Shakespeare: The World as Stage

by Bill Bryson

In the forty-five years of Elizabeth’s reign, fewer than two hundred Catholics were executed.

As Frank Kermode has noted, a quarter of Shakespeare’s plays would be built around questions of royal succession—though speculating about Elizabeth’s successor was very much against the law.

being Catholic was not particularly an act of daring in Elizabethan England. Being publicly Catholic, propagandizing for Catholicism, was another matter,

Tea and coffee were yet unknown.

Some of it is a little rich for modern tastes—for instance: And now she beats her heart, whereat it groans . . . “Ay me!” she cries, and twenty times, “Woe, woe!” But such lines struck a chord with Elizabethan readers and made the work an instant hit.

Shakespeare was just one of several poets—Thomas Nashe, Gervase Markham, John Clapham, and Barnabe Barnes were others—vying for Southampton’s benediction during the same period (his rivals’ obsequious dedications, not incidentally, make Shakespeare’s entreaties look restrained, honest, and frankly dignified).

Though Shakespeare is frequently categorized as an Elizabethan playwright, in fact much of his greatest output was Jacobean and he now produced a string of brilliant tragedies—Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus—and one or two lesser works, notably Timon of Athens, a play so difficult and seemingly incomplete that it is rarely performed today.

More than for any other writer, Shakespeare’s words stand separate from his life. This was a man so good at disguising his feelings that we can’t ever be sure that he had any. We know that Shakespeare used words to powerful effect, and we may reasonably presume that he had feelings. What we don’t know, and can barely even guess at, is where the two intersected.

Printers in Shakespeare’s day (and, come to that, long after) were notoriously headstrong and opinionated, and rarely hesitated to introduce improvements as they saw fit.