# data[].attributes.headline
Shakespeare's Words: Common Phrases Today

# data[].attributes.subject
Shakespeare's Words: Common Phrases Today

# data[].attributes.body
With an indefinite amount of words that Shakespeare made, there are some that we know were made by him that we use everyday. Some are "break the ice, catch a cold, heart of gold, housekeeping" and many more. Some have been modified with words, but the meaning has not. One like that is "it smells to heaven" which has changed to "it smells like heaven".

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Shakespeare Phrases: Idioms & Phrases Shakespeare Invented

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Shakespeare phrases and idioms. Read the many phrases Shakespeare invented when writing his plays, sonnets, and poems. Though all his works, Shakespeare brought

# data[].attributes.headline
Shakespeare's Words: How Many Words Did He Actually Make?

# data[].attributes.subject
Shakespeare's Words: How Many Words Did He Actually Make?

# data[].attributes.body
Many phrases that we use today are ones that Shakespeare created. People are debating how many words were actually created by him. If you search on Google, it says that he made 1700 words, but it is most likely a rounded number. people sometimes made words just to use once, but Shakespeare did not intend for his words to be used once.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Inventors get a lot of love. Thomas Edison is held up as a tinkering genius. Steve Jobs is considered a saint in Silicon Valley. Hedy Lamar, meanwhile, may have been a Hollywood star but a new book makes clear her real legacy is in inventing the foundations of encryption. But while all these people invented things, it's possible to invent something even more fundamental. Take Shakespeare: he invented words. And he invented more words-words that continue to shape the English language-than anyone else. By a long shot.

But what does it mean to "invent" words? How many words did Shakespeare invent? What kind of words? And which words are those exactly? Rather than just listing all the words Shakespeare invented, this post digs deeper into the how and the why (or "wherefore") of Shakespeare's literary creations.

How Many Words Did Shakespeare Invent?

1700! My, what a perfectly round number! Such a large and perfectly round number is misleading at best, and is more likely just wrong-there is in fact a bunch of debate about the accuracy of this number.

So who's to blame for the uncertainty around the number of words Shakespeare invented? For starters, we can blame the Oxford English Dictionary. This famous dictionary (often called the OED for short) is famous, in part, because it provides incredibly thorough definitions of words, but also because it identifies the first time each word actually appeared in written English. Shakespeare appears as the first documented user of more words than any other writer, making it convenient to assume that he was the creator of all of those words.

In reality, though, many of these words were probably part of everyday discourse in Elizabethan England. So it's highly likely that Shakespeare didn't invent all of these words; he just produced the first preserved record of some of them. Ryan Buda, a writer at Letterpile, explains it like this:

But most likely, the word was in use for some time before it is seen in the writings of Shakespeare. The fact that the word first appears there does not necessarily mean that he made it up himself, but rather, he could have borrowed it from his peers or from conversations he had with others.

However, while Shakespeare might have been just the first person to write down some words, he definitely did create many words himself, plenty of which we still use to this day. The list a ways down below contains the 420 words that almost certainly originated from Shakespeare himself.

But all this leads to another question. What does it even mean to "invent" a word?

How Did Shakespeare Invent Words?

Some writers invent words in the same way Thomas Edison invented light bulbs: they cobble together bits of sound and create entirely new words without any meaning or relation to existing words. Lewis Carroll does in the first stanza of his "Jabberwocky" poem:

`Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

Carroll totally made up words like "brillig," "slithy," "toves," and "mimsy"; the first stanza alone contains 11 of these made-up words, which are known as nonce words. Words like these aren't just meaningless, they're also disposable, intended to be used just once.

