Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 19, 2025
One of the largest furnaces was at Lamberhurst, on the borders of Kent, where the noble balustrade surrounding St Paul's Cathedral was cast at a cost of about £11,000. It is stated by the historian Holinshed that the first cast-iron ordnance was manufactured at Buxted. Two specialities in the iron trade belonged to Sussex, the manufacture of chimney-backs, and cast-iron plates for grave-stones.
Not a worm that gnaws on the dull scalp of voluminous Holinshed, but at every meal devoured more chronicle than his tribe amounts to. A marginal note of W. P. would serve for a winding-sheet for that man's works, like thick-skinned fruits are all rind, fit for nothing but the author's fate, to be pared in a pillory.
He certainly does not manifest in it the cogent and glittering dramatic force that is felt in Othello and Macbeth. The probability is that he wrought upon the old legend of Holinshed in a mood of intellectual caprice, inclining towards sensuous and fanciful dalliance with a remote and somewhat intangible subject.
I have tried to show how easily his mind might be steeped in the all- pervading classicism and foreign romance of the period, with the wide, sketchy, general information, the commonly known fragments from the great banquet of the classics, with such history, wholly uncritical, as Holinshed and Stow, and other such English chroniclers, could copiously provide; with the courtly manners mirrored in scores of romances and Court plays; and in the current popular Morte d'Arthur and Destruction of Troy.
But Shakespeare did NOT do "all this"! We know the sources of the plays well enough: novels in one of which "Delphos" is the insular seat of an oracle of Apollo; Holinshed, with his contaminated legends; North's Plutarch, done out of the French; older plays, and the rest of it.
Holinshed's Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland, published when Shakespeare was fourteen years old, gives the stories of Lear, Cymbeline, Macbeth, and of all the English kings who are the heroes of the historical plays. As Holinshed is very dry reading, if Shakespeare had followed him closely, for instance, in King Lear, the play would have lost its most impressive parts.
Before we shelve Holinshed, for the good Raphael's folios are like Falstaff in size, if not in wit, and, when once laid flat-long, require levers to set them up on end again, let us see if he cannot help us to account for more of the "legalisms" that our Lord Chief Justice and our barrister have "smelt out" in Shakespeare's historical plays. Mr.
Strype covers this period in his "Memorials" and in his lives of Cranmer, Cheke, and Smith; Hayward's "Life of Edward the Sixth" may be supplemented by the young king's own Journal; "Machyn's Diary" gives us the aspect of affairs as they presented themselves to a common Englishman; while Holinshed is near enough to serve as a contemporary authority.
The bands of retainers who had hung round the castle, living at the expense of its lord, and ready to follow him in his career of violence, were gradually being absorbed in useful and industrial pursuits. Among the yeomanry the general progress was exceedingly noticeable. The character and worth of this important class were commented upon by Holinshed.
Do not forget, then, that Matthew is Holinshed and not Benvenuto. The very first pages of his narrative will put your attitude to the test. Matthew tells us that the mother of Jesus was betrothed to a man of royal pedigree named Joseph, who was rich enough to live in a house in Bethlehem to which kings could bring gifts of gold without provoking any comment.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking