So little is known about Shakespeare that there are perhaps as many biographies of him as there are biographers. Scholars often read back i...
So little is known about Shakespeare that there are perhaps as many biographies of him as there are biographers. Scholars often read back into his life from either his plays or other extant reports of 16th century London life. One such was Columbia English professor James Shapiro’s powerful study: The Year of the Lear: Shakespeare in 1606, which has resurfaced recently.
Why? Because 1606 was also the year of the plague. Shapiro writes: “We know a great deal more about how a rodent-borne visitation in 1606 altered the contours of Shakespeare’s professional life….” Shakespeare, it is understood, interned himself during the lockdown of London stages and wrote, hold your breath Macbeth, King Lear and Anthony and Cleopatra. Surely, isolation has never been more fecund.
Who will grudge the fact that two of Shakespeare’s greatest studies of power and frailty – Macbeth and King Lear – were as if birthed in his isolation from the world? “The prince of darkness is a gentleman”, Edgar ponders in King Lear, to which, as if, Macbeth retorts, “Come, seeling night,/ Scarf up the tender eye of pitiful day,/And with thy bloody and invisible hand/Cancel and tear to pieces that great bond/Which keeps me pale!”
Yet, Shakespeare’s greatest study of social isolationism – Hamlet (1603) – was behind him in 1606; isolationism embossed in those famous lines...
