It housed the greatest collection of international art in the realm, its "spacious rooms" hung "with Persian looms," its treasures "fetched from the richest cities of proud Spain" and beyond. able-bodied Elizabethan men between the ages of sixteen and sixty, all of whom were potential conscripts. James Shapiro arrives at an interpretation of [Shakespeare] and his work that is unparalleled in its lucidity and originality.

Vivid medieval paintings of the Passion and the Last Judgment had once decorated the walls of Stratford's church, but they had been whitewashed by Protestant reformers shortly before Shakespeare was born.

James Shapiro, who teaches English at Columbia University in New York, is author of several books, including 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare (winner of the BBC4 Samuel Johnson Prize in 2006), as well as Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare?

It was the most tumultuous of times and Shapiro has produced an extraordinary work bringing Shakespeare to life in one of the most important years of his life. But he did not escape unscathed: Jonson was branded with a “T” for Tyburn, Elizabethan London's site of execution, on his thumb. Shakespeare might hardly seem to need another biography, but James Shapiro's 1606: William Shakespeare and the Year of Lear (Faber) is so much more than that.Hayward had also poisoned the well for those writing national history: "no English histories" are to "be printed except they be allowed by some of her Majesty's Privy Council. Em suma, a história de “1599” é fascinante e inclui a reconstrução do Globo; a queda de Essex; a morte de Spenser; uma discussão complicada sobre os Sonetos; a sensacional abertura de “Júlio César”; rumores sobre a morte da rainha; a conclusão de um volume muito vendido de poesia sobre “O Peregrino Apaixonado”; e, finalmente, a extraordinária mudança imaginativa na vida do bardo representada pelo primeiro rascunho de Hamlet. Contrary to some authors looking for a sensationalist angle, a fair amount is known about him (including that he wrote most if not all of the plays commonly attributed to him), yet there are many frustrating lacunae in the biographical details.