A Jacobean as well as an Elizabethan
By Morris Dean
Over the years, I'd dabbled in William Shakespeare (1564-1616), beginning I guess with Macbeth or The Merchant of Venus in one of Miss Lois Thompson's English classes in high school. And I seem to remember that a Shakespeare play was included in the first year's syllabus for reading groups of the Great Books of the Western World, which had been published only a few years before I entered high school. Mr. King assembled and led a reading group of six or eight high schoolers, of whom I was one. And, two or three years later, I signed on for a small part in a my residential college's production of The Tempest.
Even as late as ten days ago, I thought of Shakespeare as being of the Elizabethan Age, and only of the Elizabethan Age. But Queen Elizabeth I died in 1603, and Shakespeare wrote another dozen plays....
What happened? Well, last week I watched something extraordinary that refreshed and reinvigorated my interest in Shakespeare. I had borrowed my local public library's two-DVD set, Shakespeare: The King's Man. I wasn't expecting anything more, really, than what I had seen in other Shakespeare programs over the years. But this was so much more!
The material in The King's Man was virtually all new to me. In its three episodes, "Incertainties," "Equivocation," and "Legacy," Columbia University Professor James Shapiro discusses nine of the twelve plays that Shakespeare wrote after Queen Elizabeth I died and James VI of Scotland (1566-1625) ascended the English throne as James I. He was the son of Mary Queen of Scots, Elizabeth's first cousin once removed. He gives his name to the Jacobean Era ("James" in Latin is "Jacobus"). The King James Bible was commissioned in 1604 and published in 1611.
As Shakespeare had been the leading playwright of the Elizabethan Age, so he was formally "The King's Man" of the Jacobean, and Dr. Shapiro's program analyzes how Shakespeare's plays reflect those times and likely would have been understood by their audiences. He also discusses Shakespeare's genius for treating the complex issues of the times obliquely so as to avoid getting into political trouble—setting them, for example, in ancient Athens.
"Incertainties" focuses on the uncertainties of regime change. Will there be more religious strife? What about this foreign king, does he understand our English values...?
Measure for Measure "seeths with the political and religious tensions of James's regime." It "perfectly captures the tone of the times."
James naturally wanted to unite England and Scotland, but this "big idea" prompted an identity crisis among the English people (and among the Scottish as well). King Lear "goes to the heart of the national angst created by James's Union agenda."
Did James intend to purge the Anglican church of Catholic practices? (The King James Bible was purged of "Catholic language.") Scottish favorites were supplanting some disempowered English noblemen (like Sir Walter Raleigh). A plot to overthrow James began early on involving Catholics and English noblemen. Macbeth dealt directly with the murder of a king.
"Equivocation" deals with the "new world of conspiracy and anxiety," with its "mood of turbulence." The very word "equivocation," Professor Shapiro contends, came to "represent a new, post-plot age." This episode covers the Gunpowder Plot of "Catholic terrorists" to unseat James. The word "equivocation" figured prominently in a manuscript of Father Henry Garnet, who allegedly knew details of the assassination plot and in whom the government found the head of a wider Papal conspiracy to overthrow James. Garnet was the principal figure in an elaborate show trial. His secret treatise provided instruction in how to bend the truth without actually lying—how to equivocate.
Antony and Cleopatra, Shapiro argues, contrasts the good governance of Antony (Elizabeth) to the decadence of Egypt (James and his extravagant bestowal of treasure on his court and on favorites), and Octavius, the uniter of the Roman Empire, seems to represent James's idea of an empire for Britain.
The Spring of 1607 featured economic protests brought on by inflation, higher food prices, and the growing divide between rich and poor. Francis Bacon wrote that "Rebellions of the belly are the worst." Riots in Northamptonshire were suppressed, and some protestors were killed. The trigger for the explosion of violence was the fairly new practice of "enclosure" having to do with the treatment of land to the detriment of the common people who depended on having a plot to work. Coriolanus opens with such a riot.