Shakespeare did not create nonce words. He took an entirely different approach. When he invented words, he did it by working with existing words and altering them in new ways. More specifically, he would create new words by:

Conjoining two words

Changing verbs into adjectives

Changing nouns into verbs

Adding prefixes to words

Adding suffixes to words

The most exhaustive take on Shakespeare's invented words comes from a nice little 874-page book entitled The Shakespeare Key by Charles and Mary Cowden Clarke.Here's how they explain Shakespeare's literary innovations:

Shakespeare, with the right and might of a true poet, and with his peculiar royal privilege as king of all poets, has minted several words that deserve to become current in our language. He coined them for his own special use to express his own special meanings in his own special passages; but they are so expressive and so well framed to be exponents of certain particulars in meanings common to us all, that they deserve to become generally adopted and used.

We can call what Shakespeare did to create new words "minting," "coining" or "inventing." Whatever term we use to describe it, Shakespeare was doing things with words that no one had ever thought to do before, and that's what matters.

Shakespeare Didn't Invent Nonsense Words

Though today readers often need the help of modern English translations to fully grasp the nuance and meaning of Shakespeare's language, Shakespeare's contemporary audience would have had a much easier go of it. Why? Two main reasons.

First, Shakespeare was part of a movement in English literature that introduced more prose into plays. (Earlier plays were written primarily in rhyming verse.) Shakespeare's prose was similar to the style and cadence of everyday conversation in Elizabethan England, making it natural for members of his audience to understand.

In addition, the words he created were comprehensible intuitively because, once again, they were often built on the foundations of already existing words, and were not just unintelligible combinations of sound. Take "congreeted" for example. The prefix "con" means with, and "greet" means to receive or acknowledge someone.

It therefore wasn't a huge stretch for people to understand this line:

That, face to face and royal eye to eye.
You have congreeted.

( Henry V, Act 5, Scene 2)

Shakespeare also made nouns into verbs. He was the first person to use friend as a verb, predating Mark Zuckerberg by about 395 years.

And what so poor a man as Hamlet is
May do, to express his love and friending to you

( Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 5)

Other times, despite his proclivity for making compound words, Shakespeare reached into his vast Latin vocabulary for loanwords.

His heart fracted and corroborate.

( Henry V, Act 2, Scene 1)

Here the Latin word fractus means "broken." Take away the - us and add in the English suffix - ed, anda new English word is born.

New Words Are Nothing New

Shakespeare certainly wasn't the first person to make up words. It's actually entirely commonplace for new words to enter a language. We're adding new words and terms to our "official" dictionaries every year. In the past few years, the Merriam-Webster dictionary has added several new words and phrases, like these:

So inventing words wasn't something unique to Shakespeare or Elizabethan England. It's still going on all the time.

But Shakespeare Invented a Lot of New Words

So why did Shakespeare have to make up hundreds of new words? For starters, English was smaller in Shakespeare's time. The language contained many fewer words, and not enough for a literary genius like Shakespeare. How many words? No one can be sure. One estimates, one from Encyclopedia Americana, puts the number at 50,000-60,000, likely not including medical and scientific terms.

During Shakespeare's time, the number of words in the language began to grow. Edmund Weiner, deputy chief editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, explains it this way:

The vocabulary of English expanded greatly during the early modern period. Writers were well aware of this and argued about it. Some were in favour of loanwords to express new concepts, especially from Latin. Others advocated the use of existing English words, or new compounds of them, for this purpose. Others advocated the revival of obsolete words and the adoption of regional dialect.

In Shakespeare's collected writings, he used a total of 31,534 different words. Whatever the size of the English lexicon at the time, Shakespeare was in command of a substantial portion of it. Jason Kottke estimates that Shakespeare knew around 66,534 words, which suggests Shakespeare was pushing the boundaries of English vocab as he knew it. He had to make up some new words.

The Complete List of Words Shakespeare Invented

Compiling a definitive list of every word that Shakespeare ever invented is impossible. But creating a list of the words that Shakespeare almost certainly invented can be done. We generated list of words below by starting with the words that Shakespeare was the first to use in written language, and then applying research that has identified which words were probably in everyday use during Shakespeare's time. The result are 420 bona fide words minted, coined, and invented by Shakespeare, from "academe" to "zany":

Words That Shakespeare Invented - Resource List

Words, words, words.

