Behind *King Lear*

“To see Shakespeare as a court official working to please his political masters is not to reduce him to the level of functionary or propagandist. It is to marvel anew at the ways in which he could use even such humbling demands as sources of imaginative energy. Though it may be incidental to his purpose, Shapiro effectively overturns the Romantic conception of the artist as the champion of freedom over necessity. We begin to see a Shakespeare for whom the distinction between freedom and necessity is scarcely relevant. Here is Shakespeare as an opportunist in every sense, a political operator taking advantage of a shift in power and a voracious artist for whom the need to please new masters is not a restriction but a creative stimulus.”

“Indeed, what comes across most strongly is Shakespeare’s genius for transforming what is, objectively, a servile relationship with his sovereign, master, and employer into a breathtaking act of appropriation. Shakespeare doesn’t just write to 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 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.”

“What begins as an opportunist keeping an eye out for what will appeal to his new master ends as some of the strangest, most searingly painful language ever spoken on the stage. For James, the state of being possessed is an object of rational inquiry. Shakespeare turns it into a heartbreaking image of the agonies that lie beyond all reason.”

“Because Macbeth picks up on so many cues from James—witches, equivocators, Scottish dynastic origins—it is easy to miss what it does not do. In making the untrustworthiness of appearances and of language a universal condition of life under arbitrary power, Shakespeare avoids the immediate political agenda of identifying them with a specifically Catholic amorality.”

“We will never know what Shakespeare thought of the Gunpowder Plot, but thanks to Shapiro we can say with some confidence that he knew very well the human cost for Catholic recusants whose lives were destroyed by it. In Macbeth, he does not blame Catholics for the moral chaos of equivocation. He blames power itself, and its infinite capacity to corrupt language and corrode humanity. In Lady Macduff’s equivocal answers about whether her husband is a traitor, we catch the terror of all those under interrogation trying desperately to use words to evade death.”

“The most remarkable thing is that this deep skepticism about power does not work against Shakespeare’s efforts to please the man in power. It originates with them. Because he so thoroughly appropriates James’s concerns, he can at once inhabit them and transform them. Nowhere does this work so strangely and so disturbingly as in King Lear. There is no doubt that the impetus for the play is to support James’s campaign to unify Britain by showing the horrors of a disunited kingdom. Lear’s dismembering of his kingdom is the negative correlative of James’s destiny to make its body whole again.”

“King Lear cannot end because authority cannot be restored. This impossibility results from Shakespeare’s greatest act of opportunism. James’s interests have given him the opportunity to write a play about the collapse of all political order and that in turn gives him the opportunity to show what authority really looks like when it is not propped up by power. In King Lear, it is the old king himself, speaking to the viciously blinded Gloucester, who utters the most savage attack on all authority”

“Lear: A man may see how the world goes with no eyes; look with thy ears. See how yon justice rails upon yon simple thief. Hark in thy ear: handy-dandy, which is the thief, which is the justice? Thou has’t seen a farmer’s dog bark at a beggar? Gloucester: Ay, sir. Lear: An the creature run from the cur, there thou mightst behold the great image of authority. A dog’s obeyed in office.”

“There is no going back from this. If the great image of authority is a cur biting the heels of a beggar, what does it matter who is king? Even the blind can see how the world goes: put a dog on the throne and men will bow before it. When Albany offers Lear the restoration of his kingdom, the old man does not even hear him. The divine right of kings, so insistently upheld by James, has become a thing of nothing. The King’s Man in his red royal livery plucked his master’s anxiety about the need for unquestioned authority and used it to summon up the deeper fear that, in their most secret selves, must haunt all kings.”