'The malice of this age'

Half a century ago, in the opening chapter of Shakespeare's England, Sir Walter Raleigh boldly declared that

Such statements, clearly contentious, will receive no more approval than any other generalizations about the familiar subjects of Elizabethan and Jacobean pessimism, cynicism and discontent. Yet the changes in the life of the age were so momentous, religious, social and literary, and the divisions so extreme, that for Englishmen of roughly Shakespeare's generation the sheer contrariety of experience presented an exceptional intensity, at once the condition of their everyday lives, a pattern for thought, and a stimulus to art. For many the condition was intolerable, the pattern fragmented, and the stimulus a goad, provoking controversy and ridicule. Such were the religious martyrs, social malcontents and literary satirists, opponents of the establishment in the English Church, of the Court factions, or of the social and literary hierarchy of established values and reputations.

Their voices tell us directly of an England about which Shakespeare speaks only obliquely, but they are necessary for the fullest understanding of his time. For it is a paradox worthy of a literature that so constantly asserted contradiction that its greatest writer came to maturity as an age declined and its ideals came under severe scrutiny.