Shakespeare and the Great Dearth

By 1597, years of torrential rains had devastated English agriculture, flooding fields and folds and raising the price of grain beyond the means of the market dependent poor - a misfortune made crisis by a long term decline in wages and the incidental crippling of traditional charitable supports. But, perhaps for the first time in English history, Crown and municipal interventions in grain markets promised to relieve the worst effects of these harvest failures, demonstrating both the potential benefits of comprehensive government policy and the potential disasters of policy failure. Famine consequently emerged in the late sixteenth century as a grammar of social and political organization, becoming a rhetoric through which the abstractions of governance were made visible in Shakespearean poetry and drama.