( Hamlet Act 2, Scene 2)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The 420 Words That Shakespeare Invented - The LitCharts Blog

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Inventors get a lot of love. Thomas Edison is held up as a tinkering genius. Steve Jobs is considered a saint in Silicon Valley. Hedy Lamar, meanwhile, may have been a Hollywood star but a new book makes clear her real legacy is in inventing the foundations of encryption.

# data[].attributes.body
The streets were slippery and cobble. People were yelling all the time, which meant that for someone to hear you, you would have to yell louder. Upper class and lower class were far apart. Wine was water for the rich, and people of middle class drank some type of alcohol. The only way the city would be clean was by birds.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The cobble streets of London in Elizabethan times were narrow and crooked. The slippery slime from the refuse of people added a not-so-silver lining in the walking space. People were hustling and bustling. They were the equivalent of New York, except worse.

The housing was mainly apartment buildings, all crammed together in odd arrangements on the street. There seemed to be little planning with much expansion. People were migrating in and out of various building and shops constantly.

There was no drainage or sewage, so what one stepped in was most likely what someone had once ate. Chamber pot feces were tossed out windows and onto the shuffling people below. The only source of cleaning was the scavenging birds.

Hooves clacking on the stone, wooden wheels bouncing around, and people yelling were all common sounds. Urban environments were obnoxious, to put it nicely. Apprentices yelled and people laughed all with no common courtesy for the rest of the citizens.

Common street festivities consisted of getting drunk at alehouses, bear baiting, gambling dens, and brothels. All of which were not even frowned upon.

A drink to quench your thirst was not the traditional water. Wine literally ran like water in these times. Only for the rich, that is. Middle class people were always drinking some type of alcohol, and being tipsy was an everyday occurrence. In a city of 130,000 - 150,000, most of them drunk, the city was most definitely not sober.

Cities contained the best and worst living. There were luxurious rich people up in palaces. But a few blocks down was a starving beggar, pickpocketing whatever he could law his paws on (Secara).

This is a map of Elizabethan London. It does not look very large, yet this was the largest city in Europe at the time. As you can see, everything comes from and is around the Thames River. This was the central part of the city where trade happened and people got water and so forth. The streets were very condensed in the river area, and a lot went on in those small places. There is, of course, the country side where the farmers and field workers stayed. The Globe Theatre is located, on this map, across the river and right off the road from the London Bridge ("Elizabethan London")

The people of London were not the smartest people in the world. Most, in fact, were illitarerate. Only the extreamly welathy ones had enough money for private schooling. Now a day, we have billboards to advertise and tell us about upcoming events. People then could not read, so that did not work. They used flags and symbols to communicate to the people. The Globe Theatre used flags to tell people that a play was coming that day. A different color meant a different type of play. Black was tragedy, white was comedy and red was history. People would always be flocking outside the Globe Theatre, as it was very busy around there. Many vendors sold merchendise and buyers were all over the place. It was very crowded, and people could see the flag. They then determined the whether to see the play or not. This attratced people and could let them know what was happeneing ("Globe Theatre")

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The cobble streets of London in Elizabethan times were narrow and crooked. The slippery slime from the refuse of people added a not-so-silver lining in the walking space. People were hustling and bustling. They were the equivalent of New York, except worse. The housing was mainly apartment buildings, all crammed together in odd arrangements on the street.

# data[].attributes.headline
Shakespeare's London: The City of London

# data[].attributes.subject
Shakespeare's London: The City of London

# data[].attributes.body
The city was a crammed place that smelled like the river. The streets were narrow and houses were close together. The city was loud and there was no drainage of sort, so they would throw their trash onto the streets. People never drank water, and were drunk more that sober.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
From Shakespeare, Anthony Burgess, 1978:

...T he city meant roughly what we mean by the City of London--a crammed commercial huddle that smells the river. The Thames was everybody's thoroughfare. The Londoners of Chaucer's time had had difficulty bridging it; the Elizabethans had achieved only London Bridge. You crossed normally by boat-taxi, the boatmen calling 'Eastward-ho' and 'Westward-ho'. There was commerce on the river, but also gilded barges, sometimes with royalty in them. Chained to the banks there were sometimes criminals, who had to abide the washing of three tides. The river had to look on other emblems of the brutality of the age--the severed heads on Temple Bar and on London Bridge itself.

