Saturday, 28 February 2026

Those familiar with his sources expected Cordelia to live

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When Shakespeare had King Lear enter with Cordelia dead in his arms, he caught his audience by surprise, all the more so because those famil...
Friday, 27 February 2026

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

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Since the end of the seventeenth century critics and editors of Julius Caesar have focused almost exclusively on the play’s unforgettable ch...
Thursday, 26 February 2026

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

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This unusual epilogue survives by accident – or rather, due to carelessness. The Second Part of Henry the Fourth was published less than two...
Wednesday, 25 February 2026

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

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In 1600, in an England of four million, London and its immediate environs held a population of roughly two hundred thousand. If, on any give...
Monday, 23 February 2026

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

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This work, then, grew out of frustration with how much I didn’t know and frustration with scholars of all critical denominations who never q...
Sunday, 22 February 2026

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

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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 live...
Saturday, 21 February 2026

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

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Family history constantly goes back to the future, mapping the distances that grow between the branches, asking why some flourish and others...