Sixteenth-century English nationalism

In the late 16th century, as English poor relief reached a crisis amid war, inflation, unemployment, famine, food riots, and large-scale vagrancy, Shakespeare came into his strength as a playwright. To what extent was Shakespeare’s sympathy for the poor a response to the hardships he must have seen on the streets of London and in the countryside to and from Stratford? This chapter explores Shakespeare’s plays for their visionary glimpses of a return to biblical compassion for the poor, in England – the first country to codify parliamentary Poor Law (1598, 1601).