This book examines six plays by Shakespeare (Love's Labour's Lost,
Hamlet, As You Like It, Twelfth Night, The Winter's Tale, and The
Tempest) as dramatizations of the Renaissance court in its developing
history - a history searched by Shakespeare to disclose its most
characteristic gains and losses. For these plays do not simply celebrate
Tudor and Stuart rule: they scrutinize it too, in the centre of its
institutional theatre of power, the court. This book shows how, if the
plays came into the court, the court also came into the plays, with its
most salient features - its competitiveness, its inner tensions and its
contradictions, its language, its cultural life and its entertainments -
exposed to the scrutiny of an art-form that proved itself to be a new
mode of historical understanding.