Overview
1606: William Shakespeare and the Year of Lear traces Shakespeare's life
and times from the autumn of 1605, when he took an old and anonymous
Elizabethan play, The Chronicle History of King Leir, and transformed it
into his most searing tragedy, King Lear. 1606 proved to be an
especially grim year for England, which witnessed the bloody aftermath
of the Gunpowder Plot, divisions over the Union of England and Scotland,
and an outbreak of plague. But it turned out to be an exceptional one
for Shakespeare, unrivalled at identifying the fault-lines of his
cultural moment, who before the year was out went on to complete two
other great Jacobean tragedies that spoke directly to these fraught
times: Macbeth and Antony and Cleopatra. Following the biographical
style of 1599, a way of thinking and writing that Shapiro has made his
own, 1606: William Shakespeare and the Year of Lear promises to be one
of the most significant and accessible works on Shakespeare in the
decade to come.