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Shakespeare, William

Understanding Shakespeare > Literary criticism > Twentieth century and beyond > Historical criticism

Increasingly in the 20th century, scholarship furthered an understanding of Shakespeare's social, political, economic, and theatrical milieu. Shakespeare's sources came under new and intense scrutiny. Elmer Edgar Stoll, in Art and Artifice in Shakespeare (1933), stressed the ways in which the plays could be seen as constructs intimately connected with their historical environment. Playacting depends on conventions, which must be understood in their historical context. Costuming signals meaning to the audience; so does the theatre building, the props, the actors' gestures.

Accordingly, historical critics sought to know more about the history of London's theatres (as in John Cranford Adams's well-known model of the Globe playhouse or in C. Walter Hodges's The Globe Restored [1953]), about audiences (Alfred Harbage, As They Liked It [1947]; and Ann Jennalie Cook, The Privileged Playgoers of Shakespeare's London, 1576–1642 [1981]), about staging methods (Bernard Beckerman, Shakespeare at the Globe 1599–1609 [1962]), and much more. Other scholarly studies examined censorship, the religious controversies of the Elizabethan era and how they affected playwriting, and the heritage of native medieval English drama. Studies in the history of ideas have examined Elizabethan cosmology, astrology, philosophical ideas such as the Great Chain of Being, physiological theories about the four bodily humours, political theories of Machiavelli and others, the skepticism of Montaigne, and much more. See also Sidebar: Shakespeare on Theatre; Sidebar: Shakespeare and the Liberties; and Sidebar: Music in Shakespeare's Plays.

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