Lucky’s Reviews > Shakespeare: The World as Stage > Status Update
Lucky
is on page 63 of 199
Tensions between Protestants and Catholics came to a head in 1586 when Mary, Queen of Scots, was implicated in a plot to overthrow the queen and Elizabeth agreed, reluctantly, that she must be executed. Killing a fellow monarch, however threatening, was a grave act, and it provoked a response. In the spring of the following year, Spain dispatched a mighty navy to capture the English throne and replace Elizabeth.
— 13 hours, 30 min ago
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Lucky
is on page 69 of 199
In 1587 a visitor from the country wrote excitedly to his father about an unexpected event he had seen at a performance by the Admiral’s Men: One actor had raised a musket to fire at another, but the
musket ball “missed the fellow he aimed at and killed a child, and a woman great with child forthwith, and hit another man in the head very sore.” It is astounding to suppose that actors were firing live muskets.
— 55 minutes ago
musket ball “missed the fellow he aimed at and killed a child, and a woman great with child forthwith, and hit another man in the head very sore.” It is astounding to suppose that actors were firing live muskets.
Lucky
is on page 64 of 199
The defeat of the Spanish Armada changed the course of history. It induced a rush of patriotism in England that Shakespeare exploited in his history plays (nearly all written in the following decade), and it gave England the confi dence and power to command the seas and build a global empire, beginning almost immediately with North America.
— 13 hours, 19 min ago
Lucky
is on page 61 of 199
“The more Elizabethan literature one reads,” he has written, “the more striking is Shakespeare’s paucity of religious reference.”
— 13 hours, 34 min ago
Lucky
is on page 51 of 199
At the end of the London bridge the heads of serious criminals, especially traitors, were displayed on poles. The headless bodies were hung above the entrance gates to the city. There were so many heads that it was necessary to employ a Keeper of the Heads. Shakespeare was possibly greeted by the heads of John Somerville and Edward Arden, who were executed in 1583 for a fumbling plot to kill the queen.
— Jan 12, 2026 06:49PM
Lucky
is on page 41 of 199
It was not unusual for a bride to be pregnant on her wedding day. Up to 40 percent of brides were in that state, according to one calculation, so why
the extravagant haste here is a matter that can only be guessed at. It was unusual, however, for a young man to be married at eighteen, as Shakespeare was. Men tended to marry in their mid-to late twenties, women a little sooner.
— Jan 10, 2026 06:29PM
the extravagant haste here is a matter that can only be guessed at. It was unusual, however, for a young man to be married at eighteen, as Shakespeare was. Men tended to marry in their mid-to late twenties, women a little sooner.
Lucky
is on page 33 of 199
Illiteracy was the usual condition in sixteenth-century England, to be sure. According to one estimate at least 70 percent of men and 90 percent of women of the period couldn’t even sign their names. But as one moved up the social scale, literacy rates rose appreciably. Among skilled craftsmen—a category that included John Shakespeare—some 60 percent could read, a clearly respectable proportion.
— Jan 10, 2026 06:09PM
Lucky
is on page 30 of 199
In 1586 Elizabeth ordered that Anthony Babington, a wealthy young Catholic who had plotted her assassination, should be made an example of. Babington was hauled down from the scaffold while still conscious and made to watch
as his abdomen was sliced open and the contents allowed to spill out. It was by this time an act of such horrifying cruelty that it disgusted even the bloodthirsty crowd.
— Jan 10, 2026 05:59PM
as his abdomen was sliced open and the contents allowed to spill out. It was by this time an act of such horrifying cruelty that it disgusted even the bloodthirsty crowd.
Lucky
is on page 28 of 199
The interest of the Crown was not so much to direct people’s religious beliefs as simply to be assured of their fealty. It is telling that Catholic priests when caught illegally preaching were normally charged not with heresy but with treason. So being Catholic was not particularly an act of daring in Elizabethan England. Being publicly Catholic, propagandizing for Catholicism, was another
matter.
— Jan 10, 2026 05:36PM
matter.
Lucky
is on page 26 of 199
The principal background event of the sixteenth century was England’s change from a Catholic society to a Protestant one—though the course was hardly smooth. England swung from Protestantism under Edward VI to Catholicism under Mary Tudor and back to Protestantism again under Elizabeth. With
each change of regime, officials who were too obdurate or dilatory to flee faced painful reprisals.
— Jan 10, 2026 05:21PM
each change of regime, officials who were too obdurate or dilatory to flee faced painful reprisals.
Lucky
is on page 24 of 199
The plague outbreak of 1564 was a vicious one. At least two hundred people died in Stratford, about ten times the normal rate. Even in nonplague years 16 percent of infants perished in England; in this year nearly two-thirds did. In a sense William Shakespeare’s greatest achievement in life wasn’t writing Hamlet or the sonnets but just surviving his first year.
— Jan 10, 2026 09:50AM
