Shakespeare and the Ideas of his Time

Summary

There is scarcely a work on Shakespeare which does not touch on what he thought, what his age thought, or on the relationship between the two. In the following pages only the more influential comments of the last fifty years on Elizabethan ideas of nature and supernature, politics and society, psychology and ethics, can be referred to; only in their broader aspects; and only so far as they bear directly on Shakespeare's mind and art.

A common fallacy would have it that Shakespeare studies in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century consisted mainly of sentimental biography, character-analysis and patriotic effusions on the history plays. In fact much of the groundwork for an understanding of Elizabethan thought was laid in this time. T. A. Spalding had distinguished in Eliiabethan Demonology the conflicting attitudes of the time to ghosts and supernatural manifestations. Edward Dowden's seminal essay ‘Elizabethan Psychology’ clearly anatomised the ‘little world of man‘. In the political historical field C. L. Kingsford traced the line of Tudor histories and their influence on Shakespeare. Others had considered Shakespeare's possible debt to the advanced thinkers of the age. Edward Meyer's Machiavelli and Eliiabethan Drama concluded that the Shakespearian villain was based on popular travesties of a Machiavelli known only through Gentillet's distortions.