Each day we feature an interesting photograph shared with us from across England.

This week we are featuring a special Best of 2019 gallery, showing our most popular images from across the year, based on social media engagement.

Shakespeare set many of our ideas of what rural England means in train. No-one since has been able to describe it like him. Witness the pastoral scenes in another great last series play of his “The Winters Tale”

In addition to coming from the Forest of Arden himself he exhibited much of the entrepreneurial skills many rural folk have which underpin the current dynamism surrounding many interesting approaches to alternative service delivery. A theme I am currently researching for Defra.

Here is academic proof of his transfer of such skills to the world of the play-write setting a new trend for the profession itself. The article tells us:

William Shakespeare was the first great “writer entrepreneur” and his financial success gave him artistic independence, an Oxford University researcher claims.

Dr Bart van Es says the turning point for Shakespeare’s writing career was when he became a shareholder in a theatre company.

It meant that he had much more control over his plays than other writers. “This separated Shakespeare from the world of the jobbing playwright,” says Dr van Es. In 1594, Shakespeare bought a share in the Lord Chamberlain’s Men theatre company, which Dr van Es describes as a “daring decision”.

It was an unprecedented step for an Elizabethan author to take a stake in the ownership of of a theatre company and it put Shakespeare in a “unique position”, compared with his literary contemporaries, claims Dr van Es, from Oxford’s faculty of language and literature.

It made Shakespeare much richer, but it also gave him much more freedom over his writing and allowed him to innovate

This article tells how a joint study by economists at the University of East Anglia and the University of St Andrews looked into the effect that life expectancy has on whether – and when – people adopt a faith.

“In countries with low life expectancies people tend to embrace faith earlier in their lives, while people in the developed world often wait until thoughts of an afterlife become more relevant.

“Religious organisations should be prepared to accept and attract a ‘greying church’ with membership skewed towards the older generation,” said Dr Elissaios Papyrakis, one of the report’s authors.”

This makes me reflect on whether the higher proportion of older people in rural England accounts at least partly for its higher incidence of practicing worshipers. What are your views?