This edition includes annotated texts of all three plays, prefaced by an account of Etherege's life and the reception of his plays on the stage and in criticism.

T. S. Eliot said of the Jacobean dramatist Thomas Middleton (1580 1627) that 'he wrote one tragedy which more than any other play except those of Shakespeare has a profound and permanent moral value and horror': Middleton has increasingly been recognised as one of the most important, if not the most important, Jacobean dramatist after Shakespeare himself. This volume contains The Changeling (of which Eliot gave so high an estimate), together with Middleton's other surviving tragedy, Women Beware Women, his best comedy, A Chaste Maid in Cheapside, and a more light-hearted early play, A Mad...

This selection contains the three finest plays of the Stuart dramatist John Ford.

Mr Wycherley is universally allowed the first place among the English comic poets who have writ since Ben Jonson. His Plain-Dealer is the best comedy that ever was composed in any language.' Yet in spite of the extreme praise many of his contemporaries accorded to his work, William Wycherley (1641 1715) is now only remembered for one play, The Country Wife. Even though The Country Wife is frequently performed by both amateur and professional companies (including a production at the National Theatre in 1977), Wycherley's three other plays, Love in a Wood, The Gentleman Dancing-Master and The...