Coriolanus was a decisive military leader, but because he could not equivocate, he was not skilled at political leadership. He was "perhaps the most ambiguous of Shakespeare's tragic heroes. And that ambiguity says much about the times, where easy distinctions, between right and wrong, seem to have vanished." Elizabeth had played her part well, but "King James, like Coriolanus, struggled with the role."
James's imprudent extravagance in the distribution of favors seems to be reflected in Timon of Athens, which was about "a spendthrift rich man"; "its subject is money and the greed and corruption that flow from it."
In "Legacy," Professor Shapiro relates Shakespeare's final three plays to a "somewhat less violent social upheaval."
James was estranged from his wife Anne, who had separate quarters, and he was concerned to arrange dynastic marriages for his children, particular his elder son Henry and his daughter Elizabeth. The Winter's Tale treats of a King's imprisoning his wife out of his mistaken jealousy that their son is not his. The son and his mother die, but the king's daughter survives to marry the son of the man the king believed had fathered his wife's son—a happy reunioning of sorts.
James had high hopes for his son Henry and Henry's eventual succession. In 1610, at the age of 16, Henry became the first Prince of Wales in 60 years (the previous English monarchs during that period having been without heirs). He was very interested in exploration and was given a draft of the first map of the Jamestown colony's river location in Virginia. In 1609, five ships had set out from England to resupply Jamestown, but one of them wrecked off the Bermudas. The Tempest deals with such a wreck and with the problems of succession.
Henry VIII, Professor Shapiro contends, was only nominally a history play about Henry VIII, who as everyone knows had several wives, including Anne Boleyn, the mother of Elizabeth I. It more importantly delves further into the contemporary problems of marital relations and dynastic succession.
At least two video clips for the program are available on the web. I prefer the one on the Athena Learning website, but there's also a trailer on Youtube:
And Columbia University Professor James Shapiro has a website.
For an excellent further discussion of Shakespeare: The King's Man, see Brandie Ashe's May 25 review, "The Political Education of Willy Shakes," on the Cinema Sentries website. Excerpt:
Copyright © 2013 by Morris Dean
By Morris Dean
Over the years, I'd dabbled in William Shakespeare (1564-1616), beginning I guess with Macbeth or The Merchant of Venus in one of Miss Lois Thompson's English classes in high school. And I seem to remember that a Shakespeare play was included in the first year's syllabus for reading groups of the Great Books of the Western World, which had been published only a few years before I entered high school. Mr. King assembled and led a reading group of six or eight high schoolers, of whom I was one. And, two or three years later, I signed on for a small part in a my residential college's production of The Tempest.
What happened? Well, last week I watched something extraordinary that refreshed and reinvigorated my interest in Shakespeare. I had borrowed my local public library's two-DVD set, Shakespeare: The King's Man. I wasn't expecting anything more, really, than what I had seen in other Shakespeare programs over the years. But this was so much more!
The material in The King's Man was virtually all new to me. In its three episodes, "Incertainties," "Equivocation," and "Legacy," Columbia University Professor James Shapiro discusses nine of the twelve plays that Shakespeare wrote after Queen Elizabeth I died and James VI of Scotland (1566-1625) ascended the English throne as James I. He was the son of Mary Queen of Scots, Elizabeth's first cousin once removed. He gives his name to the Jacobean Era ("James" in Latin is "Jacobus"). The King James Bible was commissioned in 1604 and published in 1611.
As Shakespeare had been the leading playwright of the Elizabethan Age, so he was formally "The King's Man" of the Jacobean, and Dr. Shapiro's program analyzes how Shakespeare's plays reflect those times and likely would have been understood by their audiences. He also discusses Shakespeare's genius for treating the complex issues of the times obliquely so as to avoid getting into political trouble—setting them, for example, in ancient Athens.
Measure for Measure "seeths with the political and religious tensions of James's regime." It "perfectly captures the tone of the times."
James naturally wanted to unite England and Scotland, but this "big idea" prompted an identity crisis among the English people (and among the Scottish as well). King Lear "goes to the heart of the national angst created by James's Union agenda."
Did James intend to purge the Anglican church of Catholic practices? (The King James Bible was purged of "Catholic language.") Scottish favorites were supplanting some disempowered English noblemen (like Sir Walter Raleigh). A plot to overthrow James began early on involving Catholics and English noblemen. Macbeth dealt directly with the murder of a king.
"Equivocation" deals with the "new world of conspiracy and anxiety," with its "mood of turbulence." The very word "equivocation," Professor Shapiro contends, came to "represent a new, post-plot age." This episode covers the Gunpowder Plot of "Catholic terrorists" to unseat James. The word "equivocation" figured prominently in a manuscript of Father Henry Garnet, who allegedly knew details of the assassination plot and in whom the government found the head of a wider Papal conspiracy to overthrow James. Garnet was the principal figure in an elaborate show trial. His secret treatise provided instruction in how to bend the truth without actually lying—how to equivocate.
Antony and Cleopatra, Shapiro argues, contrasts the good governance of Antony (Elizabeth) to the decadence of Egypt (James and his extravagant bestowal of treasure on his court and on favorites), and Octavius, the uniter of the Roman Empire, seems to represent James's idea of an empire for Britain.
The Spring of 1607 featured economic protests brought on by inflation, higher food prices, and the growing divide between rich and poor. Francis Bacon wrote that "Rebellions of the belly are the worst." Riots in Northamptonshire were suppressed, and some protestors were killed. The trigger for the explosion of violence was the fairly new practice of "enclosure" having to do with the treatment of land to the detriment of the common people who depended on having a plot to work. Coriolanus opens with such a riot.
Coriolanus was a decisive military leader, but because he could not equivocate, he was not skilled at political leadership. He was "perhaps the most ambiguous of Shakespeare's tragic heroes. And that ambiguity says much about the times, where easy distinctions, between right and wrong, seem to have vanished." Elizabeth had played her part well, but "King James, like Coriolanus, struggled with the role."
James's imprudent extravagance in the distribution of favors seems to be reflected in Timon of Athens, which was about "a spendthrift rich man"; "its subject is money and the greed and corruption that flow from it."
James was estranged from his wife Anne, who had separate quarters, and he was concerned to arrange dynastic marriages for his children, particular his elder son Henry and his daughter Elizabeth. The Winter's Tale treats of a King's imprisoning his wife out of his mistaken jealousy that their son is not his. The son and his mother die, but the king's daughter survives to marry the son of the man the king believed had fathered his wife's son—a happy reunioning of sorts.
James had high hopes for his son Henry and Henry's eventual succession. In 1610, at the age of 16, Henry became the first Prince of Wales in 60 years (the previous English monarchs during that period having been without heirs). He was very interested in exploration and was given a draft of the first map of the Jamestown colony's river location in Virginia. In 1609, five ships had set out from England to resupply Jamestown, but one of them wrecked off the Bermudas. The Tempest deals with such a wreck and with the problems of succession.
Henry VIII, Professor Shapiro contends, was only nominally a history play about Henry VIII, who as everyone knows had several wives, including Anne Boleyn, the mother of Elizabeth I. It more importantly delves further into the contemporary problems of marital relations and dynastic succession.
At least two video clips for the program are available on the web. I prefer the one on the Athena Learning website, but there's also a trailer on Youtube:
And Columbia University Professor James Shapiro has a website.
For an excellent further discussion of Shakespeare: The King's Man, see Brandie Ashe's May 25 review, "The Political Education of Willy Shakes," on the Cinema Sentries website. Excerpt:
[B]y paying homage to Elizabeth’s Tudor roots and the monarchy as a whole, Shakespeare ensured himself favor with the queen—favor that, upon her death in 1603, was further extended by her successor, her Scottish cousin James. Upon ascending the throne, the newly-crowned King James I extended to Shakespeare the title of “king’s man,” an honor that brought with it a prime position at court. And Shakespeare, ever the observer of human nature, took full advantage of the opportunity to craft a new series of plays that are among the most effective he ever wrote...._______________
Copyright © 2013 by Morris Dean
| Please comment |
The Tempest! My first play by The Bard. I played Caliban, one of the best roles I've ever had.
ReplyDeleteDelighted, James, to prompt the remembrance. I believe that Mr. James T. Carney and I played sailors on the ship that was wrecking....
