Elizabeth’s Reviews > Soul of the Age: The Life, Mind and World of William Shakespeare > Status Update

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).