Elizabethans How Modern Britain Happened

The Sunday Times bestseller Now a major BBC TV series presented by Andrew Marr

In a brilliantly entertaining, living history of the modern United Kingdom, Andrew Marr traces how radically we have transformed through the course of Queen Elizabeth II's reign. When the Queen stepped up her crown in 1953 at the age of twenty-five, Britain was a very different nation. In this vital history, bestselling author Andrew Marr tells the story of modern Britain through the people who shaped it: from Sylvia Plath to Elvis Costello, Frank Critchlow to Bob Geldof, Zaha Hadid to James Dyson, David Attenborough to the Beatles. How did our activists, our innovators, our artists, our every-kind-of-mover-and-shaker define and progress this new Elizabethan era over the last seven decades? How did the seventies shape the eighties, shape the nineties to incrementally land us where we are today? And where exactly is that?

In the first half of the twentieth century, many writers and artists turnedto the art and received example of the Elizabethans as a means ofarticulating an emphatic (and anti-Victorian) modernity. By the middleof that century, this cultural neo-Elizabethanism had become absorbedwithin a broader mainstream discourse of national identity, heritage andcultural performance. Taking strength from the Coronation of a new, youngQueen named Elizabeth, the New Elizabethanism of the 1950s heralded anation that would now see its 'modern', televised monarch preside over animminently glorious and artistic age.This book provides the first in-depth investigation of New Elizabethanismand its legacy. With contributions from leading cultural practitioners andscholars, its essays explore New Elizabethanism as variously manifestin ballet and opera, the Coronation broadcast and festivities, nationalhistoriography and myth, the idea of the 'Young Elizabethan', celebrations ofair travel and new technologies, and the New Shakespeareanism of theatreand television. As these essays expose, New Elizabethanism was muchmore than a brief moment of optimistic hyperbole. Indeed, from moderndrama and film to the reinternment of Richard III, from the London Olympicsto the funeral of Margaret Thatcher, it continues to pervade contemporaryartistic expression, politics, and key moments of national pageantry.

Studies conformity to the Church of England after the Reformation.

This book examines British playwrights' responses to the work of Shakespeare and his contemporaries since 1945, from Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead to Sarah Kane’s Blasted and Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem. Using the work of Julie Sanders and others working in the fields of Adaptation Studies and intertextual criticism, it argues that this relatively neglected area of drama, widely considered to be adaptation, should instead be considered as appropriation - as work that often mounts challenges to the ideologies and orthodoxies within Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, and questions the legitimacy and cultural authority of Shakespeare’s legacy. The book discusses the work of Howard Barker, Peter Barnes, Edward Bond, Howard Brenton, David Edgar, Elaine Feinstein and the Women’s Theatre Group, David Greig, Sarah Kane, Dennis Kelly, Bernard Kopps, Charles Marowitz, Julia Pascal and Arnold Wesker.

A History of Modern Britain by Andrew Marr confronts head-on the victory of shopping over politics. This edition also includes an extra chapter charting the course from Blair to Brexit. It tells the story of how the great political visions of New Jerusalem or a second Elizabethan Age, rival idealisms, came to be defeated by a culture of consumerism, celebrity and self-gratification. In each decade, political leaders think they know what they are doing, but find themselves confounded. Every time, the British people turn out to be stroppier and harder to herd than predicted. Throughout, Britain is a country on the edge – first of invasion, then of bankruptcy, then on the vulnerable front line of the Cold War and later in the forefront of the great opening up of capital and migration now reshaping the world. This history follows all the political and economic stories, but deals too with comedy, cars, the war against homosexuals, Sixties anarchists, oil-men and punks, Margaret Thatcher's wonderful good luck, political lies and the true heroes of British theatre.

England under Elizabeth I. A time of war and plague, politics and rebellion, personal heroism and religious fanaticism. When if you were born poor you stayed poor, and the thumbscrews and the rack could be the grim prelude to the executioner's block. But it was also an age that encouraged literary genius, global exploration, and timeless beauty. When the lowly privateer Francis Drake circumnavigated the globe with no reliable navigational instruments and only a drunken, mutinous crew for company. When the Queen's favourite, the wealthy and handsome Robert Dudley, was widely suspected of having killed his wife. And when only the machinations of ruthless intriguers like William Cecil and Francis Walsingham prevented Elizabeth's kingdom from descending into anarchy and political chaos. The Elizabethans is a panoramic, exhilarating depiction of an intensely colourful period by master-historian, A N Wilson. This is what life under Elizabeth I was really like.

The age of Elizabeth I continues to exercise a fascination unmatched by other periods of English history. Yet while the leading figures may seem familiar, many Elizabethan figures, including the queen herself, remain enigmatic. In Elizabethans Patrick Collinson examines the religious beliefs both of Elizabeth and of Shakespeare, as well as redrawing the main features of the political and religious structure of the reign. He understands the characters of the period as individuals but is also sensitive to the attitudes and beliefs of the day.