By Victor Kiernan
Contributor note: creation by means of Michael wooden
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With Shakespeare: Poet and Citizen, Kiernan monitors how profoundly delicate Shakespeare was once to the large social and political upheavals of his age. throughout the playwright’s lifetime, he observed the 1st demanding situations to monarchical rule, in addition to severe ameliorations in England’s social hierarchy.
Shakespeare witnessed and capitalized on those occasions, utilizing significant social alterations, corresponding to rebellious new woman roles, prominently in his comedies, which function id confusion, gender bending, and cross-dressing. His historic performs, equally, mirror the loss of life of feudal allegiances and the improvement of the fashionable country.
By putting those performs in the context of England’s rising modernity, Kiernan brilliantly upends our traditional perceptions of Shakespeare’s work.
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Extra resources for Shakespeare: Poet and Citizen
Example text
328). l59-60). 35). Clearer evidence of regret for a hasty marriage may be the almost obsessive disapproval of pre-marital sex to be found in plays as far apart as Romeo andJuliet and The Tempest. At any rate, his wife was unlikely to be congenial company for long for a young man whose mind was developing as extraordinarily quickly as Shakespeare's must have been. From 1585 to 1592 he disappears from view. At some date - which may have been 1589 - he made his way to London, as other young Stratford men were doing.
Among the feudalists, Gloucester is the most estimable. More than in Part I, he emerges clearly as a faithful statesman who, as Protector during Henry's minority, kept order well. But he has grown old and tired, and is being pulled down by his enemies; there is real pathos here, and some likeness to the dying John of Gaunt in Richard II His afflictions are worsened by the plotting, and disgrace, of his ambitious wife. This embryo Lady Macbeth warns him that he too will come to grief; she is right.
Whether he ever became a wide reader has been queried (Hart 9); if not, his vast and ever-expanding vocabulary is all the harder to account for. From about 1575 his father's affairs were going downhill; he was never bankrupt, but for years he was harassed by debts and lawsuits, and lost his place on the town council. This was happening during William's adolescence, a sensitive time for him to be exposed to such a family comedown; it may well have left a permanent scar. W. Gray 102). Early in his life Shakespeare was familiar with the spectre of poverty; it may have taught him both fellow-feeling with the poor, and a determination not to be condemned to a life of deprivation himself If the family's decline had a disorientating effect on him, one result may have been - if we can trust an old story - his poaching escapades and prosecution by the landowner Sir Thomas Lucy.