John Dover Wilson: Life in Shakespeare's England

Many people who have learned to enjoy Shakespeare feel they would like to know more about his life and times, and this authoritative book, reprinted again in Pelicans, is the answer. It is not a biographical study, but an anthology collected from many contemporary sources so as to Illuminate the conditions, the appearance, the habits, pastimes, and beliefs of Shakespeare's time. Professor Dover Wilson's method of assembling this panorama of the period is to pin-point the clues provided by scores of passages in the plays and follow them up by relevant supporting evidence from what we nowadays call the 'documentary' writers of the time. Thus we are able to see city and countryside, school and university, court and theatre, as the man of Shakespeare's day saw them with his own eyes. We observe at close quarters his sports, his superstitions, his daily life at home or abroad, his experiences in childhood and age. Actor, sailor, courtier, traveller, and beggar relate, in their own words, what living was like in the great days of sixteenth-century England.