Elizabethan England

London in the 1590s was noisy, plague-ridden, and electric. William Shakespeare was writing a new play almost every year, putting human psychology onstage in ways no one had managed before — inventing the interior monologue, the unreliable narrator, characters who seem to know they're in a story. The theatre was the most democratic art form in England, and it was changing what it meant to be a person.

His patrons — the young earls Henry Wriothesley and William Herbert — became the likely subjects of his sonnets. His wife Anne Hathaway waited in Stratford while he conquered London. The Elizabethan world was small, interconnected, and producing work that would outlast the empire by centuries.