ABSTRACT
The English literature of the Elizabethan and Jacobean Ages is one of the great phenomena of European culture. There is psychological reality in the central theme, and the characters as a whole belong to the world immediately outside the Elizabethan theatre. To read Shakespeare’s histories in chronological sequence enables the reader to get a bird’s eye view of political history (as seen through Elizabethan eyes) from the time of the composition of The Canterbury Tales to the reign of Henry VIII. Shakespeare’s attachment to a particular company in which he had a financial interest supplied him with the kind of opportunity and motive which stimulate a writer. The Shakespearian phenomenon is not solely a matter of individual genius. Commercial and technical conditions were congenial.
