Another Year in the Life of Shakespeare

This book is the successor to Shapiro’s highly acclaimed 1599, published ten years ago and welcomed by Jonathan Bate as ‘one of the few genuinely original biographies of Shakespeare’. Concentrating on a single year was certainly an innovation, but there was nothing original about the methods Shapiro employed. In his Shakespeare’s Lives, Samuel Schoenbaum identified the Victorian biographer Charles Knight as the first person properly to ‘associate Shakespeare with the circumstances around him’ and thus triumph over ‘the limitations of his data’. What this method chiefly means, in Shapiro’s case, is making historical background stand in for a biographical foreground which is absent because the information directly related to Shakespeare’s life is still so desperately meagre. How could it not be when not a single letter he wrote survives; almost all the fifty or so references to him by contemporaries which E. K. Chambers collected together are, from a biographical point of view, worthless; and the last biographically significant archival discovery dates back to 1910? What Shapiro tried to do was relate the major historical events of 1599 to what little we know of Shakespeare’s life, but that proved so difficult that it seemed to me his subtitle, ‘A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare’, became misleading, suggesting as it did that we actually know what was happening to the playwright in the spring, summer, autumn, or winter of that year.

The subtitle of Shapiro’s new book is more cautious and there appear throughout it confessions as to our complete ignorance of Shakespeare’s circumstances and feelings in situations where they would really matter. The claim Sir William Davenant was fond of making, which might well have seemed relevant to 1606, that his mother had an affair with Shakespeare of which he himself was the result, figures in most Shakespeare biographies, but is rightly ignored here; yet many of the old habits still persist, with liberal scatterings of ‘might’ or ‘would have’ and occasional recourse to the argument from silence. Thus we are told Shakespeare preferred ‘to remain in the shadows’, so that our ignorance of his life then becomes his own responsibility, and that the fact he never accepted a commission to write a masque ‘tells as much about him as a writer as the plays he left behind’, when we don’t know he was ever offered such a commission (although even if we did, the claim would still be an extraordinarily extravagant one). But the main problem Shapiro has is the old one of how to associate the historical events he wants to talk about with the details of Shakespeare’s life. It will not do to assert that ‘it would be hard to find many individuals in Jacobean England more intricately linked than he was to those whose lives were touched by the Gunpowder Plot’ when the chief proof he adduces is that many of the plotters also came from Warwickshire and when, despite several claims he makes to the contrary, there are no surviving reliable indications that Shakespeare was friendly with any of them (the case is different with Ben Jonson). The account he offers of the plot, which was of course discovered before 1606 began, and its aftermath, is well written, but what ties it down to its ostensible rationale is like thin and fraying string, so that the reader often feels that it would have been better if Shapiro had forgotten all about biography and Shakespeare and allowed his text to sail away from its moorings.

This seems to me true even though a major focus of this book is on making connections with Shakespeare’s writing rather than with his life. The plays are not particularly rich in topical allusions, or at least those which are now easy to recognize, but two of them which Shapiro assumes were first performed in this year, King Lear and Macbeth, do contain several well-known reminders of contemporary events. It has been...