Ten non-Shakespearean Renaissance plays and a masque have been brought together for the first time in what is a major text for students of English drama of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.
The Renaissance saw a dramatic explosion of such force that, four hundred years later, its plays are still amongst the most frequently performed and studied we have. This anthology offers a full introduction to Renaissance theatre in its historical and political context, along with newly edited and comprehensively annotated texts of the following plays:
The Spanish Tragedy (Thomas Kyd)
Arden of Faversham (Anon.)
Edward II (Christopher Marlowe)
A Woman Killed with Kindness (Thomas Heywood)
The Tragedy of Mariam (Elizabeth Cary)
The Masque of Blackness (Ben Jonson)
The Knight of the Burning Pestle (Francis Beaumont)
Epicoene, or the Silent Woman (Ben Jonson)
The Roaring Girl (Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker)
The Changeling (Thomas Middleton and William Rowley)
’Tis Pity She’s a Whore (John Ford)
Each play is prefaced by an introductory headnote discussing the thematic focus of the play and its textual history, and is cross-referenced to other plays of the period that relate thematically and generically.
Simon Barker is Principal Lecturer in English at the University of Gloucestershire. His research and teaching interests lie in the cultural history of the Tudor and early Stuart periods with an emphasis on drama.
Hilary Hinds is Lecturer in English at the University of Lancaster. Her research and teaching focus principally on seventeenth-centuty literature, and in particular on women’s writing from the radical sects.