Navigation

Navigating within the Life and Times

At the top of the screen are navigational buttons that take you to other areas of the Internet Shakespeare Editions site. Beneath the page header, you can see a special navigational menu for the Life and Times.

Navigational aids on the menu

• The forward arrow takes you to the next page in your current chapter, or on to the next chapter when you reach the end. It is like turning pages in a book.
• allows you to turn back the pages in the current chapter.
• Intro takes you to the opening page of the Life and Times.
• Help brings you to this chapter on help.

The books and chapters

Each book listed has a popup list of the chapters you will find in that book. You can click on the book name to go to the home page, or select a specific chapter from the popup list.

• Life discusses Shakespeare's life and his career as a playwright.
• Stage illustrates the many kinds of stages that were used in the period. There is also some information on stage props, costumes, the actors, and the audience.
• Society explores the range of social activities and social levels in Elizabethan society, from the country to the city and from the beggar to the court.
• History deals with the early history that lies behind the plots of many of the plays, and the political currents of Shakespeare's own time.
• Ideas demonstrates the range of beliefs in Shakespeare's time about the nature of the universe, religion, and the natural world.
• Drama provides background on the kinds of early plays that led to the drama of Shakespeare's time, and records the achievements of his many brilliant contemporaries.
• Literature reveals the extraordinary richness of the literary traditions in Shakespeare's time in genres other than the drama: in prose and poetry. It also looks at Renaissance art, and the strong traditions of music in the England of Elizabeth.
• Plays provides links to topics of interest in specific plays. For the study of Hamlet, for example it provides links to chapters on ghosts, revenge, the staging of the play in the Globe theatre, and so on.
• Reference collects all kinds of useful information: indexes, bibliography, chronology and so on.

Further aids

At the bottom of each page you will find two links:

• Further reading on this topic takes you to the appropriate page in the extensive Bibliography in the Reference book.
• How to cite this page illustrates how to refer to the page you are on if you quote from it in an essay.