1606: William Shakespeare and the Year of Lear - Hardcover

1606: William Shakespeare and the Year of Lear succeeds brilliantly in the very difficult task of matching James Shapiro's previous and companion volume, 1599, for intensity of narrative and depth of insight. His particular gift as a literary historian is to combine great good sense with daring imaginative reach. (Andrew Motion)

1606: Shakespeare and the Year of Lear is a meticulous narrative of a momentous year in the life of the playwright and a masterpiece of intelligent literary criticism. (Colm Tóibín Guardian)

A book for anyone interested in history, or literature, or in the creation of the greatest play ever written. (Richard Eyre)

The Shakespeare Shapiro painstakingly and subtly presents here is a virtuoso remix artist, a textual sponge, a magpie, a master-orchestrator of the Zeitgeist ... 'Political theatre' is a dismissive buzz-phrase nowadays: but for the Jacobean court, politics was theatrical and theatre was political. Interpretation was everything. All the world, as this terrifically interesting book shows, really was a stage. (Sam Leith Spectator)

Despite the intricate tangles of evidence he assembles, Shapiro manages, as in 1599, to present his argument in a series of vivid, sometimes harrowing, narratives ... [His book] draws on a mountain of reading, yet is persistently original. It takes us onto the streets of Shakespeare's London, and it reminds us of the brutal culture from which his plays sprang. (John Carey Sunday Times)

In 1606 Shakespeare pens three of his greatest plays: King Lear, Macbeth and Antony and Cleopatra. As Shapiro shows in exhaustive yet exhilarating depth, these works reflect the dark and anxious public mood which dominated a year which began in the shadow of the Gunpowder Plot of 5 November 1605, and ended with an outbreak of plague in London, whose victims included Shakespeare's own landlady... [Shapiro has] a vigorous, burning appetite for historical information and an equally burning desire to impart it ... What Shapiro knows better than most is that the devil is in the details. (Lucasta Miller Independent)

Mr. Shapiro has once again brought Shakespeare's world to precise and pertinent life; the bright light he shines into obscure corners gives us the illusion that we can almost glimpse the dramatist himself, but he immediately slips away again. It is to be hoped that Mr. Shapiro might be persuaded to write a book for every year of Shakespeare's life. (Simon Callow Wall Street Journal)

Shapiro demonstrates once again his skill in shaping quantities of research into a brisk and enjoyable narrative. (Charles Nicholl Guardian)

[An] excellent and ingenious book ... Shapiro rekindles interest in the plays with every page, and I could imagine him writing something fascinating about every year, month and day of Shakespeare's life. (Stuart Kelly The Scotsman)

'As James Shapiro explores in his informative and exciting new book, 1606 was a significant, epoch-defining time that formed the background to two of Shakespeare greatest tragedies, King Lear and Macbeth ... the great strength of Shapiro's book is that he is able to combine acute literary criticism with substantial historical knowledge. (Andrew Hadfield Irish Times)

Ten years ago James Shapiro won the Samuel Johnson Prize for his best-seller 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare. Now, to mark the forthcoming 400th anniversary of Shakespeare's death, comes a compelling look at a no less extraordinary year in his life: 1606. 1606 is an intimate portrait of one of Shakespeare's most inspired moments: the year of King Lear, Macbeth and Antony and Cleopatra. 1606, while a very good year for Shakespeare, was a fraught one for England. Plague returns. There is surprising resistance to the new king's desire to turn England and Scotland into a united Britain. And fear and uncertainty sweep the land and expose deep divisions in the aftermath of a failed terrorist attack that came to be known as the Gunpowder Plot. James Shapiro deftly demonstrates how these extraordinary plays responded to the tumultuous events of this year, events that in unexpected ways touched upon Shakespeare's own life. By immersing us in Shakespeare's England, 1606 profoundly changes and enriches our experience of his plays, works that continue to speak to us with such immediacy.