The streets were narrow, cobbled, slippery with the slime of refuse. Houses were crammed together, and there were a lot of furtive alleys. Chamber pots, or jordans, were emptied out of windows. There was no drainage. Fleet Ditch stank to make a man throw up his gorge. But the City had its natural cleansers--the kites, graceful birds that made their nests of rags and refuse in the forks of trees. They scavenged, eating anything with relish. ... And countering the bad, man-made odors, the smells of the countryside floated in. There were rosy milkmaids in the early morning streets, and sellers of newly gathered cresses.

It was a city of loud noises--hooves and raw coach wheels on the cobbles, the yells of traders, the brawling of apprentices, scuffles to keep the wall and not be thrown into the oozy kennel. Even normal conversation must have been loud since everybody was, by our standards, tipsy. Nobody drank water, and tea had not yet come in. Ale was the standard tipple, and it was strong. Ale for breakfast was a good means of starting the day in euphoria or truculence. Ale for dinner refocillated the wasted tissues of the morning. Ale for supper ensured a heavy snoring repose. The better sort drank wine, which promoted good fellowship and led to sword fights. It was not what we would call a sober city.

From the report of a Venetian envoy, about 1500:

It abounds with every article of luxury, as well as with the necessities of life. But the most remarkable thing in London is the wonderful quantity of wrought silver. I do not allude to that in private houses, but to the shops of London. In one single street, named the Strand, leading to St Paul's, there are fifty-two goldsmith's shops, so rich and full of silver vessels, great and small, that in all the shops in Milan, Rome, Venice, and Florence put together, I do not think there would be found so many of the magnificence that are to be seen in London. And these vessels are all either salt cellars or drinking cups or basins to hold water for the hands, for they eat off that fine tin [ pewter] which is a little inferior to silver.

These great riches of London are not occasioned by its inhabitants being noblemen or gentlemen; being all, on the contrary, persons of low degree, and artificers who have congregated there from all parts of the island, and from Flanders and from every other place.

A London and Westminster Directory
A Map of Tudor London
Shopping in London

MaggiRos
26 March 2008 mps

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
From Shakespeare, Anthony Burgess, 1978: ...T he city meant roughly what we mean by the City of London--a crammed commercial huddle that smells the river. The Thames was everybody's thoroughfare. The Londoners of Chaucer's time had had difficulty bridging it; the Elizabethans had achieved only London Bridge.

# data[].attributes.body
Crimes were solved by cruel punishments to the person. The death penalty was not an issue in this era. More and more people were becoming poor. The poor were categorized into three categories and most had to beg and steal to survive.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Elizabethan England - Crime & Punishment

Elizabethan England and Elizabethan Crime and Punishment - not a happy subject. Violent times. Crimes were met with violent, cruel punishments. Many punishments and executions were witnessed by many hundreds of people. Facts about the different Crime and Punishment of the Nobility, Upper Classes and Lower Classes.

Picture of Queen Elizabeth I

We recommend the following site for Facts and information about Medieval England

Elizabethan England - Elizabethan Executions
Elizabethan England and Elizabethan Executions. The Death Penalty was definitely not an issue during the Elizabethan era, the only question was what form of execution did the person in question deserve. Executions by beheading were considered the least brutal of execution methods and were accorded to important State prisoners or people of noble birth.

The most dreadful punishment of being Hung, Drawn and Quartered was a barbaric form of execution was reserved for the most hated prisoners who had usually been convicted of treason.
Elizabethan England - Elizabethan Tortures
Elizabethan Tortures were excruciatingly painful and violent. Various means of tortures were use to extract confessions for crime. The Rack, the Scavenger's Daughter, the Collar, the Iron Maiden, Branding Irons, the Wheel and Thumbscrews were all excrutiating methods of Elizabethan tortures.

