Shakespeare's World | Shakespeare and Foreigners
Islanders are notoriously (and by definition) insular in their outlook, and the inhabitants of Britain in Shakespeare's day were no exception. Within the island itself, the metropolis of London was almost another island. For the ordinary Londoner, the world beyond the fringe of the Great City, and certainly that beyond the seas—even merely across the Channel—was "outlandish," or foreign. Except for the two universities and, possibly, the archiepiscopal see of York, the Londoner saw the rest of his island, and Ireland as well, as cultural wasteland. To him, T. S. Eliot's perspective...
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