Elizabethan English

1564: Devon sailor Francis Drake sets out on a journey of adventure. Drake learns of routes used to transport Spanish silver and gold, and risks his life in an audacious plan to steal a fortune.

In Behind the Throne, historian Adrian Tinniswood uncovers the reality of five centuries of life at the English court, taking the listener on a remarkable journey from one Queen Elizabeth to another and exploring life as it was lived by clerks and courtiers and clowns and crowned heads: the power struggles and petty rivalries, the tension between duty and desire, the practicalities of cooking dinner for thousands and of ensuring the king always won when he played a game of tennis.

Jack and Annie are whisked back to Elizabethan England where they meet the Bard of Avon himself, William Shakespeare, and luckily for them, he is desperate for two small actors for his latest play! An exciting adventure and a wonderful introduction to Shakespeare.

Sir Walter Ralegh’s life is romantic, irresistible, and of central importance to our island story. His death is a convoluted and contested tale of bargaining, failure and betrayal. Through the Elizabethan golden age and Ralegh’s famous adventures to the final act, Anna Beer presents his stranger-than-fiction life in all its richness. How could a man once the Queen’s favorite find himself consigned to the Tower by her successor? Should his legacy be fame or infamy? Who was the real Sir Walter Ralegh?

S. J. Parris returns with the next Giordano Bruno mystery, set inside Queen Elizabeth’s palace and steeped in period atmospherics and the strange workings of the occult. It is the year of the Great Conjunction, when the two most powerful planets, Jupiter and Saturn, align - an astrologi­cal phenomenon that occurs once every thousand years and heralds the death of one age and the dawn of another. The streets of London are abuzz with predictions of horrific events to come, possibly even the death of Queen Elizabeth.

Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, is one of the most intriguing men of the Elizabethan period. Tall and handsome, he soon becomes a ‘favorite’ at court, so close to the queen many wonder if they are lovers. The truth is far more complex, as each has what the other yearns for. Robert Devereux longs for recognition, wealth and influence. His flamboyant naïveté amuses the ageing Queen Elizabeth, like the son she never had, and his vitality makes her feel young.

In England in the Age of Shakespeare, Jeremy Black takes readers on a tour of life in the streets, homes, farms, churches, and palaces of the Bard’s era. Panning from play to audience and back again, Black shows how Shakespeare's plays would have been experienced and interpreted by those who paid to see them. From the dangers of travel to the indignities of everyday life in teeming London, Black explores the jokes, political and economic references, and small asides that Shakespeare’s audiences would have recognized.

London, winter of 1589. The city is alive with intrigue, and anticipation. The players of Lord Strange’s Men are rehearsing a daring new play, penned by one of their promising young actors, William Shakespeare. But excitement turns to disaster when the authorities shutter the theatre over a trivial offense, plunging Will into uncertainty and despair. Determined to press on, he begins crafting a grisly revenge tragedy—Titus Andronicus—hoping to sell it to another troupe. But before he can do so, his entire collection of playscripts is stolen. His reputation, his career—everything is ...

In "The Gilded Cage," set in the vibrant city of Bath in 1598, we follow the journey of Yvonne Fletcher, the cherished daughter of an affluent merchant. Amidst the grandeur of lavish banquets and suitors vying for her affection, Yvonne feels trapped within the shimmering confines of her privileged existence. Despite her opulent surroundings, a restless spirit yearns for adventure and freedom beyond the suffocating societal expectations that dictate her every move. As she navigates the expectations of aristocratic life, Yvonne's heart ignites with the desire for independence and self-...

AS FEATURED ON ITV's THE ALAN TITCHMARSH SHOW, 1 NOVEMBER 2011 NEW AND IMPROVED SECOND EDITION 2025 First Edition published by Peter Owen Publishers, 2010 FROM THE BACK PAGE Initially published in 2010, Pity For The Guy was the first biography of Guy Fawkes to paint a detailed portrait of the man behind the infamous Gunpowder Plot. For hundreds of years, Fawkes has been portrayed as an extreme figure: a rabid Catholic and cold-blooded would-be murderer who tried to blow up the Houses of Parliament, killing James I and much of England’s nobility. Such was the threat that the Gunpowder Plot...