Elizabethan England - Religion - Protestants, Catholics and Jews

The two major religions in Elizabethan England were the Catholic and Protestant religions. The convictions and beliefs in these different religions were so strong that they led to the executions of many adherents to both of these Elizabethan religions. What were the differences between the Catholic and Protestant religion and beliefs in Elizabethan England? How were the Jews perceived in England during the Elizabethan era. How were Catholics and Jews treated in the Elizabethan era?
Elizabethan England - The Poor Law
Society in Elizabethan England was changing and the number of poor people living in abject poverty was increasing. A series of laws was introduced by the English Parliament in 1563, 1572, 1576, 1597 culminating in the 1601 Poor Law designed to make provision for the poor. The poor were divided into three categories - the 'Deserving Poor', the 'Deserving Unemployed' and 'Undeserving Poor' - those who turned to a life of crime or had become beggars.

Elizabethan England

Elizabethan England
The section and era covering Elizabethan England includes the following subjects:
Elizabethan England - Elizabethan Laws
The section covers Tudor and Elizabethan Laws passed during the 1500's. Important dates and details of Laws which effected the every day lives of Elizabethans in england including the 1559 Second Act of Supremacy the 1574 Sumptuary Laws called the 'Statutes of Apparel' and the 1601 Poor Law.
Elizabethan England - Elizabethan Sumptuary Laws
English 1574 Sumptuary Laws were well known by all of the English people. The penalties for violating Sumptuary Laws in England could be harsh - fines, the loss of property, title and even life. Sumptuary Laws were imposed by rulers to curb the expenditure of the people. Such laws might apply to food, beverages, furniture, jewelry and clothing. These Sumptuary Laws, called the Statutes of Apparel, were used to control behaviour and ensure that a specific class structure was maintained in England.

Elizabethan England
Interesting facts and information about life in Elizabethan England. For additional information regarding the Elizabethan era in England please access the Elizabethan Era Sitemap.

Elizabethan England

Crimes and Punishments in England

Executions in England

Tortures in England

Elizabethan Religion in England

Elizabethan Laws in the 1500's England

The 1601 Poor Law in England
1574 Sumptuary Law called the Statutes of Apparel in England

www.elizabethan-era.org.uk are subject to Copyright Laws - the name of the Website Author is Linda Alchin. The referencing protocol is suggested as follows:

Elizabethan Era - Free Educational Resource. Author Referencing Information
The contents of Alchin, L.K.
Elizabethan Era
e.g. Retrieved May 16 2012 from www.elizabethan-era.org.uk
The content of Elizabethan Era is free but solely for educational purposes. Reproduction is not to be "used for any purpose other than private study, scholarship, or research.". We would respectfully direct our visitors to our Elizabethan Era Copyright page and Elizabethan Era Privacy Statement regarding the Terms of Use of this history site, both may be accessed from the links provided at the bottom of this page.

Queen Elizabeth's Coat of Arms

Elizabethan Family Life

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Elizabethan England - Crime & Punishment Elizabethan England and Elizabethan Crime and Punishment - not a happy subject. Violent times. Crimes were met with violent, cruel punishments. Many punishments and executions were witnessed by many hundreds of people. Facts about the different Crime and Punishment of the Nobility, Upper Classes and Lower Classes.

# data[].attributes.headline
Elizabethan Theater: The Queen's Influence on Theater

# data[].attributes.subject
Elizabethan Theater: The Queen's Influence on Theater

# data[].attributes.body
The Theater flourished under her reign. She would have people perform for her so that she wouldn't have to go to the theater. Plays got more complex and diverse under her reign. Playhouses were built and people performed for her privately.

# data[].attributes.body
The Globe premiered some of Shakespeare's greatest plays. Its design influenced other theaters' designs. The original Globe opened in Fall of 1599, and was one of several major theaters of the area of Southwark, now known as Bankside. The Globe was burned down in a fire and was rebuilt in 1614 but was torn down again for building houses.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Elizabethan drama was the dominant art form that flourished during and a little after the reign of Elizabeth I, who was Queen of England from 1558 to 1603. Before, drama consisted of simple morality plays and interludes, which were skits performed at the banquets of the Queen's father Henry VIII or at public schools at Eton.

