Notes, Notings, and Common Refrains

One of the things that people forget (or never learned, or choose not to know), because they tend to romanticize Elizabethan England, because of the "Teh Shiny!!" is that the government had more in common with Soviet Russia than England, today. Government spies were everywhere, and they kept records on everything. And every play he wrote had to be line-item checked by a government censor.

There's a reason Shakespeare set all his social/political commentary plays in either far-away "exotic" places, or long, long ago. or both.