Every queen had ladies-in-waiting. Her confidantes and chaperones, they are the forgotten agents of the Tudor court. Ever present and yet hidden behind the scenes, these women held the secrets and the hearts of some of the Tudor period's most powerful men and women. Experts at survival, negotiating the competing demands of their families and their queen, the ladies-in-waiting of Henry VIII's wives were far more than decorative 'extras': they were serious political players who changed the course of history, and four of them became queen themselves.

This illustrated book, also available as a 172 page paperback from Troubador.co.uk at £9.95, introduces the conclusions of recent scholarship and research into theatrical conditions, conventions and concepts in the time of Shakespeare. It is designed as a companion to the study of any Shakespeare play, including those treated in Literature Insights, such as Hamlet, Henry IV parts 1 and 2, King Lear, Richard II, Richard III, The Tempest, Troilus and Cressida. The book begins with a discussion of the origins of early modern English drama and of the theatres that were built for it. Attitudes ...

Sixteenth-century Europe was a time of destabilization of age-old norms and the waging of religious wars - yet it also witnessed the remarkable flowering of a pacific culture cultivated by a cohort of extraordinary women rulers who sat on Europe's thrones, most notably Mary Tudor; Elizabeth I; Mary, Queen of Scots; and Catherine de' Medici.

Frances Walsingham is the only surviving child of Queen Elizabeth’s ‘spymaster’ Sir Francis Walsingham. Better educated than most men, her father arranges her marriage to warrior poet Sir Philip Sidney. After Philip Sidney is killed in battle, Frances becomes Countess of Essex, and is banished from court after her husband Sir Robert Devereaux’s rebellion against the queen.

At the start of the 16th century, England was hardly involved in the wider world, and London remained a gloomy, introverted medieval city. Stephen Alford's evocative, original new audiobook brings to life the network of merchants, visionaries, crooks, and sailors who changed London and England forever. In a sudden explosion of energy, English ships were suddenly found all over the world - trading with Russia and the Levant, exploring Virginia and the Arctic, and fanning out across the Indian Ocean. The people who made this possible are as interesting as any of those at court.

Robert Cecil, statesman and spymaster, lived through an astonishingly threatening period in English history. Queen Elizabeth had no clear successor and enemies both external and internal threatened to destroy England as a Protestant state, most spectacularly with the Spanish Armada and the Gunpowder Plot. All His Spies is a wonderfully engaging and original work of history. Many listeners are familiar with the great events of this tumultuous time, but All His Spies shows how easily these dramas could have turned out very differently.

In 1987, when Hilary Mantel was first published in the London Review of Books, she wrote to the editor, Karl Miller, ‘I have no critical training whatsoever, so I am forced to be more brisk and breezy than scholarly.’ This collection of 20 reviews, essays and pieces of memoir from the next three decades tells the story of what happened next.

Normal Women is a radical retelling of our nation’s story – not of the rise and fall of kings and the occasional queen – but of social and cultural change, powered by the determination, persistence and effectiveness of women – from 1066 to modern times. Did women really do nothing to shape England’s culture and traditions in nine centuries of turmoil, plague, famine, religious reform and the rise of empire and industry?

London 1558. An orphan from a far-off land is renamed “Noah Ames,” and given every advantage the English Crown can bestow. London 1592. Now an experienced barrister, Noah witnesses what appears to be a botched robbery outside the Rose Theater, a crime he soon suspects to be part of a plot against Queen Elizabeth herself. Steadfast in his loyalty to the Queen, Noah must use every bit of his knowledge and skill to lure her most disloyal subject onto the only battlefield where Noah has the advantage ... a court of law – though in doing so he risks public exposure of his darkest secret, a...

Britain's most esteemed scholar of 16th and 17th century literature, Frank Kermode is also a noted author and professor. In this Modern Library Chronicle, he uses the context of the Elizabethan Era to link each of Shakespeare's plays to their probable years of creation. By portraying the bard's England in terms of its society, economy, and arts, Kermode provides an invaluable guide to understanding Shakespeare?s works.