Shakespeare the Elizabethan is a brief and briliant life of the world's greatest dramatist within the context of his own time. It was a life, writes A. L. Rowse, 'coterminous with the Elizabethan Age itself' -- the golden age of England and the English language. A prime glory of the period was the Elizabethan drama, the greatest age in the history of the world's theater. All foreigners coming to London were struck by the brilliant theatres and performances of plays, no less than at Court in the various royal palaces, and at the universities and schools. English players toured all over Norther Europe, especially Germany, the Netherlands and Denmark. No writer was more a man of the theatre than William Shakespeare -- player, playwright, producer; man of business, with a share in the Lord Chamberlain's Company and the Globe theater, part-owner of the Blackfriars. His career was an Elizabethan sucess-story. Here it is portrayed in Shakespeare's close association with that circle -- the young Earl of Southampton of the Poems and Sonnets, his patron whose step-father was Vice-Chamberlain; Lord Chamberlain Hunsdon himself, whose mistress, Emilia Bassano, was taken over for a time by the dramatist. The book concisely sums up our knowledge of the world's greatest writer, newly acquired as well as old and traditional, and presents him as the living three-dimensional Elizabethan he was.