Video: James Shapiro

James Shapiro didn’t enjoy Shakespeare in School. And he didn’t study Shakespeare at university. But he became completely transfixed after he watched - at first a few, and then hundreds of - Shakespeare plays at London’s West End. This was the beginning of decades spent immersing himself in every detail of what day to day life would have been like for a Jacobean playwright like Shakespeare.

Watch him give an introduction to his new book, 1606: William Shakespeare and the Year of Lear, the follow up to 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare: