Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Shakespeare And The Marginalized “Others”, Carole Levin

Department of History: Faculty Publications

When we think of the London and England of Shakespeare and Elizabeth I, traditionally we have assumed a fairly homogeneous society. But more recently scholars have recognized that England, and especially the London of early modern England, was instead a truly heterogeneous place, as was the Edinburgh of early modern Scotland. In early modern British cities, there was a wide range of peoples of different statuses and backgrounds. This chapter discusses the actual lives of those somehow perceived as different, attitudes about them, and how these attitudes were reflected in the drama of the time, especially in the works of …