This innovative study examines emotional responses to socio-economic pressures in early modern England, as they are revealed in plays, historical narratives and biographical accounts of the period. These texts yield fascinating insights into the various, often unpredictable, ways in which people coped with the exigencies of credit, debt, mortgaging and capital ventures. Leinwand discusses plays by Shakespeare, Jonson, Middleton, Heywood and Massinger, pairing them with writings about the finances of royalty and aristocrats, privateers, theatrical entrepreneurs and debtors.

This innovative study examines emotional responses to socio-economic pressures in early modern England, as they are revealed in plays, historical narratives and biographical accounts of the period. These texts yield fascinating insights into the various, often unpredictable, ways in which people coped with the exigencies of credit, debt, mortgaging and capital ventures. Leinwand discusses plays by Shakespeare, Jonson, Middleton, Heywood and Massinger, pairing them with writings about the finances of royalty and aristocrats, privateers, theatrical entrepreneurs and debtors.

The Great William is the first book to explore how seven renowned writers--Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats, Virginia Woolf, Charles Olson, John Berryman, Allen Ginsberg, and Ted Hughes--wrestled with Shakespeare in the very moments when they were reading his work. What emerges is a constellation of remarkable intellectual and emotional encounters.

Theodore Leinwand builds impressively detailed accounts of these writers' experiences through their marginalia, lectures, letters, journals, and reading notes. We learn why Woolf associated reading Shakespeare with her brother Thoby,...