James Shapiro’s Shakespeare

by Kirk Woodward

[Kirk’s an insatiable reader even in ordinary times, but the enforced leisure (if that’s even the right term) of the pandemic shut-down has given him time and the inclination to do more reading.  And thank goodness for that lagniappe.  The Max Beerbohm article he contributed to Rick On Theater on 2 November was the consequence of his having just read a book (or several, I’m not sure) on the man. 

[Now comes another guest-post Kirk drew from his reading.  He just finished four books by Shakespeare scholar James Shapiro and he’s composed a sort of book review of three Shakespeare volumes and one on the Passion Play of Oberammergau.  As you’ll see, Shapiro takes uncommon approaches to his Shakespeare studies; combined with Kirk’s own habitually unexpected perspective, “James Shapiro’s Shakespeare” will be a most interesting read, whether you’re a Bardolater or not.] 

Books of James Shapiro Discussed Below:

Oberammergau. Vintage Books, 2000.

A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare. HarperCollins, 2005.

Contested Will. Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 2010.

The Year of Lear. Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 2015.

 *  *  *  *

The plays and life of William Shakespeare (1565-1616) are inexhaustible subjects, his plays because they are so numerous and so rich, his life because so little is known about it. One person who has done a great deal to close the gap between the two is the writer James Shapiro (b. 1955), who is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University.

I first became aware of Shapiro’s books inadvertently. Killing time while someone was completing house repairs, I glanced at a library shelf and saw a book called Oberammergau, aptly described as “The troubling story of the world’s most famous passion play.” I had no idea I owned this book and no idea where it came from.

Its subject is the famous play based on the New Testament’s gospel accounts which has been performed in the small town of Oberammergau, in Bavaria, Germany, roughly every decade for the last four centuries or so. Half the town’s citizens perform in the play, which was supposedly first created as a response to the plague, and by all accounts it can be quite stirring.

It has also been, throughout its history, horribly anti-Semitic, and the struggle to eliminate or at least mitigate those elements in the play is the subject of Shapiro’s book. He does a fine job of reporting, and he puts his finger on what seems to me to be the center of the problem it discusses:

For all the ecumenical attention to a shared spiritual heritage, the play forces Jews and Christians to face the painful fact that they read differently, and that a single version of the founding story of Christianity cannot be comfortably shared.

However true this may or may not be, and whether or not it is the last word on the subject, I was impressed by Shapiro’s thoughtfulness and his ability to put himself in many other people’s shoes. So I was delighted to have read the book.

Then, to my further surprise, I found another book by Shapiro on my shelves that I did not remember reading, much less owning, although since there is a bit of underlining in it I may have. That book is A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare. Shapiro begins by making it clear that “we don’t know very much about what kind of friend or lover or person Shakespeare was.”

I can’t report what Shakespeare ate or drank or how he dressed, but I can establish some of the things he did this year [1599] that were crucial to his career, what he read and wrote, which actors and playwrights he worked with, and what was going on around him that fueled his imagination. . . . I hope to capture some of the unpredictable and contingent nature of daily life too often flattened out in historical and biographical works of greater sweep. . . . I end up focusing more on things that can be dated, such as political and literary events, rather than on more gradual and less perceptible historical shifts – though because Shakespeare’s plays are remarkably alert to many of these, I do my best to attend to them as well.

And he sensibly proposes to avoid “awkwardly littering the pages that follow with one hedge after another – ‘perhaps,’ ‘maybe,’ ‘it’s most likely,’ ‘probably,’ or the most desperate of them all, ‘surely . . . .’

And then we’re off, on the most interesting and exciting presentation of Shakespeare’s life that I’ve read, matched only in my reading by his follow-up book The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606.

The choices of 1599 and 1606 are not arbitrary. Although scholars differ on estimated dates for Shakespeare’s plays, Shapiro follows substantial scholarly opinion that 1599 saw the writing and/or first performances of Henry the Fifth, Julius Caesar, As You Like It, and Hamlet.

1606, in its turn, saw the advents of King Lear, Macbeth, and Antony and Cleopatra. It makes sense, as Shapiro tells the story, that these seven masterpieces arise in a period of notable, important, and often deeply upsetting events in the history of England and its neighbors Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. It was certainly a dramatic time.

1599 was the year in which Queen Elizabeth (1533-1603; reigned 1558-1603) tried to crush a ferocious rebellion in Ireland by sending there a reluctant Duke of Essex and an equally reluctant ad hoc army, with appalling results. Although Shapiro does not make this comparison, the Irish situation was basically England’s Vietnam War of its time.

The health of the Queen, nearing the exhausted end of her reign amid suspense about who would succeed her, was also on everyone’s mind. And nobles and citizens alike thought it likely that Spain would try to invade the country again (everyone thought they knew exactly when), as it had tried to do in the famous Great Armada of 1588.

