Critical Essay | William C. Carroll

William C. Carroll

SOURCE: "Language, Politics, and Poverty in Shakespearian Drama," in Shakespeare Survey: An Annual Survey of Shakespeare Studies and Production, Vol. 44, 1992, pp. 17-24.

In the following essay, Carroll studies the speech and political views of the underclass in Shakespeare's plays.

In an essay published in Shakespeare Survey 38, the historian E.W. Ives analysed the ways in which history and literature mutually illuminated (or did not) each other in the study of Shakespeare. After reviewing the distressing conditions of poverty during Shakespeare's lifetime, Ives concluded that 'to the historian, the remarkable thing—and a contrast to Shakespeare's sensitivity to the realities of politics and the Court—is the distance there seems to be between his plays and the socio-economic realities of Elizabethfan] and Jacobean England'. Coriolanus, Ives notes, 'stands alone' as an exception, and in any event 'takes very much an establishment point of view'. Yet it is possible, Ives concedes, 'to...
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