THE ELIZABETHAN RENAISSANCE - THE CULTURAL ACHIEVEMENT

In The Cultural Achievement, Mr. Rowse chronicles the astonishingly rich cultural flowering that marked the reign of Elizabeth I. He brings vividly to life the age's poetry, painting, sculpture, minor arts, and, above all, the tightly knit world of the theatre, in which a community of playwrights and actors worked with and sometimes against each other. He devotes individual chapters to the masters of Elizabethan music: Byrd, Dowland, Weelkes, Gibbons, and their followers, and to the science of the English Renaissance, with discussions of Gilbert's great work on magnetism and Harvey's discovery of the circulation of the blood.