Shakespeare and His Contemporaries, by Charles Nicholl, National Portrait Gallery, London, 2005
As I am both a playwright and an art critic, it is always a pleasure when I find a book that straddles both occupations. Charles Nicholl’s Shakespeare and His Contemporaries is such a volume. As the title implies, it looks at the bard within the milieu of his Elizabethan and Jacobean contemporaries: not just playwrights but also poets, pamphleteers, scientists, patrons; and even the Queen’s Maids of Honour. As the publication is produced by London’s National Portrait Gallery, the book is structured around a large group of their portraits, reproduced in colour. In most cases, each chapter is based around one individual.
Often, with books of this nature which are really catalogues accompanying an exhibition, the writer is an academic art historian who is determined to show off his or her research and is not bothered about communicating directly to an unspecialized audience. As it happens, Nicholls is an academic but one specializing in biography. He has written numerous books including a fine biography of the playwright Christopher Marlowe (The Reckoning, which is an investigation into the playwright’s murder) as well as biographies of the French nineteenth-century poet Rimbaud and the renaissance artist Leonardo da Vinci. In all of his works that I have read, he goes out of his way to write simply and lucidly, being determined to reach a general audience but, being a career academic and biographer, he has the requisite knowledge.
(l-r) Cover showing portrait of William Shakespeare; Ben Jonson; John Fletcher - all portraits in National Portrait Gallery, London
Our book opens with a general introduction which sketches in the historical background deftly. We are reminded that when Elizabeth was a princess, she witnessed the execution of her mother, Anne Boleyn, and survived ‘virtual house-arrest’ for years, during the reign of her half-sister Mary. We note that Robert Devereaux, the Earl of Essex, last of the Queen’s favourites, commissioned a performance of Shakespeare’s Richard the Second, shortly before the 1601 rebellion which left him without a head…and we learn that Sir Philip Sidney, a major Elizabethan poet, died a heroic soldier’s death in the Netherlands, aged only thirty-two. Nicholls knows how to grab your attention!
As for the rest of the book, there are short, lively chapters on Shakespeare, Marlowe, Ben Jonson, Beaumont & Fletcher, and George Chapman, all of them playwrights. There are particularly fine portraits of Jonson (sometime apprentice bricklayer, soldier in the Netherlands, and actor as well as a major playwright) and of Fletcher who wrote or co-wrote over fifty plays and who collaborated with Shakespeare on the bard’s final plays.
(l-r) Insert page showing portrait of John Donne; portrait of Edmund Spenser; portrait of Elizabeth I - all portraits in National Portrait Gallery, London
Of the poets who include Edmund Spenser of Fairie Queen fame, John Donne, Edward de Vere and Sir Walter Raleigh, John Donne is perhaps the most fascinating. The 1595 portrait shows a handsome, swarthy young rake (Nicholls typifies the early Donne as a cynical philanderer) who, in 1601, at the age of thirty-eight, married a seventeen-year-old, the union producing twelve children before she died in 1617. Whereas, however, his 1616 portrait, indicates a changed man, one who delivered famous sermons on sin and redemption at St. Paul’s Cathedral.
Although a catalogue, this book is quite capable of, so to speak, standing on its own two feet. It does not depend on its exhibition. Rather, in spritely, entertaining fashion, it gives you a guided tour of the Elizabethan and Jacobean world that whets the appetite for more. It has an index, list of illustrations and a short but particularly useful bibliography. Enjoy!
Brian McAvera, January 2026
A copy of ‘Shakespeare & His Contemporaries’ is available in the NI Visual Art Research Library & Archive at the Golden Thread Gallery. NIVARLA items in the rare and special collection will be available to view by appointment. We will share more information on how to access and use NIVARLA soon!
The Northern Ireland Visual Art Research Library & Archive is supported by the Ampersand Foundation, with many books and archive items donated and on loan from the McAvera & Walker Library.
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