opfui.blogg.se

At the time, Shakespeare and his troupe had recently been selected by James I to assume the privileged role of The King’s Men. He would have known Whitehall well, having staged numerous performances there. William Shakespeare, a nationally celebrated actor and playwright in his day who was also a shareholder in the Lord Chamberlain’s Men as well as the Globe Theater, was among the audience members at this masque.

We are invited to stroll through the dark and whispering alleyways of 17 th century London and join six hundred other aristocrats at the Banquetting House of the Palace of WhiteHall where a royal masque is set to be formed (a masque was an opulent, sycophantic stage performance wherein courtiers donned garish costumes and masks, the whole affair was embraced by James I). Shapiro chooses to begin his book during the holiday season of 1606 at the start of the new year. The reign of the new king came with the promise of patching up old problems James hoped to rule as a peacemaker, both at home and abroad, bringing unity to both England and Scotland, healing the rising religious fervor among the Puritans, Jesuits, and Church of England, and revitalize English art and culture via extravagant pageantry, despite the protestations of Parliament. With her death, and consequently the end of the childless Tudors, came the rise of the Stuart dynasty under James VI of Scotland (James I of England).

It was a year of extraordinary tumult and upheaval –Elizabeth I “The Good Queen Bess” had died only a couple of years prior in 1603. While many biographers of William Shakespeare have tended to focus almost exclusively on the Bard’s prolific period at the end of the Elizabethan era, in a more recent book entitled The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606 (2015), leading Shakespeare scholar James Shapiro focuses on Shakespeare’s late career resurgence through the lens of a single transformative year in English history: 1606.