Description
Book SynopsisTrade ReviewThe traces of the past are everywhere visible in the England of Jeremy Black's compendious new guide, England in the Age of Shakespeare. . . . Black attempts to capture a sense of early modern mentality: the average English person's worldview, the religious leanings of a multiply converted populace, the extent of the continuing faith in white and black magic. It is an inevitably fractured and overlapping picture, and Black is right to point out that the 'tensions and rift lines' visible in Elizabethan and Jacobean popular culture 'reflected the ambiguities and confusions of contemporary thought' (12–13). . . . This is a work of history not dramatic criticism, and . . . Black makes up for it with his richness of detail about the sights and sounds of early modern England.
-- Will Tosh * Journal of British Studies *
Table of ContentsPreface
1. The Imagination of the Age
2. The World of the Plays
3. A Dynamic Country
4. London
5. Narrating the Past: The History Plays
6. The Narrative of Politics
7. The Political Imagination
8. Social Conditions, Structures, and Assumptions
9. Health and Medicine
10. Cultural Trends
11. England and Europe
12. The Wider World: Locating Prospero
13. As We Like Him
Selected Further Reading
Index
