To know Shakespeare is to know his plays, not just one by one but all together or what T. S. Eliot calls the pattern in his carpet . But if in view of their quantity a division has to be made, it must be that between Elizabethan and Jacobean. More than we realize, the dramatist was affected by the mind of the monarch, negatively no less than positively, not least in his time of profound religious change a fact that is sadly ignored by the majority of scholars.
