This compares with eight thousand Protestant Huguenots killed in Paris alone during the St Bartholomew’s Day massacre in 1572, and the unknown thousands who died elsewhere in France. That slaughter had a deeply traumatizing effect in England – Christopher Marlowe graphically depicted it in The Massacre at Paris and put slaughter scenes in two other plays – and left two generations of Protestant Britons at once jittery for their skins and ferociously patriotic. - P26
It is easy to understand the line in As You Like It about a boy ‘creeping like snail unwillingly to school’. - P37
One of the principal texts of the day taught pupils 150 different ways of saying ‘Thank you for your letter’ in Latin. Through such exercises Shakespeare would have learned every possible rhetorical device and ploy – metaphor and anaphora, epistrophe and hyperbole, synecdoche, epanalepsis and others equally arcane and taxing. - P38
Until 1604 the age of consent was twelve for a girl, fourteen for a boy. - P40
In her father’s will she was referred to as Agnes (which at the time was pronounced with a silent g, making it ‘ANN-uss’). Agnes and Anne were often treated as interchangeable names. - P40
We know also that she had three children with William Shakespeare – Susanna in May 1583, and the twins Judith and Hamnet in early February 1585 – but all the rest is darkness. - P41
Shakespeare’s early life is really little more than a series of occasional sightings. So when we note that he was now about to embark on what are popularly known as his lost years, they are very lost indeed. - P43
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