James Shapiro, _The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606_

MY TAKE ON this turned out to be the inside-out version of my take on its predecessor, 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare. The premise of 1599--excavate the archives on a particularly critical year for Shakespeare, use the findings to piece out the biographical record--did not sound all that promising to me, and I would have skipped the book had not a trusted Shakespearean colleague tipped me to it. Reading it, I was amazed. It rivaled Ellmann on Joyce for giving one a sense of the living, working writer, an accomplishment I would not have thought even remotely possible for a figure as long gone as Shakespeare.

So, I picked up The Year of Lear in high anticipation. Same method, somewhat higher stakes: change of monarch, Gunpowder Plot, Lear, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra. Somehow, it did not work as well, for me. Shapiro certainly has his customary smart, well-grounded things to say about all the items on the above list. But Shakespeare the writer and theater man does not pop into relief with quite the same vividness.

I happen to be in the middle of Joseph North's Literary Criticism: A Political History, which argues that historicist/contextualist scholarship has dominated Anglo-American literary studies for something like two or three decades now, and I found myself wondering how, or whether, The Year of Lear fits into that particular context.

It's certainly a fine-grained account of how the historical moment in which Shakespeare wrote shaped what he wrote. It's certainly about power, resistance, ideology, and discourse...I mean, the Gunpowder Plot, come on, can you get nearer the heart of power, resistance, ideology, and power than that? But Foucault, Jameson, even Greenblatt seem far, far away as we read this (well, not recent Greenblatt, perhaps).

Is it just that Shapiro is not writing for academic peers here, but for that ever-sought, ever-elusive intelligent general reader? The book definitely engages with topics of high interest in recent Shakespeare scholarship (Catholicism, for instance), it certainly shows mastery of that scholarship, but it seems to locate itself on some quite different map.