blue

Every morning the sky and the sun seemed to be a little higher and the river stretched before us with a greater haze of promise. Every day the book-stall keepers seemed to have taken off another garment, so that the shape of their bodies appeared to be undergoing a most striking and continual metamorphosis.

‘Oh, women! There is no need, thank heaven, to have an opinion about women. Women are like water. They are tempting like that, and they can be that treacherous, and they can seem to be that bottomless, you know?—and they can be that shallow. And that dirty.’ He stopped. ‘I perhaps don’t like women very much, that’s true. That hasn’t stopped me from

We seemed to have a great deal to tell—or Giovanni did. Even at my most candid, even when I tried hardest to give myself to him as he gave himself to me, I was holding something back. I did not, for example, really tell him about Hella until I had been living in the room a month. I told him about her then because her letters had begun to sound as t

Pre-cooked food was available for sale from bakers, hot meat shops and alehouses. London had a row of all-night hot meat shops on the south side of London Bridge from at least the thirteenth century ready to serve travellers, those heading for the capital’s markets and locals alike.

The first permanent theatre was built in 1576, in Shoreditch, by James Burbage and four of his fellow actors from the Earl of Leicester’s professional acting troupe.

Ben Jonson’s introduction to the printed version of his play The New Inn (1631), which offered the following rebuttal to those who had criticized it: ‘What did they come for, then? thou wilt aske me. I will as punctually answer: To see, and to bee seene. To make generall muster of themselves in their clothes of credit: and possesse the Stage, again

That which you see enacted in film and television dramas is of necessity the rather tame, simple stuff that actors can learn within rehearsal times. The impression that many people get, therefore, is that all historical dancing was the calm and stately stuff that opened an evening’s entertainment, the pavans and basse dances suitable for serious an

Fashion at court changed rapidly, and that which had cost the equivalent of a large town house to buy could appear upon the back of the most ambitious only a handful of times before appearing passé. For those like Robert Dudley, patron of one of the acting companies, handing on such clothes could form part of his financial support package, perhaps

The expenses also mentioned items for four separate rehearsals: three fairly low-cost events, perhaps just with the main protagonists in the play, and one ‘general’ rehearsal, later on, which was a much more pricey affair. With twenty-four such plays being staged simultaneously in a town of scarcely 6,000 inhabitants, there can have been few who we