Shakespeare's England - Softcover

R.E. Pritchard

3.68

63 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0750924454 ISBN 13: 9780750924450

Publisher: Sutton Publishing Ltd, 1999

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What was life like in Shakespeare's time - or, what did people then say it was like? This volume provides a picture of the age, with a selection of accounts of Elizabethan and Jacobean life taken from books, plays, poems, letters, diaries and pamphlets by and about Shakespeare's contemporaries. Extracts have been taken from a wide range of writers, including 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), Stubbs (with a Puritan's 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. Also included are accounts of theatre-going, May Day celebrations, Queen Elizabeth at court, the place of women, education, garden books and herbals, clothes, food, drink and religion. The extracts are organized thematically, each section having an introduction reflecting modern historical research. A miscellany of some of the best, wittiest and most unusual of 16th and 17th-century writing, this book aims to bring to life the variety, the energy and the often harsh reality of the society that produced England's greatest writer.

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About the Author:

R.E.Pritchard was formerly a lecturer in English at Keele University. He has also edited Poetry by English Women, The Sidney Psalms, Lady Mary Wroth and Dickens's England.

From Publishers Weekly:

Where might a knave find a loose lady in the time of Queen Elizabeth? What vegetable did Jacobean doctors prescribe for a scorpion bite? And what manner of man was described as "an intelligible ass, or a silly fellow in black, that speaks sentences more familiarly than sense"? (Answers below.) These amusing vignettes, collected by British historian Pritchard from 16th- and 17th-century writing, presents us with a riotously complex, compellingly vile and invariably colorful world. With its Morisco gowns, tight French breeches and elegantly bare-breasted Faerie Queene, this was a vibrant age with a craze for fashion. But the Elizabethans could puncture pretension as easily as conjure beauty or majesty: witness the glorious, hideous picture of "The Sonneteer's Beloved," which illustrates the clich s of lyric love poetry in an alarming collage of a woman with lips of pink coral and teeth of pearls. The age's joie de vivre is heightened by the backdrop of plague and poverty, and despite the ominously hackneyed decision to open the book with the invocation of "This earth, this realm, this England," the editor recognizes that the merriment of the royal court was always accompanied elsewhere by Third World levels of suffering. Thematic selections on "Women and Men," "London," "Poverty, Crime and Punishment," etc., are prefaced by brief, sensible introductions. But with documents headed "Teach Yourself Rogue's Cant" or "Amaze Your Friends with Home Magic," the book gravitates inexorably toward the coffee-table. (Answers: the theater; a beetroot; a scholar.) History Book Club selection. (Jan.)

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