Who was William Shakespeare, what did Elizabethan society look like, how did his age imagine the order of the universe, and what was it like to watch a play at the Globe? Explore the timelines, the chain and the playhouse, then test yourself.
William Shakespeare
1564–1616
“All the world’s a stage.”
Life, career and the plays: a timeline and an overview of the works.
Explore his life and workThe Great Chain of Being
A view of the world
“Take but degree away, untune that string.”
Every being has its place. What happens in the plays when the order breaks?
Explore the chainTheatre in his time
London, 1576–1642
“Can this cockpit hold the vasty fields of France?”
The Globe, the actors, the audience and the rules of the stage.
Explore the playhouseHow to work with this page: read the four sections, use the interactive tools (timelines, society explorer, chain explorer, plays lab, Globe explorer) and finish with the exercises in “Practise”.
William Shakespeare was born in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1564 and died there in 1616. In between he became the most successful playwright of his time: an actor, a writer and a shareholder in the company that built the Globe. He wrote about 38 plays and 154 sonnets. Much of what we know is based on official records such as baptisms, contracts and his will. His private thoughts and feelings are largely unknown.
Click a year to see what happened.
The First Folio (1623) sorts the plays into comedies, histories and tragedies. Later editors added a fourth group, the late plays or romances. Choose a group to see the plays, their approximate dates and their main themes.
| Work | Group | Date | Main themes |
|---|
Verse and prose: Serious and noble characters mostly speak blank verse, unrhymed iambic pentameter. Comic characters, lower-status characters and letters are often in prose, and characters sometimes switch to prose when they are mad, angry or joking. A rhyming couplet often ends a scene. You can practise scanning verse in exercise 8 below.
Shakespeare lived under two rulers: Elizabeth I, who reigned from 1558 to 1603, and James I (1603–1625). The first period is called Elizabethan, the second Jacobean. In 1600 England had about four million inhabitants, and London, with roughly 200,000 people, was by far the biggest city. It was a society with clear ranks, a state church, a queen without an heir and a fast-growing capital in which theatre became a big business.
The clergyman William Harrison described the ranks in his Description of England (1577). He divided the people into four groups: gentlemen (nobles and gentry), citizens and burgesses, yeomen, and artificers and labourers. The explorer below shows the ranks in more detail.
Click a rank, from the top to the bottom.
The religious and political changes of the Tudor and early Stuart period shaped Shakespeare’s world. Click a year.
About 200,000 inhabitants by 1600: crowded, noisy and dirty, but also the centre of trade, guilds and apprentices. Many people came from the countryside to find work. The playhouses stood outside the city’s control, in districts known as the Liberties.
An unmarried woman was legally under her father’s authority, a married woman under her husband’s. Most women worked in the household, in trade or as servants, and girls rarely went to grammar school. Elizabeth I, a ruling queen, was the great exception.
Boys from middle-class families could attend grammar schools, where Latin was the main subject, and universities were for men only. Literacy was rising, but many people, especially women and the poor, could not read. Printing and the English Bible spread ideas, and the language grew quickly with new words.
Life expectancy was low and many children died young. The plague returned regularly, and theatres were closed when many people died. Doctors still explained illness with the theory of the four humours.
Bad harvests and rising prices made life hard, especially in the 1590s. Beggars and vagrants who could work were punished, and parishes were made responsible for the poor who could not. The fear of disorder was strong, which helps to explain why rulers stressed order (see the Great Chain of Being).
Sailors such as Francis Drake sailed around the world (1577–80). Trading companies grew, for example the East India Company (founded in 1600), and the first attempts to found colonies in America began. Foreigners and people from Africa lived in England in small numbers, and attitudes to outsiders are a theme of Othello and The Merchant of Venice.
Society and the plays: Rank, religion and succession are everywhere in Shakespeare’s plays. Malvolio’s dream of rising above his rank in Twelfth Night touches the fear of social climbing. The worry about who would follow Elizabeth I stands behind the plays about kings. In Macbeth, the porter jokes about an “equivocator”, which many readers connect with the trials after the Gunpowder Plot. And The Tempest was written when England was starting to found colonies.
