1606 William Shakespeare & the Year of Lear traces Shakespeare's life & times from the autumn of 1605 when he took an old & anonymous Elizabethan play The Chronicle History of King Leir & 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 & Scotland & 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 & Antony & Cleopatra Following the biographical style of 1599 a way of thinking & writing that Shapiro has made his own 1606 William Shakespeare & the Year of Lear promises to be one of the most significant & accessible works on Shakespeare in the decade to come