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$Unique_ID{bob00762}
$Pretitle{}
$Title{Description Of Elizabethan England
Introductory Note}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{Harrison, William}
$Affiliation{}
$Subject{
see
pictures
see
figures
}
$Date{1577}
$Log{See William Shakespeare*0076201.scf
}
Title: Description Of Elizabethan England
Author: Harrison, William
Date: 1577
Introductory Note
Near the beginning of Elizabeth's reign, Reginald Wolfe, the Queen's
Printer, with the splendid audacity characteristic of that age, planned to
publish a "universal Cosmography of the whole world, and therewith also
certain particular histories of every known nation." Raphael Holinshed had
charge of the histories of England, Scotland, and Ireland, the only part of
the work ever published; and these were issued in 1577, and have since been
known as "Holinshed's Chronicles." From them Shakespeare drew most of the
material for his historical plays.
Among Holinshed's collaborators was one William Harrison, chaplain to
Lord Cobham, and later Rector of Radwinter in Essex and Canon of Windsor. To
him was allotted the task of writing the "Descriptions of Britain and England"
from which the following chapters are drawn. He gathered his facts from books,
letters, maps, conversations, and, most important of all, his own observation
and experience; and he put them loosely together into what he calls "this foul
frizzled treatise." Yet, with all his modesty, he claims to "have had an
especial eye to the truth of things"; and as a result we have in his pages the
most vivid and detailed picture in existence of the England into which
Shakespeare was born.
[See William Shakespeare: First among the writers who added lustre to the
reign of Elizabeth.]
In 1876 Dr. Furnivall condensed Harrison's chapters for the New
Shakespeare Society, and these have since been reprinted by Mr. Lothrop
Withington in the modern dress in which the most interesting of them appear
here. No apology is needed for thus selecting and rearranging, since in their
original form they were without unity, and formed part of a vast compilation.
Harrison's merit does not lie in the rich interest of his matter alone.
He wrote a racy style with a strong individual as well as Elizabethan flavor;
and his personal comment upon the manners of his time serves as a piquant
sauce to the solid meat of his historical information.