Who Wrote Shakespeare? by James Shapiro

Author:James Shapiro
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2010-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

Jacobean Shakespeare

I was in London on 5 November 2008, Guy Fawkes Day, that time-honored celebration of King James’s miraculous escape from a terrorist plot. There had been fireworks exploding in the skies of London all week, a legacy of four hundred years of bonfires and bells, though I wondered how much those setting off these explosives knew about what they were commemorating. I thought I’d pay my own respects to King James more quietly by viewing his portrait at the National Portrait Gallery. I passed through the Tudor galleries, rich in portraits of Elizabeth I and her courtiers, but became confused when I entered the next gallery and couldn’t find the familiar images of James and his courtiers where they had long been displayed. I walked around in circles before finally asking a guard to direct me to the Jacobean portraits. He explained that they were temporarily in storage, their place now taken up by portraits of playwrights—“Shakespeare and His Circle.” The King’s Men without the king felt a bit like Hamlet without the prince.

Discouraged, I headed to Foyles, that wonderful bookshop, in search of recent books about King James—also in vain; only one was in stock. I couldn’t understand why historians, commercial publishers, and booksellers had largely given up on someone who ruled in England for twenty-two years (after having reigned in Scotland for thirty-six). Adjoining shelves sagged under the weight of books about the Tudors, especially Queen Elizabeth. It was the same everywhere I turned: there was a popular television series on The Tudors and any number of lavish films I could rent about Elizabeth—but not one sequel on her royal successor (the very subject, I later learned, of Ronald Hutton’s witty essay “Why Don’t the Stuarts Get Filmed?”).

Shakespeare in Love is one of the most delightful movies ever made about Shakespeare. In one of its best scenes we get to watch Queen Elizabeth, played by Dame Judi Dench, sitting in the galleries at the outdoor playhouse at a performance of Romeo and Juliet and telling Shakespeare afterward to come by the palace, “where we will speak some more.” Imagine replacing her in this scene with, say, Simon Russell Beale in the role of King James. It wouldn’t work. Though almost half of his creative life was spent as a King’s Man, Shakespeare has for the longest time been powerfully and irrevocably linked with Queen Elizabeth, so much so that we seem to have forgotten Ben Jonson’s evenhanded recollection of how Shakespeare’s plays “so did take Eliza, and our James!”

Things have been this way since at least the early eighteenth century, when writers began inventing an intimacy between playwright and queen that had no documentary foundation. In 1702 John Dennis claimed that The Merry Wives of Windsor “was written at her command.” A few years later, Nicholas Rowe added that Elizabeth “without doubt gave him many gracious marks of her favour.” The last time anyone tried to establish a direct connection between Shakespeare and his other monarch was

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.