Excerpt from Shakespearean Tragedy and the Elizabethan Compromise In making this study of Shakespearean tragedy I am un dertaking to enlarge a great creative synthesis of Shake spearean scholarship, Theodore Spencer's Shakespeare and the Nature of Man, and to supplement a great work of Shakespearean criticism, A. C. Bradley's Shakespearean Tragedy. Profiting from the scholarship on Elizabethan psy chology, social theory, and cosmology of Ruth Anderson, Lily B. Campbell, and James Emerson Phillips, Jr., among others, and from his own research, Spencer re-created a setting against which Shakespearean drama casts off new lights. Today, thanks to him and to E. M.

W. Tillyard, whose Elizabethan World Picture appeared shortly after Spencer's book, we are so cognizant of the importance of the Elizabethan concept of hierarchy in human nature, society, and the universe that we can scarcely comprehend how it was almost entirely passed by before. But Spencer only partly fulfilled his purpose of presenting the bistori cal - the intellectual, social, and emotional - background which Shakespeare was able to use, and out of which he grew, 1 for, interested primarily in intellectual history and literary criticism, he confined his comments on Shakespeare's social background to a few perfunctory sentences. I have sought not only to fill in further details in the Elizabethan pattern of belief which he displayed but to show the social causes for the development of this pattern and for the age's intense awareness of the possibilities and consequences of its violation. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work.

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