England in the Age of Shakespeare

Jeremy Black is Professor of History at the University of Exeter. He is author of many books, including Charting the Past: The Historical Worlds of Eighteenth-Century England; London: A History; and Mapping Shakespeare: An Exploration of Shakespeare's Worlds through Maps.

• Preface1. The Imagination of the Age2. The World of the Plays3. A Dynamic Country4. London 5. Narrating the Past: The History Plays6. The Narrative of Politics7. The Political Imagination8. Social Conditions, Structures, and Assumptions9. Health and Medicine10. Cultural Trends11. England and Europe12. The Wider World: Locating Prospero13. As We Like HimSelected Further ReadingIndex

"The traces of the past are everywhere visible in the England of Jeremy Black's compendious new guide, England in the Age of Shakespeare. . . . Black attempts to capture a sense of early modern mentality: the average English person's worldview, the religious leanings of a multiply converted populace, the extent of the continuing faith in white and black magic. It is an inevitably fractured and overlapping picture, and Black is right to point out that the 'tensions and rift lines' visible in Elizabethan and Jacobean popular culture 'reflected the ambiguities and confusions of contemporary thought' (12–13). . . . This is a work of history not dramatic criticism, and . . . Black makes up for it with his richness of detail about the sights and sounds of early modern England."—Will Tosh, Shakespeare's Globe, Journal of British Studies, reviewing a previous edition or volume