1606 was even grimmer, introduced as it was by aftershocks from the Gunpowder Plot to blow up the King, Parliament, and most of the rest of the government, a scheme uncovered in late 1605. Although the plot did not succeed, the resulting panicked activity brings to mind an equivalent mood in the United States following the destruction of the World Trade Center.

Partly as a result of the Gunpowder Plot, Elizabeth’s successor, James I (1566-1625; reigned in England, 1603-25), found himself trying to balance political and religious disputes. And in the second half of the year, the situation was complicated by a serious outbreak of the plague.

Shapiro effectively draws us into these stories with detailed and vivid descriptions of events, so it’s hard not to feel we’re learning what it must have been like to be there. I have seen comments on these two books complaining that Shapiro spends too much time describing events like the Gunpowder Plot, as though his only intention were to give an historical narrative. I find these complaints off the mark for two reasons.

In the first place, Shapiro handles beautifully the historian’s dilemma – to concentrate on the great sweep of history, or on the experiences of the “common people” of the time. Shapiro gives us in detail both the objective side of events and the way they may have looked “at ground level,” at the level they would have manifested themselves to obscure but real people who were affected by them.

In the second place, the fact is that in both these years we don’t know much about Shakespeare except that he was writing and at least to some extent acting. Shapiro makes it clear that he doesn’t want to try to describe “what Shakespeare might have been thinking,” and he usually avoids it.

However, he can and does describe where Shakespeare would likely have been at the time of those events, and the results are revelatory.

To give one example, people sometimes wonder where Shakespeare got the impressions of court life that are so convincingly embodied in his plays. Shapiro provides multiple answers. He demonstrates that London was essentially a fairly small place, with a population of around 200,000. Shakespeare would have known members of the nobility.

And Shapiro makes it clear that as a member of the Chamberlain’s Men, and later of the King’s Men, Shakespeare would have been inside the royal palaces many times, often in close proximity to the sovereign.

Shakespeare saw plenty of court life at first hand. He would have known other notables of the time as well – for example, he and his family were uncomfortably close to the social circles of the Gunpowder plotters, a dangerous relationship at a fraught time.

Shapiro is not a breezy writer, but I found both these books engrossing, and I will certainly reread them. Meanwhile, I have not yet mentioned an even more important aspect of his approach: the light that it throws on Shakespeare’s plays themselves.

Shapiro does not claim that Shakespeare wrote any of the plays under discussion as a direct response to historical events. Playwrights who did, like Ben Jonson (1572-1637), whose satirical play Eastward Ho (1605) was considered by the government too satirical, found themselves in jail. Elizabethan England was not a permissive state, and neither was Jacobean England.

However, Shapiro does demonstrate that Shakespeare was attuned to the social and political events and currents of his time, and that he let them flow through his plays, not explicitly taking sides, but letting immediate circumstances influence his work.

I will sketch a few of his insights. Shapiro writes of Henry the Fifth that

Conquest, national identity, and mixed origins – the obsessive concerns of Elizabethan Irish policy – run deep through Henry the Fifth and sharply distinguish it from previous English accounts of Henry’s reign.  . . . Battlefield deaths have not gentled the condition of the [non-noble] anonymous soldiers who fought alongside Henry. . . . In the end this fraternal goodwill doesn’t cut across social lines.

Shapiro sees within Julius Caesar an ongoing discussion of censorship, an issue continually faced by playwrights of his time. “No play by Shakespeare explores censorship and silencing so deeply . . .” as terrifyingly illustrated by the death of Cinna the poet, and by the executions ordered after Caesar’s death.

The trends affecting As You Like It, as Shapiro presents them, have to do with increasing sophistication in the demands on playwrights by the times and the audiences. “Flat” characters like those of The Comedy of Errors (1592-1593?), and routine romances, would no longer do. In As You Like It, Shakespeare parodies, mimics, and overturns stereotypes of romantic love and conventional comedy, even (in the person of Rosalind) calling the idea of love itself into question.

Of Hamlet Shapiro writes

What the Chamberlain’s men did to the wooden frame of The Theatre [they tore it down and moved it], Shakespeare did to the old play of Hamlet [a version now lost, apparently written around 1587]: he tore it from its familiar moorings, salvaged its structure, and reassembled something new. By wrenching this increasingly outdated revenge play into the present Shakespeare forced his contemporaries to experience what he felt and what his play registers so profoundly: the world had changed. Old certainties were gone, even if new ones had not yet taken hold . . . Hamlet [is] a play poised midway between a religious past and a secular future.

In King Lear Shapiro sees those two same elements in conflict, and also identifies resonances with the impact of the Gunpowder Plot, the succession to the royal throne, King James’ desire to make England, Ireland, and Scotland into one nation (“Britain”—of which Wales was already part), the plague, and heated attitudes toward witchcraft, including the King’s own opinions.

