Shakespeare: The World as Stage

“Was Hamlet a Man or a Woman?” and others of similarly inventive cast.

Was Hamlet a Man or a Woman?” and others of similarly inventive cast.

patently could do both

John Shakespeare rose through a series of positions of authority in which an inability to read would have been a tiresome, if not insuperable, handicap

reasonably consequential town

when his father, John, was fined 1 shilling for keeping a dung heap in Henley Street in Stratford. This was a matter not just of civic fussiness but of real concern because of the town’s repeated plague outbreaks

sumptuary laws weren’t actually much enforced

unusual for felons to be disemboweled

they were raised abruptly—and, for most people, crushingly

their habit of being willfully disobedient to authority and dangerously outspoken