Shakespeare doesn’t just write to King James’s order—he somehow manages to absorb James’s interests into his own imagination. In fact—though Shapiro does not go this far—it does not seem unreasonable to think of Shakespeare treating James (who was, after all, attempting to alter the consciousness and identity of his subjects) as a fellow dramatist, and then doing what he always did with fellow dramatists: taking their best ideas and plots and reprocessing them.
Robert Greene’s famous complaint about the young Shakespeare—“an upstart crow, beautified with our feathers”—is not entirely unjustified, though of course Shakespeare used the feathers he plucked from others to make wings that could fly in previously unimagined directions. This is essentially what he does with King James. He plucks the king’s obsessions and ideological projects and uses them to beautify his own work. It is an astonishingly adept combination of deference and impudence, the King’s Man at once serving and stealing from his boss.
Shakespeare might
answer his his critics - those trying to do this young Stratford turk down with
a line from Macbeth “I…begin/To doubt the equivocation of the fiend,/That lies like truth
In a vicious Elizabethan world who can survive without lying, and who can tell deception from honesty?
or lines from Lear as if those speaking ill of him were infected and is best as it is in 2015 to ignore those who wish you ill, give them no sustenance of acknowledgement.
The foul fiend haunts Poor Tom in the voice of a nightingale. Hoppedance cries in Tom’s belly for two white herring. Croak not, black angel: I have no food for thee.
Source the New York Review of Books
The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606
Robert Greene’s famous complaint about the young Shakespeare—“an upstart crow, beautified with our feathers”—is not entirely unjustified, though of course Shakespeare used the feathers he plucked from others to make wings that could fly in previously unimagined directions. This is essentially what he does with King James. He plucks the king’s obsessions and ideological projects and uses them to beautify his own work. It is an astonishingly adept combination of deference and impudence, the King’s Man at once serving and stealing from his boss.
Shakespeare might
answer his his critics - those trying to do this young Stratford turk down with
a line from Macbeth “I…begin/To doubt the equivocation of the fiend,/That lies like truth
In a vicious Elizabethan world who can survive without lying, and who can tell deception from honesty?
or lines from Lear as if those speaking ill of him were infected and is best as it is in 2015 to ignore those who wish you ill, give them no sustenance of acknowledgement.
The foul fiend haunts Poor Tom in the voice of a nightingale. Hoppedance cries in Tom’s belly for two white herring. Croak not, black angel: I have no food for thee.
Source the New York Review of Books
Behind ‘King Lear’: The History Revealed
The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606
by James Shapiro
Simon and Schuster, 367 pp., $30.00
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