DeleteA very interesting read, Morris. I had no idea that Shakespeare was a political writer. Or If I knew at some time, I had completely forgotten it.
ReplyDeleteI asked my fellow reviewer, Jonathan Price, whether he knew Professor Shapiro (he did not), and he had some observations I'd like to share with our readers:
ReplyDeleteI was never a Shakespearean scholar, but of course I read your review, which was an excellent and intriguing summary of something I've never seen nor read. Shakespeare of course is at the pinnacle or literary effort and achievement; nevertheless, this approach, the quasi-historological one, doesn't cut much mustard with me. Does it make much sense, anyway, that Antony and Cleopatra is about a man's administrative success and a woman's folly, but that the Professor argues it is really about a female queen's success and successor male king's folly? Or that the play is primarily about love and how it entangles and deceives people? Seems that Shapiro is guilty of terminal cleverness without much sense. Sad truth is that not a great deal of insight has been shined on Shakespeare since the new critics went to work in the 30s.
I did know, for example, Stephen Greenblatt at Yale [my—Morris's—classmate, who lived just down the hall my junior year], and, to a much lesser extent, some years later. Now he's at Harvard and a Shakespeare, scholar, inter alia. Tried to read his Shakespeare bio, but it seemed to me intensively written in the subjunctive: Shakespeare would have done this; he probably thought.... And so forth. Trouble is, Shakespeare left few documents and fewer reliable sources among friends and so forth. We are stuck with his plays. And that's ok.
The only thing I can think of in Professor Shapiro's defense with regard to Antony & Cleopatra is that the play isn't about one anything, whether political or romantic, but about several things, all complexly woven together—which is how Shakespeare—more than just setting his plays in other times and places—was able to avoid getting into trouble with monarchy. In other words, artistically speaking, he muddied the water. That, I believe, is Professor Shapiro's thesis, which I'm afraid I didn't state well in my review.
I read Professor Greenblatt's biography of Shakespeare (Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare), and I differ with Jon in that I think we have besides Shakespeare's plays some very interesting and arguable speculations based on those plays and what other evidence intelligent scholars can piece together. Whether those speculations are true, we will of course never really know. But that's okay.
It helps, I guess, that I didn't read Prof. Shapiro's book and therefore don't understand his thesis, but the play-a-clef approach always seems to me a bit unappealing to someone who doesn't live with those conditions or in that era, and seems like a stupid approach to great literature anyway: that this is really about King James or something it doesn't seem to be about, if only we have the code. And then, so what! It reduces the play from a magnifier and intensifier to a kind of investigation of microbial politics that only those obsessed with Jacobeanism would like. Similarly, I never completed my colleague and former Calhoun College alumnus' biography of Shakespeare, especially when I began to wonder about the assumptions that Shakespeare was really a Catholic and then to realize that the tissue of evidence on which they were based was very flimsy; about the same aura of rationality to convince us he was actually someone else, like Francis Bacon. He lived at a certain time-late fifteenth, early sixteenth centuries, died early (for such an incredible talent), could be mean and narrow in his personal dealings, but was constantly challenging himself as an artist and us as his audience. If "Lear" is about Scotland or the British Open or something else than family relationships and aging, that diminishes it unnecessarily, for me at least. Which doesn't mean it might not have that meaning for someone else. We are all groundlings to some degree.
DeleteI asked another member of Mr. King's Great Books reading group whether he remembers the syllabus to have included a play by Shakespeare:
ReplyDeleteI don't recall reading a play by Shakespeare. I'm afraid that exposure to Shakespeare was wasted on me in high school. My struggle to follow the rhythm of the language and the Elizabethan English often caused me to miss the heart of what was being said. Much later, having seen some professional and well done performances of some of Shakespeare's plays, I came to the conclusion that, for the uninitiated, the best way to appreciate Shakespeare was to see one of his plays well performed. (We saw Patrick Stewart in Macbeth in New York six years ago, and I shall never forget the emotional response the play provoked in me; I doubt if I could have had that by reading the play.) The gamut of human behavior portrayed by Shakespeare can be well understood outside of its historical context—but it must be well presented.