We are grateful to the Shakespeare Oxford Fellowship for giving us permission to reprint William Boyle’s review of Year of Lear that appeared in the Winter 2016 edition of the SOF Newsletter. Boyle is the creator of the Shakespeare Online Authorship Resources (SOAR) catalog. Boyle’s editor at the SOF Newsletter, Alex McNeil, is a co-editor of Contested Year. For more information about the SOF Newsletter, read “Winter 2016 . . . “. To gain access to the latest edition of the SOF Newsletter, join the SOF online. Thanks, again, to the SOF for Boyle’s analysis, below. (CY)
The Shapiro Method
The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606 (S&S, 2016)
by James Shapiro
Reviewed by William Boyle
Professor James Shapiro’s latest book, The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606, is his third in the last ten years on the Shakespeare authorship debate. Some in the mainstream Shakespeare studies community might argue that only the second of those three books, Contested Will, is concerned with the authorship debate. But those of us in the Oxfordian community know better, since the true agenda of both of his “Year in the Life” books (1599: A Year in the Life of Shakespeare, and The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606) is as much about the authorship of Shakespeare as Contested Will. In his latest book Shapiro posits that Shakespeare wrote three full-length plays (King Lear, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra ) back to back within one year (1606, and in that order, as his “Note on Dating the Plays” claims), all against the backdrop of the Gunpowder Plot of November 1605 and its aftermath.
While The Year of Lear is eminently readable and chock full of interesting information and anecdotes, it is also chock full of misleading information, misleading speculation, and outright error. The Oxfordian community has already responded to this in the just published ebook — Contested Year: Errors, Omissions and Unsupported Statements in James Shapiro’s The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606 — edited by Alexander Waugh, Mark Anderson, and Alex McNeil (available from Amazon for Kindle). Contested Year includes commentary on each chapter in The Year of Lear from seventeen prominent Oxfordian scholars.
Contested Year gives many examples of the simple mistakes that Shapiro makes (for example, getting names, dates, ranks and titles wrong), but it also delves deeply into the real subtext of his book, which is to establish Shakespeare as a writer who was in touch with his times and who was as much a Jacobean (i.e., alive and working after 1604) as an Elizabethan figure. The cornerstone of the latter argument can be found in how Shapiro decides to deal with the play King Leir, which preceded Shakespeare’s King Lear and about which there is universal agreement that Shakespeare based his King Lear upon it. This original play clearly dates back to the early 1590s (if not earlier) and, as such, presents many problems for how Shapiro wishes to present his argument. So the story he presents is that, since this original King Leir was first published in 1605, Shakespeare “must have” purchased a copy at that time (Shapiro has him walking down the street one day and going into a bookshop!), and within six months he wrote his King Lear. And as he was writing it, one of the most famous events in English history occurred, the Gunpowder Plot of November 1605.
In fact, the second most important part of The Year of Lear is the Gunpowder Plot, an infamous event remembered to this day (Guy Fawkes Night, the Fifth of November). It is well documented that the Jesuit doctrine of equivocation (generally defined as “the use of ambiguous language to conceal the truth or to avoid committing oneself”—a necessary, useful skill in a totalitarian state that hunts down Catholics) was front and center in this saga, as much on trial as the individuals who plotted to place gunpowder under the Parliament. Thomas Regnier addresses Shapiro’s chapter on equivocation and makes further observations on the flaws in Shapiro’s use of this historical fact, and how he overstates its supposed “newness” in 1606, when the doctrine had been around, and had been employed, for more than twenty years.
“Equivocation” is also the linchpin by which Shapiro (following in the footsteps of many before him) places the composition of Macbeth in 1606, immediately following King Lear. Shapiro relies on the famous Porter’s speech and its riffs on “equivocation,” and the notion that the Scottish King James was being flattered (and even alluded to) in a play about Scottish kings, notwithstanding its bloody alterations of succession. Finally, Shapiro assures his readers that Shakespeare was working on Antony and Cleopatra even as he finished Macbeth, which would place it also in 1606. He presents his A&C argument as Shakespeare belatedly finishing a sequel to Julius Caesar (which he dates to 1599). The sequel is “belated” because the Antony and Cleopatra love story could have been seen in the late 1590s as alluding to Queen Elizabeth and the fallen Earl of Essex, seemingly a dangerous move back then, but not so dangerous in 1606, in an “altered political landscape.” All of Shapiro’s dating evidence is tenuous, and is effectively rebutted in Contested Year.
