Clare Asquith worked in publishing, writing and teaching before traveling Eastern Europe in the 1980s and 90s with her husband, Viscount Asquith, a diplomat serving in Moscow and Kiev. The experience led her to publish Shadowplay and Shakespeare and the Resistance. Her work sets Shakespeare and his contemporaries in the context of a political oppression largely ignored by Western literary critics yet, Asquith argues, crucial to a full understanding of 16th-century literature.