Hamlet's Choice

“Lake’s conclusions are striking, unexpected, and even revelatory. . . . In its openness, Lake’s performance here shows that accounts of history may be approached like plays as well as plays approached for history.”—William N. West, Studies in English Literature 1500–1900

“Taking Hamlet’s Choice together with How Shakespeare Put Politics on Stage, Peter Lake has established himself as one of the principal voices of the historical contextualization of Shakespeare.”—Stephen Greenblatt

“Compelling. . . . A strikingly fresh and rich account of what religion and resistance meant in Elizabethan England, Hamlet’s Choice is required reading for historians, theologians and Shakespeareans.”—Tiffany Stern, general editor of the fourth series of Arden Shakespeare

“The depth of Peter Lake’s historical research shows just how these plays’ urgent questions kept the audience on the edges of their seats.”—David Norbrook, author of Poetry and Politics in the English Renaissance

“With great deftness, Lake startlingly and compellingly connects the worlds of stage revenge, religious conversion and political allegiance. To read Hamlet’s Choice is as clarifying and cathartic as a great performance of a revenge play itself.”—Nigel Smith, author of Andrew Marvell: The Chameleon