The Elizabethan era saw the birth of plays that were far more morally complex, vital and diverse.

As with the interludes, the earliest Elizabethan plays were put on for university students. They were modelled after the comedies of the Roman playwrights Plautus and Terence and the tragedies of Seneca.

The First Playhouses and First Playwrights

In 1576, James Burbage, an actor and theatre-builder, built the first successful English playhouse in London on land he had leased in Shoreditch. It was simply called The Theatre and was supported by young playwrights from Cambridge and Oxford Universities.

These young men became known as the University Wits and included Thomas Kyd, Robert Green, John Lyly, Thomas Nash and George Peele. The play The Spanish Tragedy, written by Kyd, was the template for the gory "tragedy of blood," plays that became wildly popular. Another theatre called The Curtain had to be built to accommodate the overflow audiences. The technical name for such as theatre was an easer.

Burbage also had a house in Blackfriars which had a roof. Because of this, it was used for plays during the winter. Burbage's son Richard was an even more famous actor and performed just about every major role in William Shakespeare's plays. He was lauded for his roles in the tragedies. The only thing that stopped the plays was the plague, and the theatres were dark from June, 1592 to April, 1594.

The Audience and Actors

Elizabethan theatre itself was notoriously raucous. People, most of whom stood throughout the play, talked back to the actors as if they were real people. Hints of this can be discerned even in Shakespeare's plays.

It is true that adolescent boy actors played female roles, and the performances were held in the afternoon because there was no artificial light. There was also no scenery to speak of, and the costumes let the audience know the social status of the characters. Because sumptuary laws restricted what a person could wear according to their class, actors were licensed to wear clothing above their station.

Shakespeare

More and more theatres grew up around London and eventually attracted Shakespeare, who wrote some of the greatest plays in world literature. His plays continue to cast a shadow over all other plays of the era and quite possibly all other plays that came after his.

But Shakespeare was not the first great playwright of the Elizabethan age. That would be Christopher Marlowe. Many scholars believe that Marlowe might have rivalled Shakespeare had he not been murdered when he was 29 years old in a fight over a tavern bill in 1593.

He was the first to change the conventions of the early Elizabethan plays with his tales of overreachers like the title character of Tamburlaine the Great, Dr. Faustus and Barabas in The Jew of Malta, men whose will to power provided the engines for the plays. Marlowe used blank, or unrhymed verse in a new, dynamic way that changed the very psychology of dramaturgy.

In the meantime, Peele and Lyly were writing light comedies and fantasies such as Endymion. These plays were performed at court, which were not only patrons but protected the companies from the wrath of the Puritans, who found theatre sinful. One of the companies who performed at court, the Lord Chamberlain's Men, had Shakespeare as a member.

This company became the King's Men under the patronage of James I.

The Globe Theatre

The Puritan reaction against the stage was such that the players had to set up theatres outside the London city limits on the south side of the Thames, but attending plays remained popular among non-Puritans. The most famous of these theatres, which became the Lord Chamberlain's Men home, was the Globe Theatre.

It was established in 1599 and was actually a new iteration of The Theatre, which Richard Burbage and his brother Cuthbert had moved and reassembled. In between the closing of The Theatre and the opening of The Globe, the Chamberlain's Men performed at The Curtain.

The Globe premiered some of Shakespeare's greatest plays, including Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth and King Lear. It's very design influenced the design of other theatres, but unfortunately The Globe was destroyed in a fire during a performance of Shakespeare's Henry VIII, which was his final play and of such inferior quality that some scholars don't believe it was written by him at all. The Globe was rebuilt in 1614 and remained standing until 1644 when it was demolished to make room for housing.

