The World полностью

In one of his first decisions, James appointed the lord chamberlain’s troupe of actors, part-owned by Shakespeare, as the King’s Players, performing for the king ten times a season. James’s two sons, the attractive Henry and the meagre, shy Charles, promised stability, and in London Anne survived three more pregnancies, the babies delivered by a French doctor with secret equipment that enabled safer births.^* Yet the atmosphere was tense as a new wave of the bubonic plague hit London, deaths rising from twenty a week to a thousand, prompting James to order a lockdown of theatre and bear-baiting. The king started to negotiate peace with Spain, but he did not cancel restrictions on Catholics, sparking the conspiracy of Robert Catesby to blow up the State Opening of Parliament. The plot is now regarded as a jape, but this terrorist spectacular would have killed not just most of the royal family but the entire elite, thousands of people. On 4 November 1605, an anonymous letter tipped off Cecil, and thirty-six barrels of gunpowder were discovered under Parliament. The conspirators were hunted down.

The paranoia and equivocation, plagues and lockdowns, the twists of power and the importance of character inspired Shakespeare, who had himself come close to destruction. As England watched the trial of the terrorists and celebrated the survival of their Scottish king and his young sons, Shakespeare wrote a Scottish story, Macbeth, based vaguely on history, about the unholy crime of killing a king and the fascinations of witchcraft. Now forty-two, Shakespeare, balding with a small moustache and beard, was the son of an impecunious glovemaker from Warwickshire born in the year Michelangelo died. He may have started as a schoolmaster, and switched to acting in the 1580s. Shakespeare made his name with two epic poems, a series of sonnets and, even though waves of plague led to periodic closures of theatres, a mix of comic and historical plays. But he made his fortune as actor-manager, part-owner of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men that enabled him to buy the largest house in his home town of Stratford-upon-Avon. There he had married young, having two daughters and a son Hamnet, who aged eleven had died ten years earlier. When he was in London, he moved between the raffish taverns of Southwark, where he stayed in lodgings, and the rotten gleam of court, where he was a groom of the chamber. Discreet and private, his passionate sonnets of love and betrayal, describing affairs with women and men in a London of bawdy houses and venereal diseases, suggest worldly experience: ‘When my love swears that she is made of truth, / I do believe her though I know she lies.’

On 5 January 1606, James attended an entertainment at the Banqueting House in Whitehall to celebrate the marriage of the earl of Essex, fourteen-year-old son of the executed favourite, to Frances Howard, daughter of one of the grandees who had destroyed the groom’s father. This marriage, devised by James as an act of reconciliation, would become a murderous scandal. But, for now, Shakespeare watched the young noblewomen dancing in scarlet costumes in a show written by his rival playwright Ben Jonson, a rambunctious Catholic sympathizer who had killed two men in duels yet made it from bricklayer and murderer to national poet. The joyful extravagance of the show inspired Shakespeare to write Antony and Cleopatra, in which the Egyptian queen’s arrival on a resplendent barge would demand a similarly spectacular mise en scène – very different from the unbearable anguish of his other work in progress, King Lear.

In the days after the show, James secretly observed the trial of the Catholic conspirators. On 30 January, eight of them were dragged backwards in wicker baskets to the gallows where they were half hanged, their genitals cut off and burned, their bowels and hearts cut out, before they were decapitated, a process designed to put them ‘halfway between heaven and earth as unworthy of both’.

Soon after he had attended King Lear, James watched a jousting match where a young Scottish courtier, Robert Carr, was unhorsed and broke his leg. James fell in love with him on the spot, nursed, educated and knighted him. Carr started to dominate the court, and was soon raised to earl of Somerset. Queen Anne loathed him, and Parliament despised James’s generous gifts to this upstart Caledonian. Fortunately, Carr’s rise was balanced by the charisma of Henry, prince of Wales, who was fascinated by the opening up of the world.