Published
2015.
“Faith, here’s an equivocator, that could swear
in both the scales against either scale, who committed treason enough for God’s
sake, yet could not equivocate to heaven.”
In Macbeth,
“1606: William Shakespeare and the Year of Lear” by James Shapiro
In the last
2 years I've been thinking a lot about Shakespeare. One of the things that
always bothers me is this: "If all of Shakespeare's works and words somehow
disappeared from the Earth today (due to a Bard-targeting virus or something),
it would be as if his works still existed."
I'll try not
to be snarky, but please read this in your nicest teacher's voice.
The answer
to the conundrum is yes. He'd still exist because his words exist in everything
we have.
By contrast, if Nicholas Sparks were to
disappear tomorrow, along with all his books and the movies directly made from
his books, future generations would never know he existed. His influence on
humanity, culture, and history has been, let's say, minimal.
On the other hand, Shakespeare's works could be
reconstructed from the evidence left behind.
Meloves a good Gedankenexperiment. Imagine we could identify authors so
influential that if every copy of their work disappeared from the face of the
earth, their literary contributions would remain essentially intact because
their innovations and ideas were reflected a hundred times over in other lesser
works from other writers. Because my mind is on Shakespeare lately, he's the
classic example to think of.
Get rid of "Hamlet",
"Lear", "Macbeth" and the stories have still been told and
retold over and over. The characters are never quite the same, the language
never quite as eloquent, specific plot points evolve over time, but the essence
of the tale is embedded in our literary culture so thoroughly that the loss of
the original at this point would leave behind a perfect impression like a fossilized
shell immortalized in stone.
Out of curiosity I searched IMDB to know
whether there were any Shakespeare movies in the making as we speak. I was
quite surprised with the result:
Shapiro’s book belongs to this trend of
“re-writing” Shakespeare, at least of our perception of him.
Shapiro’s “theories” as usual abound. I must say,
however, the only theory I found rather far-fetched was the one where Lear is
based on the Leir play. There are other key moments when a connection between
an "historical event" and Shakespeare's work is satisfying but rather
unlikely unfortunately.
I’ve read somewhere that some authors take it
for granted that Shakespeare wrote Lear after reading Leir, but it's entirely
possible, as other editors have suggested, that the idea was gestating as early
as 1603, and took Holinshed as its primary source. Some have even suggested,
based on close reading and verbal resonances, that it was actually Leir that
borrowed from Lear. I've read too many theories spun out of whole cloth to be
entirely comfortable with verbal resonances alone as evidence. It's because of
this that I prefer to take as literal an approach as possible rather than take
as true a historical claim based upon suggestions that could be interpreted in
more than one way.
We do not know too much that is definite about
Shakespeare, and I often think those who try to provide more "definite information"
rely as much upon their imagination as upon indubitable evidence, not to
mention a willing suspension of disbelief. Sometime it's not easy for readers
of Shapiro's book to determine when assumption becomes assertion.
I really don't want to be a spoilsport. As a
scholastic approach it's highly readable. It enhanced and enriched, in many
ways, my appreciation of Lear and Macbeth. Forget about Fassbender's movie. If after reading Shapiro's take on "Macbeth" (“his take on
the origins of the word “equivocation” is quite masterful: it’s a whole new
world of “equivocation”, and the disturbing concept of “the fiend that lies
like truth”), "Lear" and "Antony and Cleopatra" you're not
inspired to read this three great plays again and thereby to liberate their
author from the chains of speculative biography, Shapiro’s valiant attempt to
re-create that mysterious year will not have been justified. Shapiro’s take on
the time in the reign of King James I is something worth reading, pulling us in
with a fresh perspective on Shakespeare’s works that has rarely, if ever, been
considered before. Greenblatt’s “Hamlet in Purgatory” comes a close second.
Shapiro chose to make it more personal, while Greenblatt went for the playwright's
dramas, and drew larger cultural concerns over them, rather than presuming
personal influence.
NB: Incidentally, for those of you more in tune
with what’s happening in the world of Shakespeareana in this day and age now, the chapter exploring the link between “equivocation” and “Macbeth” is not
something really new when it comes to Shapiro. In 2012 he did a 3 episode TV Series at the BBC where one of the shows was entitled “equivocation”. This series,
all by itself, is a “must”, namely because it’s easy to make a comparison
between the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods in terms of the Shakespeare plays.
1606 is commonly regarded as a pivot year “connecting” this change in
Shakespeare.
