Dr Dover Wilson examines Falstaff's role in the two parts of Henry IV and his relationship to the Prince. Like most other Shakespearean scholars he had accepted, Bradley's portrait as shown in The Rejection of Falstaff, until (as he writes) he 'began checking it with yet another portrait - that which I found in the pages of Shakespeare himself. As the result of much recent work on the two parts of Henry IV, a new Falstaff stands before me, as fascinating as Bradley's, certainly quite as human, but different; and beside him stands a still more unexpected Prince Hal. The discovery throws all my...

Entertaining and informative, this 1956 anthology paints a vivid picture of the world in which Shakespeare lived. Using the playwright's life as the framework his birth, his education, his move to London, his life in theatre, his death the book uses selected extracts from key Elizabethan publications to embody the atmosphere of this period. From sport to superstition, from festival to fashion, from the plague to playhouses, the significant features of the age are described through its prose, providing the reader with first-hand accounts of the conditions in which Shakespeare's masterpieces...