The Armada

Historians believe that the flowering of Elizabethan drama was due in part to the burst of patriotic confidence and national identity that erupted after England's victory over the Spanish Armada in 1588. This was a fleet of ships assembled by Philip II of Spain to conquer England. The conquest failed through a combination of hubris, bad weather, English ingenuity and some help from the Dutch.

It might not be a coincidence that Shakespeare began to contribute in earnest to Elizabethan dramaturgy around 1588, when he was 24, though he'd arrived in London from his home in Stratford on Avon around 1585 to seek work as an actor.

As a playwright, he gave Marlowe's blank verse more range, flexibility and subtlety. He responded to the patriotic mood of the country with his History plays. Besides these plays, of course, were his magnificent comedies and tragedies.

Late Elizabethan Drama

Ben Jonson was a friend of Shakespeare and considered his chief rival after the death of Marlowe. However, Jonson followed the strict classical form that was a hallmark of ancient Latin drama. His plays include Vulpine, or the Fox and The Alchemist.

Other dramatists of the late Elizabethan period, which continued after her death, included John Webster, Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher. Richard Burbage also acted in the plays of Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher as well as Shakespeare.

By 1600, three years before Elizabeth died, the robustness of Elizabethan drama began to fade. After Shakespeare's retirement after 1612 and his death in 1616, Elizabethan drama was no more.

Link/cite this page

If you use any of the content on this page in your own work, please use the code below to cite this page as the source of the content.

Link will appear as Hanson, Marilee. "Elizabethan Theatre" https://englishhistory.net/shakespeare/elizabethan-theatre/, February 10, 2017

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Elizabethan drama was the dominant art form that flourished during and a little after the reign of Elizabeth I, who was Queen of England from 1558 to 1603.

# data[].attributes.body
The way people lived depended on what social class you were. Village life depended on self-sufficiency. Money was scarce in the village, so people would trade for things instead of using money. In the center of each village there was a place where people would do leisure activities.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Other work such as milkmaids, servants and millers were usually beholden to the Lord of the Manor.

The role of Women in Elizabethan Village Life
Elizabethan women were expected to look after small animals - geese, chickens etc. Weaving, spinning and making and mending clothes were also part of a woman's work as well as cooking, preparing rushes for lighting and making preserves. The house, the vegetable plot, dairy and poultry yard was the Elizabethan woman's domain. Women were also responsible for the children and need an understanding of medicines and herbs for basic nursing requirements.

Elizabethan Village Life - Hours of Work
Elizabethan Village Life started in the summer as early as 3am. Cock crow summoned the servants to work. Breakfast of pottage was the usual fayre. Laborers were in the fields by 5am. By 10am preparations had to be started in order to provide the midday meal. Everyone was expected to wash before a meal and 'Grace' would be said before each meal. A break from work was allowed after the midday meal. Employers were obliged to give their workers during the day for meals and 'drinkings'. The terms of the Elizabethan Statute of Artificers fixed working hours for laborers as follows:

March to September - 5am to 7 or 8 pm

September to March - From Dawn until Dusk

Elizabethan Village Life Leisure time
Elizabethan Village life became quiet after sundown and evenings were spent in talk and games. On Sunday there was some free time. The men met for church in the morning, with time to gossip, play games and enjoy a few pints of ale after the service was over. Women worked communally at sewing or spinning whilst men bowled, played skittles or ball games. Many enjoyed board games like Nine Man's Morris, chess or draughts (checkers).

Elizabethan Village Life - the Decline in Village life
Changes in agriculture during the Elizabethan period led to people leaving the countryside and their village life to search for employment in the towns. The wool trade became increasingly popular during the Elizabethan age, which meant that land which had been farmed by peasants was now dedicated to rearing sheep and a process known as land enclosure meant that the traditional open field system ended in favour of creating larger and more profitable farming units which required fewer people to work on them. Village life was changing and the movement towards town life started during the Elizabethan era.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Other work such as milkmaids, servants and millers were usually beholden to the Lord of the Manor. The role of Women in Elizabethan Village Life Elizabethan women were expected to look after small animals - geese, chickens etc.