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England in the Age of Shakespeare
- Narrated by: Simon Barber
- Length: 12 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged Audiobook
- Categories: History, Europe
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In the years leading up to 1606, since the death of Queen Elizabeth and the arrival in England of her successor, King James of Scotland, Shakespeare's great productivity had ebbed, and it may have seemed to some that his prolific genius was a thing of the past. But that year, at age 42, he found his footing again, finishing a play he had begun the previous autumn - King Lear - then writing two other great tragedies, Macbeth and Antony and Cleopatra.
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When published in hardcover in 1997, this book was praised for providing an engrossing education not only in naval strategy and tactics, but in Victorian social attitudes and the influence of character on history. In juxtaposing an operational with a cultural theme, the author comes closer than any historian yet to explaining what was behind the often-described operations of this famous 1916 battle at Jutland.
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Publisher's Summary
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.
The book is published by Indiana University Press. The audiobook is published by University Press Audiobooks.
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Reviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- Jerry G
- 03-02-21
A Great Book to Listen to
This book is fascinating. It covers not just the plays of Shakespeare but the history they present as well as that of Shakespeare's own lifetime. Black shows this world to be quite different from our own, one where life is very much "nasty, brutish and short." It is also the period in which England is coming together as a nation-state and the modern world is beginning to be born. The author covers every conceivable aspect of the history, reality of daily life and subsequent uses of Shakespeare up to our current day. Indeed, the book is so dense that listening to it -- especially as read by Simon Barber -- would be much the more enjoyable way of taking it all in. Barber brings the text to life and does an especially good job reading the many snippets from the plays. I highly recommend spending some time with Black and Barber..