But King Lear and the Gunpowder Plot lie at the center of The Year of Lear. In the longest chapter in Contested Year, Dr. Roger Stritmatter takes on these issues—the original composition dates of King Leir and King Lear, the doctrine of equivocation in history and in Shakespeare, and the Gunpowder Plot—and deftly demonstrates the serious flaws in Shapiro’s analysis. He also calls attention to a significant position Shapiro takes in his own telling of the Gunpowder Plot story:
Shapiro speaks of “selective official account[s],” of evidence being “suppressed or destroyed,” and of an artificial rebellion staged by the Cecil government “to advance the ends of the state, especially the suppression of England’s Catholics” (US/102; UK/119). Shapiro is actually supporting as plausible the idea, long familiar to independent historians like Francis Edwards, that Cecil’s Jacobean government staged a “conspiracy” to frame England’s Catholics, with historical implications that are still not yet fully understood. Shapiro’s daring is admirable, if not foolhardy. Apparently it does not occur to him that such speculations compromise his otherwise inflexible opposition to the “conspiracy theory” that the authorship of Shakespeare’s plays is in doubt. If the Jacobean state could pull off a gambit like this, using the Gunpowder Plot to frame its political enemies, and making a false story of the event stick for more than four hundred years, it should hardly be controversial, given the appropriate circumstances and personalities, to suggest that a similar “conspiracy” could have existed with respect to Shakespeare. Alas, a reader will search Shapiro’s book in vain for any self-awareness of such contradictions. (Contested Year, page 46)
In his comments, Stritmatter refers to the “Cecil government,” but Shapiro does not use Cecil’s name at all anywhere in his book (“Cecil” is not even in the index). Instead, Robert Cecil is always referred to as “Salisbury” (i.e., the Earl of Salisbury, a title bestowed upon him by King James in 1605). Even in his telling of Father Southwell’s capture and torture in 1592, Shapiro refers to “the future Earl of Salisbury” rather than saying “Robert Cecil.” This struck me as odd, as of an author paying strict attention to his agenda, which in this case is a “post-Elizabethan, post-1604 Shakespeare” … so, no “Robert Cecils” allowed here. Even on the few occasions when reference is made to the Essex Rebellion (another key historical event that occurred almost five years before the Gunpowder Plot, and involved Robert Cecil and Shakespeare), no reference is made at all to Cecil’s role in that event, nor to his more important secret role of bringing James to the throne. This too is odd, as Shapiro relates in some detail the Ben Jonson masque of January 5, 1606, celebrating the marriage of Essex’s son Robert (now the 3rd Earl of Essex) and Frances Howard as a form of peace reconciliation; the performance was followed the next evening by a second part of the masque (Barriers) in which actual Essex Rebellion survivors did battle with those who had subdued them in 1601, in what amounted to a symbolic restaging of the rebellion in terms of a battle over Truth, Virginity, Marriage and Sacrifice. I was intrigued, and wondered what the real subtext might have been in both masques. But Shapiro, who can be very selective in his telling of a story, had no further comment.
Still, beyond the numerous factual errors, dating problems and selective telling of history that plague The Year of Lear, there exists the larger issue of whether an authorship debate agenda is in play, and what that may portend for the future of the Shakespeare authorship debate. As luck would have it, amidst all the reviews of The Year of Lear published last fall, there was an extremely interesting interview with Shapiro (published online in The Daily Beast, December 13, 2015) in which novelist Arthur Phillips talks with Shapiro about the issue of Shakespeare biographies, and how can one ever get to “know Shakespeare.” It is worth exploring here to get an idea of what Shapiro is up to in this book and in his two earlier ones. Phillips prefaces his first question by stating:
I see the importance, and the great pleasure, of your work like this: for people who want to know something about Shakespeare himself, about who we was and what he was thinking, there had been until now two unsatisfactory methods. One is limited and by now probably exhausted; the other was flawed from the start. The limited method was the biographical method. We only have a small amount of verifiable detail about his life, and so we look to it to explain the man who wrote the place. We hope that we could understand the word better if we look hard at the biographical details…. The other way we have … of knowing him was, I think, doomed from the beginning, a method that doesn’t work on Shakespeare and doesn’t really work on any writer of fiction or drama, and that is looking for the truth of the writer in his plays.
Phillips gushingly continues with a remarkable explanation, and a great summing up, of what Shapiro has been doing with his three recent books:
I think you’ve forged an entirely new way of seeing him. It seems like in 1599 and now in The Year of Lear that you broke through these two flawed methods and found something new, a much more plausible way of understanding the man. The Shapiro method goes like this: in a given year in London everybody would’ve known and reacted to certain facts, to the talk of the town. Everyone knew about the plague numbers or the recent executions or the news from Ireland or the inconceivably evil and fast terrorist attack that was thwarted and we know, from good old biographical research, that Shakespeare was in a given place of the given time and would’ve known all this too, and then you can look at his [plays] that you know [were] written in that [same] year and say, “this is the material that was going into his head, this is what he was living with that year … , and this in turn is the material that was coming out of his quill…” (emphasis added).
