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Excerpt from Shakespeare in His Age
Such a picture was not my purpose. I wanted to discover and describe what was happening in England, and even further afield, while Shakespeare was doing this and writing that. We all know that he was finishing Henry V at the time Of Essex's Irish campaign; but what was happening, what were other men doing - statesmen, courtiers, churchmen, sailors, poets and composers - when he married at the age Of eighteen, when he arrived in London, when he was writing Love's Labour's Lost, Macbeth and Pericles, and when he was collaborating with Fletcher? The only thing that matters, of course, is the writing, but it follows that anything that illuminates it is Of some value, and such a synthesis seems to me to be particularly illuminating. King yohn gains by being seen in the light Of the death of Drake, the Cadiz Raid, the Islands Voyage and the poetry of Donne, and Lear in that Of the Hampton Court Conference, Gun powder Plot and Volpone. Then, against this shifting scene Shake speare himself becomes a more comprehensible figure, and, after all, the scene itself is not the least interesting in our history.
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