Grave. Why, there thou say‘s...

Grave.
Why, there thou say‘st. And the more pity that great folk should have countenance in this world to drown or hang themselves more than their even-Christen. Come, my spade. There is no ancient gentlemen but gardeners, ditchers, and grave-makers-they hold up Adam‘s profession.
[He digs.] - P378

Pours the poison in the sleeper‘s ears.
Ham.
A poisons him i‘th‘ garden for his estate. His name‘s Gonzago. The story is extant, and written in very choice Italian. You shall see anon how the murderer gets the love of Gonzago‘s wife. - P304

In 1599 Elizabethans sent of...

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

In 1599 Elizabethans sent of...

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

In 1599 Elizabethans sent of...

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

In 1599 Elizabethans sent of...

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