The Elizabethan World Picture

E M W Tillyard

Editions

Review

The book that David Newsome took as his model of excellence, this is an even shorter work that revitalises the beliefs and conventions of a world now almost alien to us.  As a counterpoint to the squalor and uncertainty of daily life in Tudor England, the idea of cosmic order, linking each of God's subjects with the eternal, was both a necessary comfort and an enviably coherent philosophy for living - a philosophy that could - well, did - produce a William Shakespeare.  Enthralling. - review by John Wyse Jackson (Seán)