"Informing the Nation: Shakespeare and the Renaissance in William Hazlitt's Lectures"

This essay examines Hazlitt’s Lectures on the English Poets and Lectures on the Dramatic Literature of the Age of Elizabeth and their textual and communicative strategies in relation to the socio-cultural and political context of early nineteenth-century Britain. In doing so, it re-evaluates Hazlitt’s interpretation of Shakespeare, and Renaissance literature more widely, and throws light on his construction of the “Age of Elizabeth” as a crucial component in the Romantic-period delineation of a coherent national cultural tradition aimed at a progressively widening public.