The Great Chain of Being is an idea about the order of the world. It goes back to ancient philosophy (Plato and Aristotle) and was developed by Christian thinkers in the Middle Ages. In the Renaissance, people still used it to explain that everything in creation has a fixed place: from God at the top, through angels, human beings, animals and plants, down to minerals. This place is called degree.
Three ideas are especially important for Shakespeare’s plays:
Click a link of the chain, from the top to the bottom.
| The heavens | The state | The family | The human body |
|---|---|---|---|
| The sun | The king | The father | The head or the heart |
| The planets | The nobles and ministers | The mother and elder children | The limbs |
| The four elements | The commoners | The servants | The four humours |
The patriarchal family model reflects the views of Shakespeare’s time. Today we discuss it critically.
Choose a play and see how it shows a broken order.
E. M. W. Tillyard’s book The Elizabethan World Picture (1943) presented the chain as the shared world view of the age. Later critics, for example new historicists and cultural materialists such as Stephen Greenblatt and Jonathan Dollimore, found this too simple. They argue that there were many competing views in Shakespeare’s England and that the idea of order was often used by those in power.
The plays use the language of order, but they also test it. Hamlet praises man as “the paragon of animals” and then calls him a “quintessence of dust”. In King Lear, a king without power becomes “a poor, bare, forked animal”. Gravediggers, servants and fools often comment sharply on their superiors, and rebels like Bolingbroke or Edmund have understandable reasons.
The idea of order supported the monarchy. The Church of England taught obedience in its official homilies. King James I wrote about the divine right of kings before he came to the English throne in 1603. Plays that showed the removal of a king were sensitive: the Master of the Revels checked them, and the deposition scene in Richard II was not printed in the early editions.
The first permanent playhouse in London, The Theatre, was built by James Burbage in 1576. The city authorities did not like plays, so the playhouses were built outside the city walls, in areas such as Shoreditch and Bankside on the south bank of the Thames. Theatre was popular entertainment for people of all classes, but it also faced criticism from Puritans and closed whenever plague spread. In 1642 Parliament closed all theatres.
Click a part of the playhouse (or move to it with the Tab key and press Enter).
Simplified cross-section of a public playhouse such as the Globe. Not to scale.
| The Globe (public) | Blackfriars (private, indoor) | |
|---|---|---|
| Building | Open-air, round or polygonal, with a thatched roof over the galleries (tiled after 1614) | A hall inside a former monastery building, fully roofed |
| Light | Daylight, plays in the afternoon | Candlelight, so plays could run into the evening |
| Audience | Up to about 3,000 people of all classes | A few hundred, mostly wealthier people |
| Price | From one penny (standing in the yard) | From sixpence |
| Used by Shakespeare’s company | From 1599 | From 1609 (in winter) |
Acting companies needed the protection of a noble patron; otherwise actors could be treated as vagrants. Shakespeare’s company was first the Lord Chamberlain’s Men and, from 1603, the King’s Men. Leading members were “sharers” who shared the profits.
All actors were male. Boys and young men played the women’s roles until women were allowed on the English stage after 1660. There were no directors. Actors learned only their own lines from long paper rolls and rehearsed very little. The company performed a different play almost every day.
People of all classes came, ate, drank and reacted loudly. The Master of the Revels licensed every play and could cut political or religious passages. Theatres were closed during plague outbreaks.
Follow a performance from the announcement to the end.
Words paint the scene: There was almost no scenery, and plays were performed in daylight. So the language had to tell the audience where and when the action takes place, and even what the weather is like. In the Prologue to Henry V, the Chorus asks the audience to “piece out our imperfections with your thoughts”.
Use these terms in your analysis. Search for a word or cover the definitions to test yourself.
| Term | Definition |
|---|
Work through the exercises in any order. Every answer comes with a short explanation. Your results stay in this window and are not saved anywhere.
Choose the correct answer.
Choose the correct answer.
Use the arrows to put these links of the Great Chain of Being in order, from the highest to the lowest. Then click “Check”.
Highest
Lowest
Choose the correct answer.
Which idea does each quotation express?
Each sign in nature belongs to one play. Choose the play.
Decide whether the statement is true or false.
Blank verse is written in iambic pentameter: five pairs of syllables, each pair with an unstressed and a stressed syllable (da-DUM). Click the syllables that carry a stress. Then click “Check”.