“And happily,” Shapiro responds, “He didn’t make up his own stories. He’s always rewriting someone else’s story.”
Happily? What we now have is an overview of all the ins and outs and problems of Shakespeare studies within the Shakespeare authorship debate over decades, if not centuries. It is centered, of course, on what is “known,” and how do we “know” what we “know”?
The second part of the problem of “knowing Shakespeare” (“looking for the truth of the writer in his plays,” as Phillips puts it) has been the ground zero of the authorship debate from the beginning. Disagreement over this point has driven the debate since the nineteenth century, especially since the emergence of the Oxfordian thesis in 1920 and its re-emergence in the mid-1980s.
So introducing the notion of the “Shapiro Method” as the solution to this problem, and praising books like The Year of Lear (and 1599) as examples of it, is remarkable. What Phillips seems to be saying here (with Shapiro agreeing with him), is that the solution to a long-standing problem is here, and it works! All one has to do is analyze the documented history of a given year, and then lay it alongside a detailed analysis of a play “known” (and there’s the rub) to have been written in that same year (e.g., Lear, Macbeth, and Antony and Cleopatra). The result will then be some new understanding of Shakespeare.
Exactly how this is any different from the eternal debate over the relationship between an author and his work remains, in my view, unclear. It seems to me that the “Shapiro Method” is not really new at all, and that it is flawed in the same way that Stratfordian scholarship has been flawed for centuries; by not having the right person identified as Shakespeare, any speculation about what Shakespeare was “thinking” or “why” he was writing will still come out wrong. One is reminded of the old cliché about computers: “Garbage in, garbage out.” Nonetheless to see it touted by Phillips as something new and important is telling, and the avalanche of glowing reviews for The Year of Lear confirms that.
In truth, I enjoyed parts of The Year of Lear. Shapiro is an excellent writer, and can marshal myriad facts into a compelling narrative. The stories of the Monteagle letter forewarning the Gunpowder Plot, of “equivocation” and Jesuits, of Father Southwell’s capture in 1592 and Father Garnett’s interrogation in 1606, etc.all are interesting and at times thought-provoking. I particularly liked some of his commentary on the plays, as when he writes of Lear (and the ways that Shakespeare changed it from Leir):
In Shakespeare’s hand “nothing” becomes a touchstone—and the idea of nothingness and negation is philosophically central to the play from start to finish.
Shapiro gives us another full page on “nothingness” and Lear. On the very next page we have his description of Cordelia’s death scene in Lear’s arms (in Leir she doesn’t die). There we learn that when Lear says “My poor Fool is hanged,” it may also be some sort of commentary on the relationship between the comedic actor Robert Armin (playing the Fool) and the tragedian actor Burbage (playing Lear), an inside joke that only the actor Shakespeare “might” think to include. This is a strange observation to make here, but typical of the mixed bag of scholarship and bold speculation that permeates The Year of Lear.
In the end, though, I finally thought to myself, wouldn’t it be easier to just pack up and leave Stratford, and join those of us who’ve been understanding Shakespeare for a long time through bona fide historical context (which is what the whole authorship debate is about), and are loving it? In short, isn’t it easier to leave behind the strained association of Shakespeare and the Gunpowder Plot (which struck me as a sort of “imitation Oxfordian” effort on Shapiro’s part, reaching for an association of Shakespeare and political danger where there is none), and go for the real thing (e.g., Shakespeare and the Essex Rebellion, where the facts are there and the danger was real). When one looks at what Shapiro has done (focusing on the years 1599 and 1606), it is clear he’d prefer to skip 1601, the year of Richard II and a dangerous deposition scene, and 1604, the year of Hamlet.
Once you get out of Stratford, for just one example, your view of who and what Shakespeare’s fools really represent will change (invariably they’re all the author himself, from Touchstone to Feste to Lear’s Fool, etc.). And the actor Robert Armin? Shortly before this very time, he was about to “take my journey (to wait on the right honorable good Lord my Master whom I serve) to Hackney.” Once you’ve got the right Shakespeare as part of your history all the pieces fall right into place, and understanding Shakespeare becomes a reality.
an anthology of critical reviews of James Shapiro's The Year of Lear 
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