Shakespeare's Restless World
Category: Books,Biographies & Memoirs,Historical,Europe,Great Britain
Shakespeare's Restless World Details
What was life like for Shakespeare's first audiences? In a time of political and religious unrest and economic expansion, how did Elizabethan play-goers make sense of their changing world? What did the plays mean to the public when they were first performed? In this fascinating series, Neil MacGregor attempts to answer these questions by examining 20 objects from that turbulent period. There are grand objects such as a communion chalice, a Venetian goblet, and Dr Dee's mirror, as well as everyday items such as a theatregoer's fork and an apprentice's cap. From Drake's circumnavigation medal to an eye relic, he uses these objects to explore the issues that shaped Shakespeare's plays, and considers what they reveal about the concerns and beliefs of Shakespearean England. Speaking to scholars, historians and experts, he discusses the topics raised - everything from exploration and discovery to violence, entertainment, and the plague.
Reviews
When you go to a museum and you look an old object, you can read a brief label about it. But in an ideal museum you would be able to read an entire essay about how an object was used and what it meant in the context of the culture of its time.You cannot do this in a museum, because you cannot read an essay while standing in front of a glass case. But the author of this book, Neil MacGregor, lets you know what it would be like if museums had armchairs. In a previous volume, "A History of the World in 100 Objects", he takes an object, say, a Korean roof tile 1,300 years old, and explains how a person of that period would have regarded it, what it meant in the context of its time.He has done the same thing in "Shakespeare's World" with 20 objects from Shakespeare's time. An example is a silver medallion about 2½ inches in diameter, made in commemoration of Drake's circumnavigation of the earth in 1577-80, when Shakespeare was a teenager. In order to truly under this object, you have to know that Shakespeare lived when Europeans first began to understand the world in an entirely new way, a great round globe (one of his theaters was named "The Globe"), full of brave new worlds with strange and wondrous people in them. His plays are full of references to maps (Comedy of Errors), strange lands (The Tempest) and exotic foreigners (Othello, Shylock). To have lived in Shakespeare's time was to have begun to see the world in an entirely new way, just like for us the world changed when we saw images of the earth taken from space.Another object is a communion cup. In order to understand this object you have to know that everyone was forced to drink from such cups in church and everyone had, by law, to go the church. It helps to know this when Claudius orders Hamlet to drink from a goblet, and when Gertrude refuses to obey him when he tells her not to.Another object is a fork, an elegant and rare object lost by some rich person in the audience while watching a play. This signifies luxury, which is associated with Italy. This chapter contains information on Elizabethan foods, and explains what Falstaff's meal would have meant to the audience: "potatoes", rare and exotic, "kissing comfits", breath mints in a land of primitive dentistry, and "sea holly", an aphrodisiac.The book helped me to better understand Shakespeare's world and his plays. I kept wondering, however, how the author had time to both run the British Museum, and also write such fascinating books.