Playwright Ben Jonson Duels to the Death
On 22 September 1598, Elizabethan actor Gabriel Spencer settled his creative differences with playwright Ben Jonson with a duel.
Elizabethan
‘The Extraordinary Journey of David Ingram’ by Dean Snow review
Great cities more than a mile long, ‘banquette houses’, elephants, and birds with heads ‘as big as a man’s: the journey of David Ingram.
‘The Great White Bard’ and ‘Shakespeare Without a Life’ review
Two significant new publications push the parameters of how we engage with the most revered writer in the English language.
The Other Favourite
Christopher Hatton rose to great power as a favourite of Elizabeth I. Born in obscurity, why has he returned to it?
The First Folio
The stage has a short memory, print a long one: 400 years since its first publication, Shakespeare’s First Folio is the reason we remember him.
The Clown that Went out of Fashion
The age of Shakespeare, and its changing notions of what was funny, gave birth to modern comedy.
The Crowd-Funded War
In the wake of the failure of the Spanish Armada, England sought retaliation by launching an invasion of its own. But how to finance such a venture?
A Painter Fit for a Queen
Nicholas Hilliard was a portraitist at the pinnacle of his profession.
Celebrity, Politics and Francis Drake
Drake’s exploits in the New World made him perfect material for the English gutter press and a figurehead for rising Hispanophobia.
The Death of Amye Robsart
The mysterious death of Amye Robsart – murdered, as many of her contemporaries thought, at the instigation of her scheming husband, favourite of Queen Elizabeth I – provides one of the strangest unsolved problems in Elizabethan history.