The Personal Shakespeare, Vol. 5 of 15 (Classic Reprint)

Excerpt from The Personal Shakespeare, Vol. 5 of 15<br/><br/>Deaths of Greene and Marlowe had left the play wright's ground unexpectedly clear. Moreover, he was able to gauge the profound influence which the Wars of the Roses had had upon the temper and sentiment of the English people. Tentatively, in his adapted and collaborated plays, he had sounded the enthusiasm of an Elizabethan audience for representations of events so near and significant to them, but so little known in historical detail. Shakespeare himself came of a stock that had shed their blood on Bosworth Field. Within the mem ory of the generation that reared him, his own county of Warwickshire had been torn asunder by the civil strife: Warwick was for the White Rose, and Coventry for the Red. The atmosphere of his childhood was steeped in the traditions of battle. When peace was established, this became the favourite county for royal visits and pro gresses. The Tudor ideal of national unity seized and held the imagination of Shakespeare to the last. In such an age, after centuries of dis ruption, the security of the Throne seemed the all important thing, and civil liberties took a secondary place. This alone can be the dramatist's excuse for ignoring utterly the struggle between the king and the people which culminated in the M agna C harta. A trumpet-call to rally round Elizabeth in her fight for England is Mr. J. R. Green's summing up of Shakespeare's King John.<br/><br/>About the Publisher<br/><br/>Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com<br/><br/>This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.