In 1599
Elizabethans sent off an army to crush an Irish rebellion,
weathered an armada threat from Spain,
gambled on a fledgling East India Company
and waited to see who would succeed their ageing and childless Queen.
They also flocked to London’s playhouses, including the newly built Globe. - P55
He and his fellow players truly were, in Hamlet’s fine phrase, the ‘abstract and brief chronicles of the time’ (II, ii, 524). - P59
Shakespeare’s appeal is universal precisely because he saw so deeply into the great questions of his day. Shakespeare himself certainly thought of his art in this way: the ‘purpose of playing’, he wrote in Hamlet, is to ‘show … the very age and body of the time his form and pressure’ (III, ii, 20–24). - P80
Circularity and arbitrariness are only part of the problem: cradle-to-grave biographers of Shakespeare tend to assume that what makes people who they are now made people who they were then. - P102
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