ELIZABETHAN DRAMA

An Elizabethan Enigma

The last thing William Shakespeare wants to be is predictable. Roughly halfway through his published collection of one hundred and fifty-four sonnets, he frets that we may find it dull that he “write[s] . . . all one, ever the same,” producing one fourteen-line poem after another (76.5). He has reason to worry: he rarely allows himself to deviate from a strict iambic pentameter, and holds his v...

islam and politics in elizabethan drama: tamburlaine the great and othello

the encounter between the west and the east is historically regarded a s crucial i n the european chronicles. i n the 16th century, the politics of queen elizabeth i towards muslims was dualistic: on the one hand, her state united with muslims to stand against imperial spain, and on the other hand, after the defeat of the spanish armada in 1588 by the english, her state’s policy changed into a ...

Elizabethan Dyetary of health

John Banister: an Elizabethan surgeon in Brazil.

In Brazil's sixteenth-century history, very few references are made to health professionals. On the expedition of Edward Fenton, dispatched by the English Crown in 1582 to set up a trading post in Asia, was the famous barber-surgeon and physician John Banister. The naval squadron, diverted from its original route to repeat the feats of Sir Francis Drake, stopped over in Africa, crossed the Atla...

The Elizabethan Idea of Empire

This paper argues that the English idea of empire in the reign of Elizabeth I was derivative, belated and incoherent. Its sources were classical and continental rather than indigenous. It arose more than a century after the Scottish monarchy had elaborated its own conception of empire. Moreover, it expressed a sense of backwardness, isolation and anxiety that mirrored the English failure to est...