Thursday Thoughts: The Elizabethan Age

In the Shadow Library

Well, all this Shakespeare over the past few days of course have put me in mind of his milieu, the Elizabethan Age, with perhaps a bit of overlap with the Jacobean Age, like Shakespeare himself. Last night I put on Elizabeth R., the 1971 BBC miniseries. I have vague memories of flipping past it on PBS, either in commercials or just going around the dial. My attention was snagged by strange costumes and odd, melancholy music.

Shakespeare, of course, was everywhere, woven into the DNA of popular culture, but mostly in a semi-embarrassed nature, men in hose and codpieces using a lot of thees and thous and -eths, everywhere from Hamlet on Gilligan’s Island (“I ask to be, or not to be …) to Romeo and Juliet (“Romeo, oh, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?”) everywhere, from cartoons to sitcoms. There was even advertising for Falstaff beer, featuring the rotund, jovial toper from Henry IV, etc. Shakespeare was a vast omnipresent mythology almost totally dark to me. I remember looking into the squat red Complete Plays in Omi’s middle room and trying to puzzle out the first play (The Tempest); the text was printed in double columns, like a Bible. I must have been 9 or 10.

Well, my familiarity with Shakespeare grew over the years. Romeo and Juliet in middle school, I think (I tried writing my own play, The Three Loonies; or The Stolen Letter); in high school we read Julius Caesar (and I tried to put on a half-assed, self-edited version of King Lear in Drama); and then came the great class with Dr. Walz in college where I really got into the Bard. I began delving into the background of the plays, the history of Shakespeare and his age, and his fellow playwrights of the time.

It didn’t hurt that there was a backlog of Shakespeare films on tap, from Laurence Olivier, to Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, to Orson Welles, to Franco Zeffirelli. Every decade there were new films coming out, from straight historical presentations of the plays to stories adapted to modern settings (often with interpretations that the playwright could never have imagined), to biographies about Shakespeare himself.

In addition to this embarrassment of riches from Shakespeare, the Elizabethan Age itself offers vast interest and varied diversion. Here are a few volumes I would like that are on the Wish List, three added just last night.