1606 william shakespeare and the year of lear

The idea of evil stalking the land in 1606 was to come to visceral life in Shakespeare’s Macbeth.Īs if the times were not extraordinary enough there was also plague in England, something that oozes through the blasted, apocalyptic landscapes of Lear and Macbeth. While the title refers to 1606 as Lear’s year, the book details two other works he wrote in the same year, namely Macbeth and Antony and Cleopatra.Ī large part of the book concerns The Gunpowder plot, the extraordinary planned act of terrorism which shook British society to its core even though it was foiled before there was a single explosion at Westminster. In Shapiro’s hands there is never anything dry about this kind of textual analysis.Īnd the writing is even more potent when it links the language and ideas of the play to what is happening in and around the rule of King James and the complex politics of dividing royal kingdoms. It is fascinating to see King Lear not just as the phenomenal work of genius it is but also as an immense reworking of what apparently was a relatively ordinary play by a then unknown writer.

In the first folio of Shakespeare’s collected works, Lear’s name in the script twice appears under the spelling, Leir, as the bard was working from the original. Shapiro says that the names of the title character and the three daughters were kept the same but given new spellings.įor instance, Cordella became Cordelia.

1606 william shakespeare and the year of lear