"What was life like in Shakespeare's time -- or, what did people then say it was like? This volume provides a fascinating picture of the age, with a selection of accounts of Elizabethan and Jacobean life taken from books, plays, poems, letters, diaries and pamphlets by and about Shakespeare's contemporaries. Lively extracts have been taken from the works of a wide range of writers, including William Harrison and Fynes Moryson (providing descriptions of England), Nicholas Breton (on country life), Isabella Whitney and Thomas Dekker (on London life), Nashe (on struggling writers), Stubbes (with a Puritan's view of Elizabethan enjoyments), Harsnet and Burton (on witches and spirits), John Donne (meditations on prayer and death), King James I (on tobacco) and Shakespeare himself. Also included are accounts of theatre-going, May Day celebrations, Queen Elizabeth at court, the place of women, education, garden books and herbals, clothes, food, drink and religion. The extracts, carefully modernized, are organized thematically, each section having an introduction reflecting modern historical research." "An intriguing miscellany of some of the best, wittiest and most unusual of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writing, Shakespeare's England brings to life, through these writers' careful observations and acute comments, and with a wealth of contemporary illustrations, the variety, the energy and the often harsh reality of the society that produced England's greatest writer. Book jacket."--Jacket.