Macbeth continues those themes. In it Shakespeare carefully walks a thin line of discussion about Scottish kings (James I, of course, was a Scot like Macbeth), their weaknesses, and their murders – a very sensitive topic. And, finally,

Any play about Antony and Cleopatra would have been seen as a reflection on the past regime as well as on the present one; it would also measure how much had altered in the political landscape during those seven years.

To this brief survey of the seven plays discussed in Shapiro’s two books can be added numerous examples of Shakespeare’s involvement with his own theater company, the Chamberlain’s (and later King’s) Men, and their theater, the Globe. These details help Shapiro answer an often-heard question: did William Shakespeare from Stratford actually write the plays attributed to him?

Shapiro approaches this question, in his book Contested Will, from an interesting angle. Although he discusses the authorship question, and to my mind settles it as well as it can be settled with the available evidence, his primary focus in the book is on why the question of authorship came up in the first place.

Shakespeare had been dead for about 200 years before the discussion began in earnest, and Shapiro asks what changed during that time. What made it a subject that people began to have opinions on? Shapiro provides fascinating answers. For example, how many of these assumptions do you share?

• Shakespeare is virtually a divinity in the world of art. He is in a world by himself. No one and nothing comes close.
• Shakespeare from Stratford was too involved in the world of commerce and business to have been the great artist that we see in the plays.
• The plays show a refinement and an awareness of exalted social circles, professional specialties, and foreign countries that an ordinary citizen from Stratford could never have had.
• Aristocrats, on the other hand, are refined and aware people (particularly the candidate for authorship that an individual has in mind).
• If Shakespeare were well known at the time, his life should have been better documented.
• The world Shakespeare lived in was essentially the same as ours in the way people lived.
• Writers always reveal themselves in their writing. All writing is essentially autobiographical.
• Personal events (for example, his father’s and son’s deaths) must have affected him in the way we assume they did.
• Shakespeare’s plays show him to be a champion of social justice/rebellion/the common people/the nobles/Protestants/Catholics/whatever else is important to the biographer.
• Shakespeare was basically a person a great deal like me (whoever the “I” is that is speaking).

Shapiro demonstrates that none of these assumptions would have applied, or had a factual basis, in Elizabethan and Jacobean times, and that it is a mistake to assume that people in Shakespeare’s time lived under the same circumstances that we do. Yet all these assumptions are crucial to the authorship debate. Start to question them, and the debate loses its punch.

For me the clincher to the authorship issue is, as Shapiro expresses it:

Whoever wrote these plays had an intimate, firsthand knowledge of everyone in the [acting] company, and must have been a shrewd judge of each actor’s talents. . . . It’s impossible to picture any . . . aristocrats or courtiers working as more or less equals with a string of lowly playwrights, especially with [George] Wilkins, who kept an inn and may have run a brothel.

Whoever wrote Shakespeare’s plays knew a lot of things, but he had inside knowledge of his own theater. The same conclusion, incidentally, is also inevitable after reading On Producing Shakespeare by Ronald Watkins (The Citadel Press, 1965).

Ultimately, it seems to me, the authorship controversy is really just a game, one that anyone can join, which is the source of the fun – but that’s all.

I called this article “James Shapiro’s Shakespeare” because the temptation for each of us, and for the many, many people who have written biographies of Shakespeare, is to see him as a person very much like ourselves - whoever we are.

Shapiro does not do this. He tells us that there are only so many known facts about Shakespeare, and that we have no idea if the plays and sonnets reflect states of his mind and experience (nor do they in the works of many other artists of his time and of ours).

Nevertheless Shapiro has gone remarkably far into the world Shakespeare lived in, dealing with what we can know, and he strikes me as a reliable and valuable guide.

[I have a personal take on the "who really wrote Shakespeare’s plays" debate.  It’s irrelevant to Shapiro’s book Contested Will (I kinda like that title) or Kirk’s précis of Shapiro’s discussion.  In fact, not only do I recognize that Shapiro’s not entering into the debate about who wrote the plays, but I think, from what I glean, I agree with his notions of why the debate exists.

[I also see that, as Kirk pointed out when I expressed the thought that follows, the debate “matters” because Shapiro’s response “extends not just to the Shakespeare authorship controversy, but to conspiracy theories like the Kennedy assassination, and from there on to Trump’s ‘fake news,’ etc.”

[Such as it is, however, the authorship question is a matter of interest only to litterateurs.  We theater people look on the whole issue as both silly and meaningless.  We don’t care.  (Okay, yes—I’m generalizing.) 

[The only thing about the plays that’s important to theater folk is that they exist.  Whoever wrote them, they’re wonderful and we’re blessed just to have them to act in, watch, and read.  Period.  End of argument.  Nothing else matters and is all just masturbatory.  IMHO, naturally—but I think you’ll find that most actors, directors, and others in the business of show will agree.]