Podcast #120: John Lithgow and James Shapiro on Guy Fawkes and Falling for Shakespeare
James Shapiro is one of the foremost living Shakespeare scholars and the author of several books, including The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606. From 2006-2007, he was a Cullman Fellow at the New York Public Library's Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers. He was recently joined at the Library by actor John Lithgow. For this week's episode of the New York Public Library Podcast, we're proud to present John Lithgow and James Shapiro discussing Guy Fawkes, the Gunpowder Plot, and Getting Hooked on Shakespeare.
John Lithgow offered his critical praise of Shapiro's book The Year of Lear. He was particularly taken with the way that research informed the dramatic arc of the book:
"It is absolutely hair-raising. Your version of this quite extraordinarily, because it is about a catastrophe that didn't happen, but you have made it so astonishingly dramatic, and so much of it is tiny details, which are the coincidences that bring it into the geographical and social proximity of Shakespeare that are so amazing."
James Shapiro explained what makes 1606 so thrilling, focusing specifically on the Gunpowder Plot:
"I didn't know much about the Gunpowder Plot. I knew a little bit about it. I read the same history books that everybody else had. There are two or three really magnificent studies of it. But I thought that was 1605 story because the attempt of twenty-five dissident catholic gentry that were really unhappy with King James's settlement with catholics in England who decided to commit what we would call a terrorist act. They loaded thirty-six barrels of gunpowder under the house of Parliament, the House of Lords, and on November 5 when King James, his family, the political leadership, and religious leadership of England were all gathered there, they were just going to set this on fire, blow them to kingdom come, roll back seventy years of a Reformation, take the one child of King James who wasn't there, his daughter Elizabeth, have a new Queen Elizabeth, a child, who'd be a catholic queen, and that would be that. And of course Guy Fawkes, as we know, was caught matches in hand. But it turned out really not to be a 1605 story because the capture, torture, executions, and government retelling of the story of the Gunpowder Plot all took place in 1606."
Though both Shapiro and Lithgow have steeped themselves in Shakespeare, neither studied Shakespeare during their undergraduate educations. Shapiro explained what hooked him on the Bard:
"I didn't take a Shakespeare class at Columbia. I'm often asked, 'Should these things be required of everyone?' So this is the perfect reason why Shakespeare should not be required. We both arrived here not having been force-fed it at a point where we weren't interested or eager... I didn't come to Shakespeare through any academic training. I had gone to Midwood High School in Brooklyn, where the teachers stamped out any love of Shakespeare, any residue of it in the late sixties for me. At least my classmates were laughing at the dirty bits in Romeo and Juliet. I didn't even get that. It had no appeal to me, and I would not have become interested in Shakespeare if not for Freddie Laker who, if you recall, allowed us to fly back and forth to London for ninety-nine dollars each way. And my big brother and I flew over and were bumming around Europe [in] late high school years for me and through college years but initially in my teens. And we were in London, and as you know, in London in those days, you could see spectacular theater and Shakespeare every night and it was subsidized, so if you had a student ID, you paid fifty pence and you slept in a church basement or a youth hostel for another fifty pence. And I remember seeing spectacular performances."
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