Historical Context In the year 1599, Queen Elizabeth sat on the throne of England. ... On the cultural front, the printing press, invented about a hundred years before, was fundamentally changing the way literature reached ordinary people. ...
It is in this context that one has to read the passage in question: Richard's speech is quite understandably marked by a feeling of inconsolable loss. ... In the given passage, however, it is one elaborate metaphor that contains the gist of Richard's sentiments: The image of the body as a wall of flesh, which is no longer "brass impregnable"24, but vulnerable like an ordinary human being. ...
