begin to recover what he was thinking about and wrestling with while composing these three plays. We can also track his responses to what he was reading, whether it was an old play called King Leir, Samuel Harsnett’s exposé of demonic possession, or one of his recent favorites, Plutarch’s Life of Antony. However much Shakespeare may have preferred to remain in the shadows, he can be glimpsed in the glare of what was going on around him. He can be spotted this year in his capacity as a King’s Man who appeared with his fellow players before the king at Greenwich, Hampton Court, and Whitehall, as well as in royal processions in his official role as a Groom of the Chamber—opportunities that offered him a privileged view of the court.
To that end, the pages that follow offer a slice of a writer’s life, one that I hope will bring his world, and by extension his works, to life. The very richness of that cultural moment both impedes and enables this effort: to draw Shakespeare out of the shadows demands considerable effort and imaginative labor, for we need to travel back in time four centuries and immerse ourselves in the hopes and fears of that moment; but the rewards are no less great, for that richness, in turn, allows us to see afresh the tragedies he forged in this tumultuous year.
1
THE KING’S MAN
In the summer of 1605 John Wright began selling copies of a newly printed play called The True Chronicle History of King Leir, which had first been staged around 1590. Not long after, William Shakespeare, who lived just a short stroll from Wright’s bookshop, picked up a copy. A few years earlier Shakespeare had moved from his lodgings in Southwark, near the Globe Theatre, to quarters in a quieter and more upscale neighborhood, on the corner of Silver and Muggle Streets in Cripplegate. His landlords were Christopher and Marie Mountjoy, Huguenot artisans who made their living supplying fashionable headwear for court ladies. The walk from his new lodgings to Wright’s bookshop took just a few minutes. Crossing Silver Street, Shakespeare would have passed his parish church, St. Olave’s, before heading south down Noble Street toward St. Paul’s Cathedral, passing Goldsmiths’ Hall as Noble Street turned into Foster Lane, emerging onto the busy thoroughfare of Cheapside. With Cheapside Cross to his left, and St. Paul’s and beyond it the Thames directly ahead, Shakespeare would have turned west, passing St. Martin’s Lane and then the Shambles, home to London’s butchers. Christ Church was now in sight, and just beyond it Wright’s shop, abutting Newgate market.
The advertisement on the title page of King Leir—“As it hath been divers and sundry times lately acted”—made it sound like a recent play, an impression reinforced by the quiet omission of who wrote and performed it. But Shakespeare knew that it was an old Queen’s Men’s play and probably also knew (though we don’t) who had written it. The Queen’s Men were a hand-picked all-star troupe formed under royal patronage back in 1583. For the next decade they were England’s premier company, touring widely, known for their politics (patriotic and Protestant), their didacticism, and their star comedian, Richard Tarleton. If he wasn’t busy acting that day in another playhouse, Shakespeare may have been part of the crowd that paid a total of thirty-eight shillings to see the Queen’s Men stage King Leir at the Rose Theatre in Southwark on April 6, 1594 (in coproduction with Lord Sussex’s Men), or part of the smaller gathering two days later for a performance that earned twenty-six shillings—solid though not spectacular box office receipts.
Looking back, Shakespeare would have recognized that their appearance at the Rose marked the beginning of the end for the Queen’s Men, who the following month sold off copies of some of their valuable play-scripts to London’s publishers, then took to the road, spending the next nine years touring the provinces until, upon the death of Queen Elizabeth, they disbanded. That year also marked the ascendancy of the company Shakespeare had recently joined as a founding shareholder, the Chamberlain’s Men, who soon succeeded the Queen’s Men as the leading players in the land, a position they had held ever since. King Leir had been among the plays the cash-poor Queen’s Men had unloaded in 1594, and Edward White, who bought it, quickly entered his right to publish the play in the Stationers’ Register. But for some reason, perhaps sensing that the play had little prospect of selling well, White never published it. Over a decade would pass before his former apprentice John Wright obtained the rights from him and the play finally appeared in print.
