Status Updates From Soul of the Age: The Life, ...

Elizabethan geopolitics--how much of it did Shakespeare use in his plays? Surprisingly interesting but also sooo complex and new to me!

I love that there was a vogue in the 1590s for sonneteering. 😂

Fascinating this section about Shakespeare as businessman compared to his fellow playwrights. He was in the top 3 most financially successful because the Lord Chamberlain’s Men was a shared business enterprise, he seems to have been frugal himself, and he made shrewd investments. Reminds me of how concerned Trollope was with how much his novels made. He has a forebear in Shakespeare! Writers gotta live!

“If one bears in mind the method of close reading in which he was trained at school, not to mention his prodigious memory both for the plays he saw or acted in and the other books he devoured and disposed of casually, then there need be no anxiety about the idea of a middle-class provincial grammar-school boy having the intellectual resources to write the plays (156).

So much in this section! The scene ages of man, why the Elizabethans translated Greek works into English, the importance of Ovid in Shakespeare’s works and imagination.

That chapter gave my brain a workout!!

“Literacy and moral education were regarded as the very foundation of the state or commonwealth” (81).

This is about the grammar schools that were established using monastic funds (from the dissolution of the monasteries) in Edward VI’s reign. Shakespeare attended one.

So many ah ha moments! The Elizabethans were the first to develop identities and histories of England’s counties. This is when the idea of Kent being the “garden of England” came about, like in Austen’s Emma.

Sooo fascinating. Bate says that the plague and the Reformation cast the two biggest shadows across Shakespeare’s early days. Also that he lived between the two great cataclysms of English history, Henry VIII’s break from Rome and the execution of Charles I. “His plays were made possible by the first and helped to create the conditions that made possible the second” (18).

So excited!

“The book is intended as an intellectual biography of the man in the context of the mind-set into which he was born and out of which his works were created” (4).

Also about how Shakespeare is both a poet of his age and for all ages.