Lady Elizabeth Russell is the star of Shakespeare and the Countess: The Battle That Gave Birth to the Globe. She was born into a family of assertive women and was educated by her father, a humanist scholar. She and her sisters all married influential husbands, and she became one of the best-connected individuals in Elizabethan England. She was a radical Puritan activist, an admired poet and linguist, a famous designer of monuments and the first woman keeper of an English castle. She also owned a large house around the corner from Shakespeare's Blackfriars Theatre.
The Blackfriars district was governed by its residents, and in this time of economic instability and riots, theaters were suspect as gathering places for seditionists. Shakespeare and Russell had opposing political and family alliances, and he put satirical references to her and her relatives into his plays. She circulated a petition to have the theater closed, even winning signatures from some of Shakespeare's previous supporters. His troupe spent the next three years playing minor venues before moving across the river to build the Globe.
Historian and biographer Chris Laoutaris tells the story of Russell's life, her epic legal battles and her capricious, violent world with sympathy, scholarship and vivid description. He has done extensive original research to piece together new insights and map the complex connections of Elizabethan society. Shakespeare's story is a central incident that doesn't begin until the second half of the book, but by then it is strengthened and illuminated by the broad and deep context Laoutaris has built up in the first. --Sara Catterall