Shakespeare: The Lodger

Just to share a quote from an interesting book on Shakespeare I've just finished (thanks, Val!). Probably not of interest to you as such - it's very detailed on the historical setting, and the Bill Bryson book was a better overview - but I loved the author's analysis of why Shakespeare is always setting plays in places he (we think) hadn't visited. Nicholl writes: "the foreign... is an imaginative key for Shakespeare: it opens up fresher and freer ways of seeing the people and things which daily reality dulled with familiarity... a foreign country was a kind of working synonym for the theatre itself - a place of tonic exaggerations and transformations; a place where you walk in through a door in Southwark and find yourself beached up on the shores of Illyria."