Book review: 1606 William Shakespeare and the Year of Lear

NOTHING will come of nothing, King Lear famously declares as he considers dividing his kingdom between his daughters commensurate with their expressions of love for him.

James Shapiro

Faber & Faber, €26

The pleasure of James Shapiro’s deeply researched latest work on Shakespeare is the manner in which we find that the play itself did not come of nothing.

We get a real — at times sensory — understanding of the culture and political tumult of the year 1606 and how this came to be echoed in Shakespeare’s work.

One of the most fascinating parts of the book is a textual analysis of how King Lear was based on an earlier play called King Leir which was staged in 1590 and published by a bookshop close to Shakespeare’s home in 1605.

Shapiro says that the names of the title character and the three daughters were kept the same but given new spellings.

For instance, Cordella became Cordelia. In the first folio of Shakespeare’s collected works, Lear’s name in the script twice appears under the spelling, Leir, as the bard was working from the original.

It is fascinating to see King Lear not just as the phenomenal work of genius it is but also as an immense reworking of what apparently was a relatively ordinary play by a then unknown writer.

In Shapiro’s hands there is never anything dry about this kind of textual analysis.

And the writing is even more potent when it links the language and ideas of the play to what is happening in and around the rule of King James and the complex politics of dividing royal kingdoms.

While the title refers to 1606 as Lear’s year, the book details two other works he wrote in the same year, namely Macbeth and Antony and Cleopatra.

A large part of the book concerns The Gunpowder plot, the extraordinary planned act of terrorism which shook British society to its core even though it was foiled before there was a single explosion at Westminster.

The idea of evil stalking the land in 1606 was to come to visceral life in Shakespeare’s Macbeth.

As if the times were not extraordinary enough there was also plague in England, something that oozes through the blasted, apocalyptic landscapes of Lear and Macbeth.

Shapiro’s previous book, 1599, published 11 years ago, which looks at the year the Tudors crushed an Irish rebellion, is a better read from an Irish point of view as it brings a deep analysis of how what was happening in Ireland shaped the plays, including Henry V.

Because Shakespeare’s character and biography are shadowy, fans and scholars could throw up their hands in an ‘if only’ sense of dejection.

That is where Shapiro rolls up his sleeves and says we have the plays, we have the literature of this time and before it, and we have many histories of the time in which Shakespeare lived.

The prologue will set the pulse of any theatre-lover racing as it sets the scene for a new play going on in London on January 5, 1606, and the sense of time and place is set most atmospherically and convincingly in so far as we might imagine it.

And right through to the epilogue, Shapiro has interesting things to say.

For instance, the late footnote that the actual end of King Lear was so devastatingly sad that for a century and a half from 1681 to 1838 it was performed from an altered script with an ending so sanitised that Lear lives at the end and not alone does Cordelia survive a murderous attack but she goes on to marry Edgar and rule the kingdom.

Thankfully, there were enough scholars dedicated to Shakespeare to ensure we now have a sense of the work and of the man that brings us closer to the truth.