Issues Elizabethans confronted in their world and in the theatre – assassination, succession, tyrannicide, holidays – were not only steeped in but produced by religious division.

Since the end of the seventeenth century critics and editors of Julius Caesar have focused almost exclusively on the play’s unforgettable characters and gripping political drama. From their perspective, the religious bits that surface throughout the play were ‘palpable blunders’ and for a long time they did their best to ignore or repair them. When, in 1693, Thomas Rymer condemned the play’s anachronisms as ‘a sacrilege’, his language ironically registers the extent to which a fixed notion of what Shakespeare’s Roman play ought to be – classical, political and pagan – had displaced the mix of religion and politics that Shakespeare’s audience would have taken for granted. Issues Elizabethans confronted in their world and in the theatre – assassination, succession, tyrannicide, holidays – were not only steeped in but produced by religious division. Part of Shakespeare’s genius was discovering in Plutarch’s old story the fault lines of his own milieu.
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Moral qualms aside, the real problem with political assassination for Elizabethans – and Shakespeare’s play makes this abundantly clear – was that it unleashed forces that could not be predicted or controlled. Assassination was linked with chaos, blood-letting and potential civil war because this was what it invariably led to. However noble Brutus’ motives, however morally and politically justified his actions, it would have been clear to many in Shakespeare’s audience that he hadn’t thought things through. Critics who fault Julius Caesar for being a broken-backed play, who are disappointed by the final two acts and who feel that the assassination takes place too early in the action, fail to understand that the two parts of the play – the events leading up to the assassination and the bloody civil strife that follow – go hand in hand.

J. Shapiro, 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare (2005), 156 and 163

This whole section on how deeply Julius Caesar is informed by the French Wars of Religion was fascinating.

Bizarrely, modern-day editors, who ought to know better, have followed suit

This unusual epilogue survives by accident – or rather, due to carelessness. The Second Part of Henry the Fourth was published less than two years after this. When the manuscript was passed along to the printing house, both versions of the epilogue were bundled with it. The compositor setting type, unsure of what to do, printed both but left an extra bit of space between the Whitehall and Curtain versions. Had he thought about it more, he might have realized that it made no sense for the speaker to kneel to the Queen midway through the epilogue and then spring up again. When the compositor of the 1623 Folio came upon this crux he too decided not to choose between the two but also melded them into a single epilogue, though he at least tried to mend things by moving the prayer to the Queen to the end of the epilogue. Bizarrely, modern-day editors, who ought to know better, have followed suit, leaving the confusion intact and obscuring why and how Shakespeare redirects his art at this time.

J. Shapiro, 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare (2005), 41

Shakespeare and his fellow dramatists were writing for the most experienced playgoers in history

In 1600, in an England of four million, London and its immediate environs held a population of roughly two hundred thousand. If, on any given day, two plays were staged in playhouses that held as many as two to three thousand spectators each, it’s likely that with theatres even half-full, as many as three thousand or so Londoners were attending a play. Over the course of a week – conservatively assuming five days of performances each week – fifteen thousand Londoners paid to see a play. Obviously, some never went at all, or rarely, while others – including young and generally well-to-do law students at the Inns of Court – made up for that, seeing dozens of plays a year; but on average, it’s likely that over a third of London’s adult population saw a play every month. Which meant that Shakespeare and his fellow dramatists were writing for the most experienced playgoers in history.

J. Shapiro, 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare (2005), 9-10

How in the course of little over a year he went from writing The Merry Wives of Windsor to writing a play as inspired as Hamlet

This work, then, grew out of frustration with how much I didn’t know and frustration with scholars of all critical denominations who never quite got around to addressing the question I found most pressing: how, at age thirty-five, Shakespeare went from being an exceptionally talented writer to being one of the greatest who ever lived – put another way: how in the course of little over a year he went from writing The Merry Wives of Windsor to writing a play as inspired as Hamlet.

J. Shapiro, 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare (2005), loc. 152

Every town has its Rawlinson report, its grim accounts of filthy streets and wretched, overcrowded hovels. Why dwell on such details? In Britain most of us doing family history will find that our ancestors were poor by our standards; their lives were harder, shorter; they lived in accommodation we could hardly stomach, on streets whose stench would make us gag; their diseases were more terrible and unchecked; their morality wayward and improvised; their accidents crippling. They coped; they put up with it; they died of it. From the perspective of much of the documentation of the period, my ancestors were merely part of what one local historian of Portsmouth calls ‘the perennial inescapable problem of poverty’. But much of it was escapable. Why go back to the past only to feel washed by an amorphous pity? Anger is more bracing. Nor is this merely a matter

Ec Why dwell on such details? In Britain most of us doing family history will find that our ancestors were poor by our standards; their lives were harder, shorter; they lived in accommodation we could hardly stomach, on streets whose stench would make us gag; their diseases were more terrible and unchecked; their morality wayward and improvised; their accidents crippling. They coped; they put up with it; they died of it. From the perspective of much of the documentation of the period, my ancestors were merely part of what one local historian of Portsmouth calls ‘the perennial inescapable problem of poverty’. But much of it was escapable. Why go back to the past only to feel washed by an amorphous pity? Anger is more bracing. 

A. Light, Common People: The History of An English Family (2014), loc. 3,479

People want to know where they came from but they also want to know where they could have gone

Family history constantly goes back to the future, mapping the distances that grow between the branches, asking why some flourish and others wither – historical questions which are always more than a matter of individual character. People want to know where they came from but they also want to know where they could have gone and why their branch of the family did not go there.

A. Light, Common People: The History of An English Family (2014), loc. 1,680

Our lack of trust in politicians is problematic, but it’s a long-term condition rather than a sudden, acute crisis.

Our lack of trust in politicians is problematic, but it’s a long-term condition rather than a sudden, acute crisis. For example, less than one in five people in Britain trust our politicians to tell the truth – but this is the same as when the survey started four decades ago. 

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Britain is far from alone in its political leaders being trusted by only small minorities of the population. The overall pattern and level of trust in politicians is similar across a collection of around 20 countries in Europe, with consistently low levels over the last 16 years and not much difference between generations. The truth is that we’ve been disappointed in our politicians for a long time. 

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Even in August 1944, with the Second World War reaching a climax, when a polling company asked, ‘Do you think that British politicians are out merely for themselves, for their party or to do their best for their country?’, only 36 per cent of respondents chose the last option. 

B. Duffy, The Generation Divide (2023), loc. 3,336