Word: elizabethaning
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...author slipped on one quotation ["men must endure their going forth" should read "going hence"] and misattributed the Restoration opinion of Elizabethan plays; it was John Evelyn [rather than Samuel Pepys] who made the notation in his diary after seeing a performance of Hamlet. But these are venial sins. His judgment about the three big festivals, about American acting, Baconianism and some other topics is sound and pithily expressed...
...arms around 1576, he slipped into money troubles and was dropped from the list of aldermen. Will had not been overly prudent himself. According to parish records, he and Anne Hathaway were married posthaste, without the customary three readings of the banns-Anne was three months pregnant. By Elizabethan standards, Anne's pregnancy was no great scandal, but her age -an antique 26 or so to Will's 18-was. The sole clue as to how they got on together is a rather ambiguous bequest in Shakespeare's will: "Item, I give unto my wife my second...
...city whose temper Shakespeare had caught was in a ferment. In the "quick forge and working-house of thought," Elizabethan London was minting a new breed: Renaissance man. Never was the Englishman more Latin; bristling with Spanish pride at personal indignities, Italianate in his boastful womanizing, French in his world-playful wit. After the Spanish Armada went down (1588), England ruled the waves, and no one had ever so masterfully ruled England as Elizabeth I. The Elizabethan was agape at the sheer wonder of himself: "What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason! How infinite...
Dazzled by life, the Elizabethan was nonetheless on familiar terms with death...
Life Is Time's Fool. There is a rough parallel between Shakespeare's day and the present. The Elizabethan view of man was being threatened by a triple revolution. Copernicus had challenged the earth-centered universe, Montaigne had skeptically consigned man to the lowest rung of the animal kingdom, and Machiavelli had argued that statecraft was a matter of the basest self-interest, devoid of moral principle. Modern man has seen Einstein throw a curve into the cosmos, Freud lift the lid on the cauldron of the unconscious, and Marx upturn continents with the doctrine of dialectical material...