Time Out London (Elizabethan Edition)

It is a singularity in the nature of the English that they are strangely addicted to all kinds of pleasure, above all other nations. The city of London alone hath four or five companies of players with their particular theaters capable of [holding] many thousands [of spectators], wherein they all play every day of the week but Sunday… — Elizabethan traveler Fynes Moryson The contrast between the plays of William Shakespeare as they were seen during his own time and as they are seen today is hilariously stark. Our well-nigh universally anointed greatest writer in the history of the English language, whose works have been subjected to microscopic inspection by generations of chin-stroking intellectuals and foisted upon hundreds of millions of reluctant schoolchildren as the equivalent of vegetables for the mind and soul, was widely regarded as the very definition of an ephemeral, not to say vaguely debased, popular entertainer while he was alive. The theater where most of his best plays…