England in the Age of Shakespeare

by Jeremy Black

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.

Genres: History, Nonfiction

428 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2019

About the author

Jeremy Black is an English historian, who was formerly a professor of history at the University of Exeter. He is a senior fellow at the Center for the Study of America and the West at the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, US.
Black is the author of over 180 books, principally but not exclusively on 18th-century British politics and international relations, and has been described by one commentator as "the most prolific historical scholar of our age". He has published on military and political history, including Warfare in the Western World, 1882–1975 (2001) and The World in the Twentieth Century (2002).

Reviews

[BAM doesn’t answer to her real name · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is not at all the format I was expecting, but that’s because I never think before diving. There’s that impulsivity popping out again.

[Andrea Engle · Rating 5 out of 5]

Jeremy Black is either an English Historian who knows Shakespeare like the back of his hand, or a Shakespearean Actor who revels in scenes from Elizabethan England ... an utterly fascinating account of English History seen through the lens of Shakespeare’s plays, particularly the History Plays which tell the story of the Wars of the Roses ... completely mesmerizing ...

by William Shakespeare
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by William Shakespeare
by William Shakespeare

[Allegria · Rating 5 out of 5]

A different approach to Shakespeare by a worthy historian. Jeremy Black explored numerous aspects of living in the Elizabethan age of Shakespeare and his writing. The book paints a picture of belief, love, fears and Shakespeare's portrayal of real, everyday life. Black probes these influences and their resulting effect on the playwright's creativity. An enjoyable, fascinating read.

[The Last Engineer · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is an interesting book to review because it is very mixed across the board. The chapters vary in quality, with the political ones outshining most of the others. There did seem to be a systematic approach in structuring the book, with the chapters beginning locally and on the psychological-cultural level, then moving toward the outside in space and time. Despite this systematic approach, the chapters do not cohere especially well. The parts do not build upon one another into a larger whole. As a reader, you do not progress in understanding in a way where previously introduced knowledge forms a foundation and elevates knowledge introduced later.

Additionally, there are many instances where the author tries to use evidence from the text as support for contextual information, but ends up falling flat. For example, the author tries to make the example that agriculture and farm animals figure prominently in Shakespeare's plays. Whatever the case may be (the author did not prove one way or other), the line given from Shakespeare's work as support of this was so flimsy that I could not take the premise seriously. There were several instances of this where I would come to the most ridiculous or clearly not correct supportive line from the text that it gave me vertigo as I wondered if Knoll's Law applied to the rest of the work.

Further, there is a lack of attention given to intellectual movements of the time, as well as little in the way of discussion about contemporaries of Shakespeare. And perhaps that is my key gripe with this work: without properly connecting Shakespeare to the age, the book fails to provide deeper illumination of either the period or the works, and therefore leaves the reader wondering if all that was talked about was for naught.

[Allegria · Rating 5 out of 5]

A stunning insight into Shakespeare's plays of Elizabethan and Jacobean life. Beautifully written and a joy to read.