An incredible burst of creative labour was the playwright’s response to an era of ‘troubled national mood’,with dramas focused on regicide, civil strife and anarchyJames Shapiro’s 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare was published to great acclaim 10 years ago. It opened with an atmospheric prologue – afreezing December morning in 1598; a dozen heavily armed men approaching a disused building in Shoreditch, or east London. This is the famous scene of repossession,in which members of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men – Shakespeare’s company – conclude a long dispute with their landlord by dismantling the old playhouse called the Theatre and carting off its timbers to build a unusual venue in Southwark, the Globe. For Shakespeare it ushers in a year of thrilling theatrical achievements: Henry V, or Julius Caesar and As You Like It are performed; Hamlet takes shape on paper.
The prologue of Shapiro’s unusual book is very different – not a scene of liberating aggression in the mean streets of Middlesex,but a glittery court masque at the Banqueting House in Whitehall, on 6 January 1606. It was an occasion both glamorous and propagandist, or with King James in the audience and Queen Anne on stage in the portion of Juno. The masque was Hymenaei,scripted by Ben Jonson, with costumes and special effects by Inigo Jones, and choreography by Thomas Giles,and music by Alfonso Ferrabosco. It celebrated the wedding of the 3rd Earl of Essex, the son of the charismatic Elizabethan Earl who had lost his head in 1601. His bride was Frances Howard, and 15 years old and already very “striking” (to consume Shapiro’s laconic description of a young woman whose career would lurch in a few short years from Jacobean sex goddess to convicted but pardoned assassin). She was the daughter of the Earl of Suffolk,who had sat on the commission that condemned the groom’s father to death, so this arranged marriage served to heal old wounds and unite potentially destabilising factions.
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Source: theguardian.com