“... the play in question was not Shakespeare’s at all). Shapiro then glances at the death of Queen Elizabeth in 1603, and considers, finally, Shakespeare’s literary and theatrical immortality. This phenomenon, we are again assured, is emphatically not the result of any desire or ability to transcend his own times: ‘He understood his age perfectly, and the ...”

“... monarch, out of the rough and ready business of governing its Indian possessions. To introduce the king or queen risked elevating the Indian rajas to an inconvenient status, licensing them to consider themselves as lieges or allies of the crown, with the right to approach the monarch directly on all sorts of embarrassing questions. The rapacious Wellesley and ...”

“... precedent that the House could make law without the participation of the House of Lords or of the king. He had established the right of electors to elect whomever they please and the principle that no constituency could be represented by anyone they had not elected. He had brought before the British public the injustices of the electoral system and the need ...”

“... and others who hoped, that the Queen might outlive her eldest son, so that he would never become king at all. Such might have been the gloomy midcareer appraisal of His Royal Highness Prince Albert Edward, later (and briefly) King Edward VII. And it is not coincidental that many of the same things are now being said about ...”

“... with the emphases of Jonson’s The Forest, where the country is praised ‘as an image of the King’s peace’. When set beside ‘anti-courtly’ Spenserian verse, ‘To Penshurst’ and ‘To Sir Robert Wroth’ ‘give the sense of a nation which, whatever its faults, is essentially harmonious and well-ordered and reflects credit on its ...”

“... royal nobleman in her house. She thought Surrey’s father, the Duke of Norfolk, might become king if Henry VIII died without a male heir (‘if ought should come to the King but good, his father should stand for king’), and declared that above his bed were arms ‘very like the ...”

“... hadn’t hitherto been known: no one had ever supposed that they were worth knowing about. Bluff King Hal, Bloody Mary, the Queen of Scots, the Virgin Queen: like Drake finishing his game of bowls and Raleigh spreading his cloak over a puddle, they all belonged as much to folklore as to history; and folklore, so far as enlightened opinion was ...”

“... their own parishes and perhaps barely understood what they were dying for. An Essex servant girl, Elizabeth Folkes, aged 20, was asked what she understood about the nature of the Eucharist. Did she believe in a ‘substantial and real presence’ in the host? She answered: ‘It was a substantial lye, and a reall lye.’ She had been questioned once and let ...”

“... American opulence and British immiseration was responsible for considerable anguish. (Princess Elizabeth, in common with other brides, was given 200 extra clothing coupons to use for her wedding dress.) Apart from dried fruit, my other main memory of this period is of the ‘dollar gap’ – a phrase then on everyone’s lips. Today the world is awash ...”

“... a new truth. All he can hope for is a ‘faint preserved outline where the truth once lay’. In Elizabeth’s England, men lied to their reflection; and Marlowe belonged to a shadow world of espionage, where every straight action is mirrored by treachery, where the agent provocateur is king. Charles Nicholl has previously ...”

“... discretion. While preparing some years later for service in the Low Countries, he wrote to Elizabeth ‘most humbly to present such a cypher as little leysure coold afoord me. if there come any matter to my knowledg the importance wherof shall deseru to be so masked I will not fail … to your own handes to recommend it.’ Masking, not just through ...”

“... royal marriage, the Princess Mary and her conservative supporters neatly sidestepped. Since the King could not be directly blamed for these upsets, those who disliked them (most people?) pointed the finger at his upstart ministers, and above all at Thomas Cromwell, whose personal role in ‘all this’ is still debated. The way in which the commotions began ...”

“... waist, Henry VIII was fat, they thought twice about saying so and in Holbein’s portraits of the king his bulk is translated into an image of monumentality and strength. The female pharaoh Hatshepsut was portrayed in sculpture as slender with delicate features. The discovery in 2007 of her long-lost mummy revealed that she was enormously fat. At the heart of ...”

“... and masterminding the laws which made the Church of England autonomous and subject only to the king as its supreme head, established for all time to come the sovereignty of statute law, and therefore of Parliament, the maker of statutes (not forgetting that the king was a member of Parliament, never, as Henry VIII ...”

“... of Aragon and so fell from favour, Cromwell somehow managed seamlessly to enter the service of the king. He eventually came to fill much of the large gap left by the portly cardinal, from whom he learned a number of tricks for reconciling the law to the will of the king. No one understands exactly how the son of a blacksmith ...”