Kim Hall: What historical lessons can we draw?

One has to be careful to draw historical lessons from Shakespeare.  That is, because he freely dramatizes historical figures and events, we ought to take his plays as a prompt to research the facts behind this dramatization.  Of course, as masterful works of art, his plays may shed light (i.e. psychological, experiential or behavioral) on historical figures and events, which facts, in and of themselves, may fail to shed light on.  At the very least, as Professor Kim Hall points out, we glimpse Elizabethan views on the royal court in Shakespeare's time.  At the end of the day, as I have argued elsewhere, our understanding of anything in our world and history are all the richer, more complete when we account for both objective and subjective angles.