The book 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.ġ606 proved to be an especially grim year for England, witnessing the bloody aftermath of the Gunpowder Plot, divisions over the Union of England and Scotland, and an outbreak of plague.

For anyone interested in Shakespeare, this is an indispensable book.ĭescription: Ten years ago James Shapiro won the Samuel Johnson Prize for his bestseller 1599: A YEAR IN THE LIFE OF WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE.ġ606: WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE AND THE YEAR OF LEAR is a compelling look at a no less extraordinary year in his life. The Year of Lear sheds light on these three great tragedies by placing them in the context of their times, while also allowing us greater insight into how Shakespeare was personally touched by such events as a terrible outbreak of plague and growing religious divisions. He ended this astonishing year with a third masterpiece no less steeped in current events and Antony and Cleopatra. It was against this background that Shakespeare finished Lear, a play about a divided kingdom, then wrote a tragedy that turned on the murder of a Scottish king, Macbeth. The aborted plot renewed anti-Catholic sentiment and laid bare divisions in the kingdom. The foiled Gunpowder Plot would have blown up the king and royal family along with the nation’s political and religious leadership. It was a memorable year in England as well-and a grim one, in the aftermath of a terrorist plot conceived by a small group of Catholic gentry that had been uncovered at the last hour. But that year, at age forty-two, he found his footing again, finishing a play he had begun the previous autumn- King Lear -then writing two other great tragedies, Macbeth and Antony and Cleopatra.

In the years leading up to 1606, since the death of Queen Elizabeth and the arrival in England of her successor, King James of Scotland, Shakespeare’s great productivity had ebbed, and it may have seemed to some that his prolific genius was a thing of the past. Preeminent Shakespeare scholar James Shapiro shows how the tumultuous events in England in 1606 affected Shakespeare and shaped the three great tragedies he wrote that year- King Lear, Macbeth, and Antony and Cleopatra.

The year of lear by james shapiro