Indiana University Press
England in the Age of Shakespeare
Key Metrics
- Jeremy Black
- Indiana University Press
- Paperback
- 9780253042316
- 8.9 X 6.3 X 1.1 inches
- 1.2 pounds
- Literary Criticism > Shakespeare
- English
Secure TransactionBook Description
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.
Author Bio
Jeremy Black, a Senior Fellow, is professor of history at Exeter University. He studied at Queens’ College Cambridge, St John’s College Oxford, and Merton College Oxford before joining the University of Durham as a lecturer in 1980. There he gained his PhD and ultimately his professorship in 1994.
Black is a prolific lecturer and writer, the author of over 100 books. Many concern aspects of eighteenth century British, European and American political, diplomatic and military history. But he has also broadened his perspective, both temporally and geographically, and published on the history of the press, cartography, warfare, culture and on the nature and uses of history itself. Jeremy’s work adds up to the most sustained presentation of British history in recent decades. He is a major exponent of military, diplomatic and cartographic history and has been important in helping the British to look at their past, as well as in representing British history to foreign audiences.
- His books include Modern British History (Palgrave, 2000),
- The Politics of James Bond (Praeger, 2001),
- America as a Military Power 1775-1882 (Praeger, 2002),
- The World in the Twentieth Century (Longman, 2002),
- Parliament and Foreign Policy in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, 2004),
- The English Seaborne Empire, Yale, 2004,
- World War Two: A Military History (Routledge, 2003),
- Great Military Leaders and their Campaigns (Oct. 2008),
- Maps of War: Mapping conflict through the centuries (Conway, October 11, 2016),
- The Holocaust: History and Memory (Indiana University Press, August 14, 2016),
- Air Power: A Global History (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, March 10, 2016),
- War in Europe: 1450 to the Present (Bloomsbury Academic, February 11, 2016),
- Insurgency and Counterinsurgency: A Global History (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, August 3, 2016).
- The Society of Military History recognized Jeremy Black’s work in April 2008, presenting him with the Samuel Eliot Morison Prize for lifetime achievement.
Source: Foreign Policy Research Institute and JeremyBlack.com
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