One of the many towns where the Queen’s Men had performed in the late 1580s had been Stratford-upon-Avon. In the absence of any information about what Shakespeare was doing in his early twenties, biographers have speculated that he may have begun his theatrical career with this company, perhaps even filling in for one of the Queen’s Men, William Knell, killed in a fight shortly before the troupe was to perform in Stratford in 1587. It’s an appealing story—something, after all, must have brought him from Stratford to London—but there’s no evidence to substantiate it, nor is there any that would confirm that Shakespeare briefly acted with or wrote for this veteran company. But what is certain from the evidence of his later work is that he was deeply familiar with their repertory.
Scholars can identify with confidence fewer than a dozen plays, mostly histories, performed by the Queen’s Men during their twenty-year run. Several of their titles will sound familiar: The True Tragedy of Richard the Third, The Troublesome Reign of King John, and The Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth. A defining feature of Shakespeare’s art was his penchant for overhauling the plots of old plays rather than inventing his own, and no rival company provided more raw material for Shakespeare than the Queen’s Men. He absorbed and reworked their repertory in a series of history plays from the mid to late 1590s now familiar to us as Richard the Third, King John, the two parts of Henry the Fourth, and Henry the Fifth. Shakespeare’s attitude to the Queen’s Men was surely ambivalent. Their plays, which likely thrilled and inspired him in his formative years as playgoer, actor, and then playwright, had stuck with him. Yet he also would have recognized that their jingoistic repertory had become increasingly out of step with the theatrical and political times.
Shakespeare was a sharp-eyed critic of other writers’ plays and his take on the Queen’s Men’s repertory could be unforgiving, rendering these sturdy old plays hopelessly anachronistic. For a glimpse of this we need only recall his parody of an unforgettably bad couplet from their True Tragedy of Richard the Third: “The screeking raven sits croaking for revenge / Whole herds of beasts come bellowing for revenge.” These lines from the old play, whose awfulness had clearly stuck with Shakespeare, resurface years later when Hamlet, interrupting the play-within-the-play and urging on the strolling players, deliberately mangles the couplet: “Come, ‘the croaking raven doth bellow for revenge’” (3.2.251–52). At best this was a double-edged tribute, reminding playgoers of the kind of old-fashioned revenge drama they once enjoyed while showing how a naturalistic revenge play such as Hamlet had supplanted the dated and over-the-top style of the Queen’s Men.
Six years had passed since Shakespeare had last refashioned a Queen’s Men’s play in Henry the Fifth, a brilliant remake of th
eir popular The Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth. If anything, the pace of change in those intervening years, especially the last three, had wildly accelerated. The Elizabethan world that had produced King Leir and in which the play had once thrived, like the playing company that had performed it, was no longer. But these years had enabled Shakespeare, as part owner of his playhouse and shareholder in his acting company, to prosper financially. When Wright began selling copies of King Leir in July of 1605 (two months usually lapsed between the time a book was registered and sold, and he had registered it in May), Shakespeare was likely away in Stratford-upon-Avon to close on a large real estate deal, so he couldn’t have picked up a copy until his return to London.
King Leir, like so many histories and tragedies of the 1590s, was fixated on royal succession. These plays spoke to a nation fearful of foreign rule or the outbreak of civil war after its childless queen’s death. For a decade that stretched from Titus Andronicus and his Henry the Sixth trilogy through Richard the Third, King John, Richard the Second, the two parts of Henry the Fourth, Henry the Fifth, Julius Caesar, and Hamlet, Shakespeare displayed time and again his mastery of this genre, exploring in play after play who had the cunning, wit, legitimacy, and ambition to seize and hold power. Those concerns peaked in the opening years of the seventeenth century as the queen approached her end, but vanished after 1603, when King James VI of Scotland, who was married and had two sons and a daughter, succeeded peacefully to the throne of England. There would be no Spanish invasion and no return to the kind of civil strife that had torn the land apart in the late fifteenth century. In an unusually explicit allusion to the political moment, Shakespeare writes in Sonnet 107 shortly after James’s accession that: