Is Shakespeare English, British, neither or both? Addressing from various angles the relation of the national poet/playwright to constructions of England and Englishness, this collection of essays explores the interplay of nation and imagination, first through new readings of particular plays, then through analyses of a range of subsequent appropriations and reorientations of 'Shakespeare' and 'this England' that the plays - in part - produced.

When William Shakespeare was about twenty, his life changed forever. He left Stratford and walked to London, where he became the world's greatest playwright. Here is his little-told story of Shakespeare, presented against the colorful tapestry of his England, the kingdom under Elizabeth I and James I. In the reigns of those monarchs, the nation was emerging from centuries of medieval turmoil. The small island that had changed so little since the Norman Conquest of 1066 suddenly became a center of international adventure, political experimentation, and artistic development. Young Shakespeare was fortunate to be in England, and in London, when he was. The first professional theatre opened in the capital in 1576; he arrived, stage-struck and in search of a job, around 1587. He retired to Stratford as a wealthy gentleman in 1611, only a generation before the theatres of England were closed by the Puritans. During Shakespeare's London years, England seethed with plots and intrigue and throbbed with pageantry; everywhere a writer looked there was a scene to fire his imagination. Like Sir Walter Raleigh and other daring contemporaries, William Shakespeare was, indeed, an Elizabethan who took advantage of his time.

How did it feel to hear Macbeth's witches chant of "double, double toil and trouble" at a time when magic and witchcraft were as real as anything science had to offer? How were justice and forgiveness understood by the audience who first watched King Lear; how were love and romance viewed by those who first saw Romeo and Juliet? In England in the Age of Shakespeare, Jeremy Black takes readers on a tour of life in the streets, homes, farms, churches, and palaces of the Bard's era. Panning from play to audience and back again, Black shows how Shakespeare's plays would have been experienced and interpreted by those who paid to see them. From the dangers of travel to the indignities of everyday life in teeming London, Black explores the jokes, political and economic references, and small asides that Shakespeare's audiences would have recognized. These moments of recognition often reflected the audience's own experiences of what it was to, as Hamlet says, "grunt and sweat under a weary life." Black's clear and sweeping approach seeks to reclaim Shakespeare from the ivory tower and make the plays' histories more accessible to the public for whom the plays were always intended.

A collection of some of the best, wittiest and most unusual excerpts from 16th- and 17th-century writing. "Shakespeare's England" brings to life the variety, the energy and the harsh reality of England at this time. Providing a portrait of the age, it includes extracts from a wide variety of writers, taken from books, plays, poems, letters, diaries and pamphlets by and about Shakespeare's contemporaries. These include William Harrison and Fynes Moryson (providing descriptions of England), Nicholas Breton (on country life), Isabella Whitney and Thomas Dekker (on London life), Nashe (on struggling writers), Stubbes (with a Puritan view of Elizabethan enjoyments), Harsnet and Burton (on witches and spirits), John Donne (meditations on prayer and death), King James I (on tobacco) and Shakespeare himself.

Church and state during Shakespeare's lifetime were in significant conflict on issues stemming from Henry VIII's break with Rome, issues centering principally on questions of authority and obedience - religious conformity, the form of church government, the jurisdiction of spiritual and temporal courts, and the source and scope of the monarch's power. To what extent were these disputes present in Shakespeare's work? In her compelling reassessment of Shakespeare's historicity, Donna Hamilton rejects the notion that the official censorship of the day prevented the stage from representing contemporary debates concerning the relations among church, state, and individual. She argues instead that throughout his career Shakespeare positioned his writing politically and ideologically in relation to the ongoing and changing church-state controversies and in ways that have much in common with the shifts on these issues identified with the Leicester-Sidney-Essex-Southampton-Pembroke group. In her readings of King John, Comedy of Errors, Twelfth Night, Measure for Measure, Cymbeline and Henry VIII, Hamilton finds Shakespeare reappropriating a wide range of idioms from church-state discourse, particularly those of anti-catholicism and nonconformity. And she uses this language to broach some of the broad social and political issues involving obedience, privacy, property, and conscience - matters that were often the focus of church-state disputes and that provided this historical period with its central rhetorics of subjectivity. In this first full-scale study of Shakespeare and church politics, Hamilton also provides an important reassessment of censorship practices, of the means by which dissident views circulated, of the centrality of anti-catholic discourse for all church-state debates, and of the overwhelming significance of church-state issues as an agent for print and stage.

Crime has been present in all cultures and societies, since the beginning of time. This work focuses on the punishments common in England around the time of Shakespeare and Milton, presenting descriptions of more than fifty criminal cases. Information comes from narratives printed for the popular news media at the time of the event. Details of everyday life in England and facts about the English legal environment of the era are brought to light. Also revealed through the narratives are issues present in society today--i. e., the status of women, poverty, and corruption. Individual cases are discussed under chapters devoted to specific types of crimes.

"In Networking Print in Shakespeare's England, Blaine Greteman uses new analytical tools to examine early English print networks and the systemic changes that reshaped early modern literature, thought, and politics. In early modern England, printed books were a technology that connected people in new ways--not only readers and writers, but an increasingly expansive community of printers, publishers, and booksellers. By pairing the methods of network analysis with newly available digital archives, Greteman aims to change the way we usually talk about authorship, publication, and print. As Greteman reveals, network analysis of the nearly 500,000 books printed in England before 1800 makes it possible to speak once again of a "print revolution," identifying a sudden tipping point at which the early modern print network became a small world where information could spread in new and powerful ways. Along with providing new insights into canonical literary figures like Milton and Shakespeare, data analysis also uncovers the hidden histories of key figures in this transformation who have been virtually ignored. Both a primer on the power of network analysis and a critical intervention in early modern studies, the book is ultimately an extended meditation on agency and the complexity of action in context"--

Is Shakespeare English, British, neither or both? Addressing from various angles the relation of the figure of the national poet/dramatist to constructions of England and Englishness this collection of essays probes the complex issues raised by this question, first through explorations of his plays, principally though not exclusively the histories (Part One), then through discussion of a range of subsequent appropriations and reorientations of Shakespeare and 'his' England (Part Two). If Shakespeare has been taken to stand for Britain as well as England, as if the two were interchangeable, this double identity has come under increasing strain with the break-up - or shake-up - of Britain through devolution and the end of Empire. Essays in Part One examine how the fissure between English and British identities is probed in Shakespeare's own work, which straddles a vital juncture when an England newly independent from Rome was negotiating its place as part of an emerging British state and empire. Essays in Part Two then explore the vexed relations of 'Shakespeare' to constructions of authorial identity as well as national, class, gender and ethnic identities. At this crucial historical moment, between the restless interrogations of the tercentenary celebrations of the Union of Scotland and England in 2007 and the quatercentenary celebrations of the death of the bard in 2016, amid an increasing clamour for a separate English parliament, when the end of Britain is being foretold and when flags and feelings are running high, this collection has a topicality that makes it of interest not only to students and scholars of Shakespeare studies and Renaissance literature, but to readers inside and outside the academy interested in the drama of national identities in a time of transition.

Hamlin's study provides the first full-scale account of the reception and literary appropriation of ancient scepticism in Elizabethan and Jacobean England (c. 1570-1630). Offering abundant archival evidence as well as fresh treatments of Florio's Montaigne and Bacon's career-long struggle with the challenges of epistemological doubt, Hamlin's book explores the deep connections between scepticism and tragedy in plays ranging from Doctor Faustus and Troilus and Cressida to The Tragedy of Mariam , The Duchess of Malfi , and 'Tis Pity She's a Whore .