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Shakespeare's World
Seeing the Plays through Elizabethan Eyes
Shakespeare's World
Seeing the Plays through Elizabethan Eyes
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Description
It goes nearly without saying that Elizabethan England, the society that produced William Shakespeare, was dramatically different than the modern world of today.
This is true not only in the most obvious ways-language, technology, living standards, politics-but in the ideas and beliefs that shaped Elizabethans' understanding of themselves and the world around them. Just as audiences 400 years from now will need guidance to understand concepts like “the American dream” or “wokeness,” so too does an understanding of the Elizabethan worldview illuminate Shakespeare's plays in new and surprising ways.
For decades, Dennis Krausnick (1942-2018), a beloved teacher of classical acting, brought Shakespeare's world and worldview to life for professional actors as Director of Training at Shakespeare & Company in Lenox, Massachusetts. As part of the company's world-renowned actor-training program-its “Month-Long Intensive”-Dennis created a full-day immersive experience that helped actors experience, understand, and embody the philosophies and beliefs underlying the Elizabethan world.
A fascinating and readable distillation of the insights developed by Dennis Krausnick and Shakespeare & Company, Shakespeare's World gives performers and directors an engaging tour of the Elizabethan worldview, unpacking such alien concepts as the four elements, the bodily humors, and “the great chain of being.” It includes detailed notes for each Shakespeare play showing how this worldview permeates the text-it will enrich the experience of anyone looking to understand and engage with Shakespeare's writing in a practical, personal, and active way.
Table of Contents
1 The Macrocosm
2 The Four Elements
3 The Great Chain of Being
4 The Humors and the Humoral Types
5 The Microcosm: Us
6 The Correspondences
7 Human Possibilities
Part II: Prompts, Puzzles, and Provocations
Part III: The Elizabethan Worldview in Practice
Acknowledgments
Bibliography
Index
Product details
| Published | 23 Jul 2026 |
|---|---|
| Format | Paperback |
| Edition | 1st |
| Pages | 352 |
| ISBN | 9781493091324 |
| Imprint | Bloomsbury Academic |
| Illustrations | 75 bw illus |
| Dimensions | 229 x 152 mm |
| Publisher | Bloomsbury Publishing |
About the contributors
Reviews
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Shakespeare is not our contemporary: that is the starting premise of this provocative and illuminating book.... By carefully reconstructing the world we have lost, the authors bring to light meanings in the plays that we could easily miss and open a new range of possibilities for actors and readers.
Stephen Greenblatt, Author, Will in the World
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I am so grateful to have spent time as a young actor working on Shakespeare's text with Dennis and Tina at Shakespeare & Company, and this book, born of lifetimes of rigorous study and time logged with the plays, gives everyone access to a powerful cornerstone of that training. Shakespeare's World gives us the opportunity to understand the lived experience of the spiritual and intellectual influences swirling around Shakespeare as he wrote - a magic skeleton key for artists to unlock and crack open every line of text with new insights and specificity!
Lauren Ambrose (Juliet and Ophelia in the New York Shakespeare Festival; Six Feet Under; Yellowjackets)
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Shakespeare's World is a valuable gift for the people who put on the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries and to all the audiences that see them.
Ralph Alan Cohen, Co-Founder of the American Shakespeare Center and Emeritus Professor of English at James Madison University

























