James Shapiro, The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2015. Cloth, 367 pages.

Summary

The text, the writer, the audience, the context, the discursive field. Each scholar tends to privilege one or two elements and neglect the others. If you want examples of the “varieties of inconclusiveness” in King Lear and their presumed effects on an audience, turn to Stephen Booth's King Lear, Macbeth, Indef inition, and Tragedy. But if you want to glimpse the varieties of inconclusiveness afflicting Jacobean England and their putative influence on Shakespeare's plays, then you’ll want to peruse James Shapiro's The Year of Lear. Drawing on historical documents, biographies, histories, Shakespearean scholarship, and his own often very imaginative labors, Shapiro develops his argument that King Lear, Macbeth, and Antony and Cleopatra reflect the most important political and religious cleavages of the year 1606 and indeed of the Jacobean era itself. In his engaging prologue, for example, he avers that a court masque might mask but could not allay the problem of alienated nobles, who constituted but one instance of several emerging realignments in the kingdom. In the fourteen chapters that follow, he describes the social and political controversies that he argues troubled Shakespeare and his contemporaries.

Shapiro sees 1606 as a “cultural moment” in which the very definition of English identity was vehemently contested. Debates about the union of England and Scotland expressed deep uneasiness about political divisions and threats to national identity. Such cultural uneasiness is starkly re-inscribed by a play in which the king parcels out his domains and France invades his kingdom. As Shapiro suggests, the political unconscious in Lear (and in Macbeth, which he covers in chapter 10) functions not as a fantasy of social conflict resolved, but as a nightmare of social antagonisms turned apocalyptic. He reinforces this reading of Lear by deftly examining the differences between Shakespeare's play and his principal source, The True Chronicle History of King Leir. Shapiro contends that the addition of the secondary plot about Edgar, the complication of motivations and consequences, the reiteration of “nothing” and other terms and prefixes signaling negation, and the deaths of Lear and Cordelia all contribute to the disconcerting effect of King Lear, observations consistent with Booth's earlier more purely textual reading of the play; Shapiro, however, contextualizes his aperçus in the Jacobeans’ powerful dissatisfactions with their government's policies and their country's religious strife.