BACKGROUND In Shakespeare’s day there was neither television nor radio, neither dictionaries nor history books as we know them, not even newspapers or magazines. Formal schooling took place in Latin and covered classical texts from ancient Greece and Rome. University schooling generally prepared students for ...
Sir Philip Sidney Sir Philip Sidney (1554-1586) was a courtier, soldier, and poet, who, with the likes of Sir Walter Raleigh and Thomas Wyatt, were the English examples of the Renaissance man. Also like Raleigh and Wyatt, he ran afoul of the reigning monarch, and ...
Edmund Spenser Edmund Spenser (c. 1552-1599) can be rightfully considered England’s finest poet of the sixteenth century. (Shakespeare and Donne, his rivals for such a credit, lived and wrote into the seventeenth century and in a sense belong more properly to the later age, although ...
Raphael Holinshed (died c. 1580) is one of the mysterious souls from the English Renaissance who left a lasting mark but almost no other trace of himself. He published in 1577 the Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland, a massive compilation of history and myth ...
Geoffrey of Monmouth Geoffrey of Monmouth (c. 1100—c. 1155), an English bishop and scholar, wrote what he called a translation of an ancient history of English kings which told largely legendary stories of English kings from the original Brutus, held to be a descendant of ...
Shakespeare borrowed plots and ideas from other material for the bulk of his writing. His two long poems tell old tales, and only four of the commonly recognized 38 plays have no known single-organizing precedent (Love’s Labor Lost, Midsummer Night’s Dream, A Winter’s Tale, Tempest). ...
