Winter Fiction, January 2017 issue

Scroll to the bottom to find links to all of the articles in this supplement 

In King Lear, Shakespeare took an old story about the disintegration of Britain and re-fashioned it for the Jacobean era.

As James Shapiro writes in his book 1606, published last year, England and Scotland were in an uneasy alliance under James I. Shortly before the play was performed, extremist Catholics had tried to assassinate James. He was accused of giving away too much power to his favourites. What better time for a play that showed an unwise…