This book provides for the first time modern-spelling, fully annotated editions of three important Elizabeth and Jacobean 'usury plays' - The Three Ladies of London, Englishmen for My Money, The Hog Hath Lost His Pearl. The edition includes an extensive scholarly introduction to the attitudes toward money-lending in early modern England, and to the authors, texts and historical contexts of this drama.
The plays included in this edition also represent examples of 'city plays' and 'alien plays', thus making them widely relevant to scholars and teachers in many areas of early modern studies....

The heart of this book is its fully annotated, critical editions of the surviving work of Richard Edwards, one of the most influential poets and dramatists writing in England before Shakespeare. Ros King's extensive introduction, identifying the holes in the documentary evidence that might accommodate this important but now little known writer, rewrites the history of pre-Shakespearean drama, illustrates new approaches to sixteenth-century prosody and to the modernisation of dramatic poetry, and re-evaluates the public role of theatre and poetry during a particularly turbulent period in...

Sir Thomas Stukeley, the notorious English courtier, pirate, adventurer and soldier, died at the Battle of Alcazar in Morocco in 1578, while serving in the army of King Sebastian of Portugal. This volume comprises the first modern-spelling, annotated edition of two plays in which he is a major character: George Peele's 'The Battle of Alcazar' (c.1588), and the anonymous 'Famous History of the Life and Death of Captain Thomas Stukeley' (c.1596).
In his extensive introduction and commentary, Charles Edelman discusses the plays' authorship, their many textual problems, and what they reveal...

During Shakespeare's lifetime, John Lyly was repeatedly described as the central figure in contemporary English literature. This book takes that claim seriously, asking how and why Lyly was considered the most important writer of his time. It demonstrates his decisive role in creating a market for cheap, short forms of literature, reinventing the prose sentence and thereby becoming a litmus test for literary excellence.
The book traces Lyly's work in prose fiction and the theatre, demonstrating previously unrecognised connections between these two forms of entertainment. Having...