From the Folger Shakespeare Library, this is Shakespeare Unlimited. I'm Michael Whitmore,

the Folgers director. There are many different ways to explore the life and works of Shakespeare.

Jim Shapiro has carved out his own niche. In 2005 and then again in 2015, he published books that focused on a single year during Shakespeare's career,

looking at England on a micro and macro level, exploring how the year's events touched Shakespeare's life and whether they are reflected in his work.

Jim's 2015 book, The Year of Lear, is the topic of this conversation.

It examines 1606 the year when Shakespeare wrote King Lear, Macbeth, and Anthony and Cleopatra,

and when a king, James I faced internal political challenges that threatened to tear England apart.

We call this podcast, I have years on my back.

Jim Shapiro is interviewed by Neva Grant.

I would like to start with a line from the prologue of your book, which really struck me.

The year 1606 would turn out to be a good one for Shakespeare and an awful one for England.

So let's work our way through that if we

can. For starters, why was it a bad year for England? 1606 was one of the worst years for

England in Shakespeare's lifetime, perhaps the worst. For one thing, a massive outbreak of

plague returned in the summer of that year.

There was also man-made trouble.

Less than two months before the end of 1605, a group of 20 or so disaffected Catholic gentry

tried to blow up the king, the ruling class, the religious leaders of

England in the famous gunpowder plot. And much of 1606 was spent finding, torturing,

trying, and publicly executing these men and then trying to figure out how to deal with the

aftershocks of an attack that would have killed up to 30,000 Londoners

and would have restored Catholicism to the reign.

...