Shakespeare's Plays-Mirrors of An Age

In his entire career, William Shakespeare never once set a play in Elizabethan England. His characters lived in Medieval England, fifteenth -century Italy, and ancient Rome, in mythical countries, and unchartered islands-anywhere and everywhere, in fact, but in Shakespeare's own time and place. But all Shakespeare's plays-even when they were set in the most exotic locations-reflected the life of Elizabeth's England, and after her death in 1603, that of her successor, James I.

Like all art, Shakespeare's plays mirror the life, language, and ideas of the age in which they were created. They are extraordinary plays and they reflect an extraordinary world. Certain things about them will be easier to understand if we know a little more about Elizabethan England.

Elizabeth's reign was an age of exploration-exploration of the world, exploration of man's nature, and exploration of the far reaches of the English Language. This sudden flowering of the spoken and written word gave us two great monuments- the King James Bible, and the plays of Shakespeare- and many other treasures as well.

Shakespeare made full use of the adventurous Elizabethan attitude toward language. He employed more words than any other writer in history-more than 21,000 different words appear in the plays- and he never hesitated to try a new word-revive an old one, or make one up. Among the words which first appeared in print in his works are such every day terms, "critic", "assassinate", "bump", "gloomy", "suspicious" and 'hurry". He invented dozens of phrases which we use today. Some examples are "catching a cold", "the mind's eye" "elbow room" and "pomp, and circumstance."

Elizabethan England was a time for heroes. The ideal man was a courtier, an adventurer, a poet, a fencer, a conversationalist, a musician and a gentleman. The real heroes of the age did all these things and more.

Despite the greatness of some Elizabethan ideal, others seem small and undignified to us. Marriage, for example, was often arranged to bring wealth and prestige to a family, with little regard for the feelings of the bride. In fact, women were relatively powerless under the law.

The idea that women were lower than men was one small part of a vast concern with order which was extremely important to many Elizabethans. Most people believed that everything rrom the lowest grain of sand to the highest angel had its proper position in the scheme of things. This concept was called, "the great chain of being." When things were in their proper place, harmony was the result; when order was violated, the entire structure was shake.

Hierarchy is a system of ranking persons or things one above another; it is a form of ordering. The Elizabethans sought to structure their world with such a system. In this way, each of God's creatures had an allotted position-degree, priority and place. The pyramid descended from God, to the angels, to man, to women, to animals to vegetation, and even to stones. Since man had a soul, he held a pivotal place. In addition to cosmic correspondences, analogical thinking existed.

Astrology was another attempt at explaining nature. Although controversial, many of Shakespeare's audience believed in the influence of the stars. Comets and meteors were thought of as omens which predicted some important future event.

All these ideas find expression in Shakespeare's plays, along with hundreds of others-most of them not as strange to our own way of thinking. As dramatized by the greatest playwright in the
history of the world, the plays offer us a fascinating glimpse of the thoughts and passions of a brilliant age. Elizabethan England was brief sky rocket of art, adventure and ideas which quickly burned out; but Shakespeare's plays keep the best parts of that time alight forever!