Life in Shakespeare's England

Whilst the greatest effort has been made to ensure the quality of this text, due to the historical nature of this content, in some rare cases there may be minor issues with legibility. Under full contribution, while most of the earlier pamphleteers are continually dropping into the ''character'' vein and are full of such admirable little vignettes as the portrait of the bookseller from Nashe on p. 152. This, however, is not always the case, and that more use has not been made, for instance, of the work of Greene is to be set down to the fact that interesting passages are not easily detachable from the main body of his text. In collecting material for this scrap-book, l have in all cases given the reference to those specimens which are at once entertaining an complete in themselves. The majority of the extracts, it should be added, have been taken from books or documents written between I 564 and 1616, the dates of Shakespeare''s birth and death, out of the sixty-nine used only four being earlier and some half dozen later than this period.