Today for various reasons I failed to do any reading. However, I did find a few documentaries - one set was a series about the life of Shakespeare and the other a series about the development of the English language.
Firstly, I need to correct myself on some earlier comments. I talked about how I'd heard that Shakespeare was writing plays voicing concerns about succession and thought maybe that the "wayward heir" character he seems to often return to might have been in itself sending up a certain potential heir. Now that I've had a bit of a refresher course in English history that's probably not the case, since Queen Elizabeth didn't actually HAVE any direct heirs and the crown passed to a once or twice removed cousin when she died.
There's a really interesting story that the Earl of Essex in 1601 decided to try to lead a revolt, and to get the message out to the general populus of London persueded (through bribery, apparently) Shakespeare's troupe to perform Richard II including the deposition scene which until then had never been published or played thanks to the censors. As it turned out the revolt failed to take hold and the conspirators were caught and tried for treason... and in general the actors were let off after explaining they'd been paid rather a lot to do it. It's a pretty powerful anecdote of how much you can get away with on stage.
Shakespeare also seems to have had a bit of a double life as he had to keep his family religion largely secret, something which links many of his friends, sponsors and advocates through most of his career. His intelligence as an actor as well as a writer shows through in his survival through a huge range of atmospheres, from changes in national religion, through wars, cultural highs and lows, plague and the Great Fire, and an uneasy succession. I get the distinct feeling I'd oversimplified the time he lived through in my mind. Partly I didn't have a concrete idea of the time his career spanned, and I think when I last really looked at these things, in my early teens and uninspired by my teacher, I didn't really have a personal experience of how much a world can change in 30 years. I was 19 and packing to go to university in the week of the attacks of 9/11. I really didn't understand the events that had led up to that point, but I remember writing at the time that I knew history was being made.
I'll draw in something from The Adventure of English here - that several times throughout our history various people have made the assertion that getting everyone speaking the same language will bring peace, whether that's referred to homogenising the language across England, or teaching colonists, or natives. I think it's true that a common language allows for better communication, so we can ask questions first and shoot later. However, it does also mean we're more immediately understood in insults and differences. While there might be a lot of English speakers in the world, we're all still followers of a huge variety of religions, with a variety of allegiances and histories. To coin an ironic phrase, the cliché of the English hating the French becomes a little more understandable when you realise that they spent a lot of the 300 years or so of being rulers over here trying to abolish the English language.
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