Quotes About Elizabethan

Elizabethan cookbooks included not only carving instructions, but the proper terminology for each type of meat such as "breake that deer, leach that brawn, lift that swan, unbrace that Mallard, allay that Fesant, wing that partridge, disfigure that peacock, dismember hern, and unlace that coney." Lamb

Damson plums were a favorite Elizabethan fruit and "eaten before dyner, be good to provoke a mans appetyde." They were also popular dried into prunes. It is unclear why, perhaps because they allegedly inflamed men's appetites, but stewed prunes were a favorite dish at Elizabethan brothels and also were a synonym for prostitutes. Shakespeare mentions prunes in that context in King Henry IV, The Merry Wives of Windsor, and Measure for Measure.

A curious fact surfaces in reading these Elizabethan cookbooks. The English did not thicken their sauces with flour. According to some scholars, it was actually a French chef, François Pierre de la Varenne, who first used that method in his 1661 cookbook, Le Cuisinier François. The English chefs of the time clearly shunned La Varenne's method of thickening, and it does not enter into English cookery books for at least fifty years.

Oyster Stew SERVES 4 Why, then the world's mine oyster, Which I with sword will open. THE MERRY WIVES OF WINDSOR, 2.2 THE ORIGINAL RECIPE calls for "slic't nutmeg," a sophisticated touch to add flavor to a dish. Nutmeg, one of the most common spices in Elizabethan recipes, became so popular that eighteenth- and nineteenth-century ladies and gentlemen carried small personal silver nutmeg graters with them to dinner parties.

Once upon a time, about 10 years ago, I thought maybe I could write a mystery series about a midwife in Elizabethan England. I had an elaborately convoluted title and an elaborately convoluted plotline, and at that point I got stupendously bored.

It's an old Elizabethan idea. The fool is the only one who is allowed to make fun of the king because he is a fool. I can say whatever I want about anybody else because I'm just an idiot talking - I'm not insisting that I'm any smarter than anyone else. It's satire.

Fulke Greville, Servant to Queen Elizabeth, Councillor to King James, and Friend to Sir Philip Sidney.

We will get back to the earlier, instinctive and less inhibited nature of theatre. Today, spectators are passive, but Elizabethan, Greek and Roma; theatre was interactive.

But as my voice coach keeps saying, if we actually spoke the way they imagine the Elizabethan voice might have been, we wouldn't be able to understand it.

What ho, hostess! Where be these whores?

The reign of Elizabeth I had conferred this right, as a way of dealing with the epidemic of begging that followed the dissolution of the monasteries.

The age was the Elizabethan; their morals were not ours; nor their poets; nor their climate; nor their vegetables even. Everything was different. The weather itself, the heat and cold of summer and winter, was, we may believe, of another temper altogether.

On April 4, 1581, almost seven months after his return, she strode onto the deck of the Golden Hind at Deptford

My wife and I have always been Anglophiles. We always felt we were born in another life in England. I was in the Elizabethan era, and she was from the Norman conquest.

Although most earlier versions of pastoral had been set in never-never lands, and although The Tempest contains only one allusion to the actual New World, its setting is not wholly fanciful. We begin with a commonplace event of the age: a ship caught in a storm and beached on an uninhabited island. It is like an Elizabethen news report.

if one goes through Francis Meres's list of the best English dramatists in 1598 one quickly discovers that commonplace books and early drafts of published plays don't survive for any of these popular Elizabethan playwrights.

The Elizabethan mind wanted and demanded that one word could mean 50 things. What Shakespeare offers us is not ambiguity; it's choices.

As with all literature, the play should be read through the eyes of the author, as far as this is possible, which in Shakespeare's case means reading it through the eyes of an orthodox Christian living in Elizabethan England.

The cupidity centered on bank statements and shareholdings is more difficult to understand than the avarice of an Elizabethan trader.

The rise of the stricter forms of Protestantism had not yet inhibited the lavish materialism that seems to characterize Elizabethan society. This might be described as the first secular age.

I was born in England and went to school there. That's when I discovered my undying passion for history - not just for the Middle Ages, but all periods of history. My favorites are medieval, Elizabethan, and Georgian; however, I've written stories set in periods as early as ancient Rome, right up to the Victorian era.

The Elizabethan Failure may engage in battle, but the blow that fells him will most likely be an accidental one. And the cup of water so gallantly offered will, at the last moment, slip from his weak grasp, thus rendering two people thirsty instead of one.