Elizabethan

Shakespeare's plays were written in Elizabethan English.

Elizabethan English is like a foreign language to modern English speakers.

They are part of an expressive tradition stretching all the way back to Elizabethan pamphlets, with particular roots in fanzines and feminist expression of the 1990s.

A dim line of ancestors, in every variety of dress, from the Elizabethan knight to the buck of the Regency, stared down upon us and daunted us by their silent company.

Do you like Elizabethan poetry?

Indeed, a remarkable aspect of the group is the way in which, despite its romantic tone and its Elizabethan form, it yet foreshadows the movement that English drama was about to make toward a ‘realistic’ presentment of life.

Until several decades ago, the physical sciences were considered to have had their origins in the 17th century—mechanics beginning with men like Galileo Galilei and magnetism with men like the Elizabethan physician and scientist William Gilbert. Historians of science, however, have traced many of the 17th century's concepts of mechanics back into the Middle Ages. Here, Gilbert's explanation of the loadstone and its powers is compared with explanations to be found in the Middle Ages and earlier. From this comparison it appears that Gilbert can best be understood by considering him not so much a herald of the new science as a modifier of the old.

It's before dawn, this 3rd of August of 2025, here on Lulu Island. I just ate a fig and am drinking hot lime water in the lamp-illumined living room. Yesterday, I saw a stocky Filipino full of Cambodian tattoos, as he told me that he stayed 4 years in Cambodia. He asked for just a small tattoo from the tattoo lady artist, but she then tattooed his whole body. At first, I thought of Tibetan tattoos, but they were Cambodian. The day before yesterday was exceptionally a day of brown Adonises at Tim Hortons café: one brown full of tattoos in the morning and in the afternoon another who spoke in a language which I thought was Maltese—at least some language that was Arabic mixed with something. In recent days, I have been asking Artificial Intelligence to write Shakespearean plays in Elizabethan English—remarkable and fascinating artwork for a machine!

After a dinner of 4 fresh green figs, some refrigerated pickled fig pieces, and microwaved spaghetti Alfredo, eaten on the balcony under a blue sky, I sipped my iced lime water whilst watching the still street below and the big tall conifer beyond. I've been talking to Michael the Dane-French ufologist in recent days about lots of things: My university was like a vacation of smart people, Zen gardens, stone libraries, and so forth. It's different from the suburbia here. We wondered if people staring addictively for hours on their smartphone would ruin their "mind's eye"—inhibiting one's own imagination. He noticed that their device distraction did ruin social gatherings in cafés. I just people-watch and meditate in the café: It reminds me of Arthur the Japanese-American software engineer in my software workplace in Japan; he could just sit on a counter whilst just staring at a wall for a long time. Lately, I've been asking Artificial Intelligence to write ballads and travelogues in Elizabethan English and nostalgic Tagalog. I pick blackberries on the walking way to Tim Hortons café: "¡Moras!" (Blackberries!), I often exclaim in Spanish. An Ecuadorian friend has "Mora" as his surname. He is partly Amerindian, maybe Incan. Today is the 3rd of August of 2025, here on Lulu Island. I went to Kin's Farm Market to buy a bag of 4 lemons, not limes, this time.

It's Lulu Island, 3 August 2025. After supper—green figs tender with sunlight, sweet vinegar from yesterday’s pickled jar, and reheated Alfredo—I sat on the balcony and watched the conifer. Stillness below, a street without cars, without haste. My lime water, iced, caught the light. Michael, the Franco-Danish ufologist, has been in my conversations lately. We speak of inner things: the trance of smart devices, the mind’s eye dwindling. He says cafés aren’t cafés anymore. People forget how to look, how to linger. I tell him of Arthur in Japan—how he'd stare into blank walls like a monk gazing at emptiness. Lately I ask machines to speak like poets, and they do. They mimic Elizabethan verses and the old wistful lilt of Tagalog ballads. I pick blackberries along the path to Tim Hortons. "¡Moras!" I shout like a child. My friend Mora, whose blood flows with Andes mist, would smile. Today, I bought lemons. I meant limes, but lemons are all right. / blackberry morning— / a fig's ghost on my fingers / and the street still sleeps

This Elizabethan Era, and all its nobleness and blessedness, came without proclamation, preparation of ours. Priceless Shakspeare^([sic]) was the free gift of Nature; given altogether silently;—received altogether silently, as if it had been a thing of little account. And yet, very literally, it is a priceless thing.

Although the potato actually has no exciting value, it was believed, in the seventeenth century, to possess definite aphrodisiac qualities, and is frequent mentioned in this respect in Elizabethan drama.

[…] I remember a lady coming to inspect St. Mary's Home where I was brought up and seeing us all in our lovely Elizabethan uniforms we were so proud of, and bursting into tears all over us because "it was wicked to dress us like charity children".

[T]he owners of Doddington Hall, in Lincolnshire, have brought the folly into the 21st century, by building a 30ft pyramid in the grounds of the Elizabethan manor.

Some people have expressed the hope that my reign may mark a new Elizabethan age. Frankly I do not myself feel at all like my great Tudor forbear, […] But there is at least one very significant resemblance between her age and mine. For her Kingdom, small though it may have been and poor by comparison with her European neighbours, was yet great in spirit and well endowed with men who were ready to encompass the earth.

(The second Elizabethan era, that is. I’m not a maniac.)

Not everything that occurred in the early 1950s may usefully be dubbed ‘New Elizabethan’ without emptying the concept of its meaning. […] [I]t becomes clear that British people in the 1950s looked all over for resources to fund their thinking and actions, including to Tudor revivals that were in fact much older, such as in music, and to several periods of the past that were not Elizabethan.

The Elizabethan age is slowly drawing to a close. The end of Prince Philip's long life is a dress rehearsal for its final curtain, when the country will find itself reviewing what it has become, the choices it has made. […] There is just time to see off the rotten party that brought the country low, and end the Elizabethan era with some of the optimism with which it began.

[T]he austerity and restraint of the 1940s was giving way to a more prosperous 1950s. It is perhaps no wonder, then, that the Queen's succession was hailed as the "new Elizabethan age". […] The Queen's death is bound to prompt Britain's reflection on its past, its present and its future. Time will tell what the reign of Charles III will look like, but one thing is for sure: the "new Elizabethan age" is long gone.

Today the Crown passes—as it is has done for more than a thousand years—to our new monarch, our new head of state: His Majesty King Charles III. […] And with the passing of the second Elizabethan age, we usher in a new era in the magnificent history of our great country,—exactly as Her Majesty would have wished—by saying the words … God save the King.

In any case, his [Peter III’s] action was a complete reversal of the Elizabethan policy, and his offer of unconditional peace eliminated Russia’s chance to secure concessions from Frederick.

The extent of her [Catherine the Great’s] knowledge and her appetite for reading made her one of the best-read women in Europe and the most unusual and outstanding woman in Elizabethan Russia.

When Moscow University was initially opened in 1755, its “founder” was I. I. Shuvalov (1727-1797), a prominent cultural figure in Elizabethan Russia and, with his brothers Peter and Alexander, the key political force at the court in the 1750’s.

Here too [Francis] Drake had luck: he took advantage of the Sultan of Ternate's war with the Portuguese garrison upon Tidore to make a treaty with him to sell his produce exclusively to the English. The literal-minded Elizabethans attached great importance to this: on the principle of never throwing an argument away, they regarded it as giving them a right to share in the spice-trade.

The ‘New Elizabethans’ were to be in continuity with their past, but also youthful, inventive, exploratory – a spirit most clearly to be seen in the arts.