“Time and the hour, run through the roughest day”

McCrum a former editor at Faber and Faber, former literary editor of the Observer, and the author of an acclaimed memoir My Year Off, reveals he is a long-standing member of the “Shakespeare Club”,  “quintessentially English mix of stage-struck self-improving playgoers with English literally degrees”.

A lively guide to Shakespeare’s life, times, and language, and attempts reconnecting with Shakespeare’s miraculous work.

The fact that the plays arose in times of plague and in an atmosphere of frightening political turmoil.

McCrum leads the reader chronologically through Shakespeare’s oeuvre with the neat economy, and remind our house-bound readers that ring with our present circumstance, Shakespeare’s world was one, like ours, “ in which a remorseless clock delivers the merciless consequences of history, without interruption”, as McCrum writes in discussing Macbeth. “ Time and the hour runs through the roughest day”.

The “Cipher Wheel” a thousand -foot-long strip of canvas printed with the playwright’s works and rotated between two giant wheels for inspection, the device created by an American physician, Dr. Orville Ward Owen ( 154-1924) to decipher what he believed were hidden messages  “proving” Francis Bacon to be the author of the texts.

McCrum has spent the last twenty-five years immersed in Shakespeare’s work, on stage and on the page.  During his prolonged exploration, Shakespeare’s poetry and plays, so vivid and contemporary, have become his guide and consolation. In Shakespearean, he asks: Why is that we always return to Shakespeare, particularly in times of acute crisis and dislocation? What is the key to his hold on our imagination? And why do the collected works of an Elizabethan writer continue to speak to us as if they were written yesterday?

Shakespearean is a rich, brilliant, and superbly drawn portrait of an extraordinary artist, one of the greatest writers who ever lived.  McCrum seeks to understand Shakespeare within is historical context, while also exploring the secrets of literary inspiration, and examining the nature of creativity itself.

Through an enthralling narrative, witty and insightful, he makes a passionate and deeply personal case that Shakespeare’s words and ideas are not just enduring in their relevance – they are nothing less than the eternal key to our shared humanity.

Shakespearean: On Life & Language in Times of Disruption by Robert McCrum, Picador £14.99, 382 pages.