Jeremy Black’s impressive new book offers an enormously wide-ranging account of the social, political and religious cultures in which England’s greatest dramatist was formed and found success. England in the Age of Shakespeare (Indiana University Press, 2019) draws together Black’s expansive reading in Shakespeare’s contexts with extensive knowledge of the canon of his plays. Black, a professor of history at Exeter University, reads the plays as evidence of Shakespeare’s interest in his changing world. As an English writer, rooted in the very distinctive theological and liturgical arguments of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, Shakespeare offers a moral vision of a turbulent and contradictory world.

Crawford Gribben is a professor of history at Queen’s University Belfast. His research interests focus on the history of puritanism and evangelicalism, and he is the author most recently of John Owen and English Puritanism (Oxford University Press, 2016).