This image is the cover for the book England in the Age of Shakespeare

England in the Age of Shakespeare

A social history of Renaissance England that raises the curtain on the cultural influences that inspired Shakespeare’s plays.

How did it feel to hear Macbeth’s witches chant of “double, double toil and trouble” at a time when magic and witchcraft were as real as anything science had to offer? How were justice and forgiveness understood by the audience who first watched King Lear; how were love and romance viewed by those who first saw Romeo and Juliet? In England in the Age of Shakespeare, Jeremy Black takes readers on a tour of life in the streets, homes, farms, churches, and palaces of the Bard’s era. Panning from play to audience and back again, Black shows how Shakespeare's plays would have been experienced and interpreted by those who paid to see them. From the dangers of travel to the indignities of everyday life in teeming London, Black explores the jokes, political and economic references, and small asides that Shakespeare’s audiences would have recognized. These moments of recognition often reflected the audience’s own experiences of what it was to, as Hamlet says, “grunt and sweat under a weary life.” Black’s clear and sweeping approach seeks to reclaim Shakespeare from the ivory tower and make the plays’ histories more accessible to the public for whom the plays were always intended.

Jeremy Black

Jeremy Black has recently retired as Professor of History at the University of Exeter. Graduating from Cambridge with a starred first, he did postgraduate work at Oxford and then taught at Durham, eventually as professor, before moving to Exeter in 1996. He has lectured extensively in Australia, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, New Zealand, and the United States, where he has held visiting chairs at West Point, Texas Christian University, and Stillman College. He was appointed to the Order of Membership of the British Empire for services to stamp design. His books include The British Seaborne Empire, Contesting History and Rethinking World War Two.

Indiana University Press