"Cliff Notes - Taming of the Shrew, The" - читать интересную книгу автора (Cliff Notes)

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE: THE AUTHOR AND HIS TIMES

William Shakespeare's life (1564-1616) spanned the end of Queen
Elizabeth's reign (1558-1603) and the first half of James I's
(1603-1625). It was a very interesting time, with considerable
social change and intellectual excitement and a general broadening of
the horizons of the English. England had adopted a national
Christianity in 1539, when Elizabeth's father, Henry VIII,
established the Church of England and threw off allegiance to the
Roman Catholic Pope. In 1588, as Shakespeare began to write his
first plays, England defeated the great Spanish Armada in the English
Channel. London was a bustling center of commerce, politics, and
learning, with the Royal Court as the pivotal point. Expeditions to
the New World set off almost every year, and the gold of South
America was buying silks and satins from China for the English
merchants and aristocracy.

But, as England moved toward economic supremacy and scientific
sophistication, older ideas kept their hold. Most of society still
believed in a hierarchical system in which everything and everybody
had a fixed place. The world was organized into a series of
pyramids--the overarching pyramid had God at its apex. In the
political sphere, the sovereign ruled by divine right with subjects
in ranks below. In the family, the husband was the equivalent of God
in the universe--the wife was to obey the husband, the children were
to obey their parents in the same order, and the servants were
supposed to obey all above them.

Yet at the same time Elizabethans were acutely aware that the world
did not always conform to this ideal order. In an era when political
dissent was still expressed in religious terms, the new religious
movement called Puritanism challenged aspects of the established
regime. On the other hand, to neighboring Catholic countries
England's defiance of the Pope was itself a kind of radical defiance
of authority. And some English subjects felt that Elizabeth was not
harsh enough on either Catholics or Puritans. One of these, the 2nd
Earl of Essex, attempted to overthrow her in 1601. In the name of
mounting a more effective defense of "order," this man committed the
most extreme offense against the established order, the attempted
overthrow of a monarch. Shakespeare was well aware of these tensions
and ironies, and his plays express them. In The Taming of the Shrew
order is re-established by teaching a wife to obey, yet that
disobedient wife is often a more appealing character than the people
who are shocked by her behavior.

Just as England was expanding its commercial and intellectual
horizons, the English language was enjoying a huge expansion of
vocabulary, in part from the languages encountered by explorers and
merchants. Language was a source of pleasure to the Elizabethans.