Teachers' Resource Web

Shakespeare Introduction

Home | Questions | Guides | Links

Richard Kroll, UCI

CONTEXT:

(A) End of the Sixteenth Century--the Advent of Scepticism:

--Montaigne, Essays, especially "The Apology for Raymond Sebond"

--His scepticism derives from reading of Sextus Empiricus' Outlines of Pyrrhonism and Against the Mathematicians.

--See also Academic scepticism in the works of Cicero, especially the Academica. Cicero's work constituted the basic teaching text by the end of the sixteenth century.

(B) The Nature of the Reformation:

--Individual given new freedom of conscience

--New sense of statehood

--Luther:

The rise of the vernacular

Lutheran Bible

Wycliffe Bible

The Authorized Version, 1613

--Protestantism as key feature of "Englishness":

Attacks from without (Spanish Armada, 1588) Cult of Elizabeth I (Astrea; the Virgin Queen)

(C) Rise of a New Middle Class--Early Capitalism; Feudalism Being Swept Away.

General Questions:

1. What was the nature of Elizabeth I's claim to the throne? Who was her grandfather? How secure was the succession?

2. What is the sixteenth-century and early-seventeenth-century ideology of kingship (not altered until the English Civil War)? See the "Somers Tracts." What, for example, are the metaphors of kingship that James I uses?

3. What can one do if a king behaves badly?