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...

George Chapman is known today as a translator of Homer and as the author of dark tragedies such as Bussy D'Ambois. An Humorous Day's Mirth, written in 1597, was one of the most popular plays of the Elizabethan era. Not only was Chapman's play the Rose Theatre's greatest box-office success of that year, but it also presented an entirely new type of comedy, one that has profoundly influenced comic writing up to the present day.
This play is the English theatre's first 'comedy of humours', in which the attitudes, behaviour, and social pretensions of contemporary men and women are satirised....

John Ford is best known as the author of the controversial 'Tis Pity She's a Whore', but his other plays are also full of interest. The Lady's Trial, his last play, encapsulates the final development of his own unique theatrical aesthetic whilst looking back to the drama of his youth, most notably Othello, whose story is here rewritten.
In Ford's version, the supposedly wronged husband, the victorious general Auria, does not simply take the word of his friend, the well-intentioned but overly suspicious Aurelio, that his wife, Spinella, is unfaithful: instead he does what Othello...

George Chapman is known today as a translator of Homer and as the author of dark tragedies such as Bussy D'Ambois. An Humorous Day's Mirth, written in 1597, was one of the most popular plays of the Elizabethan era. Not only was Chapman's play the Rose Theatre's greatest box-office success of that year, but it also presented an entirely new type of comedy, one that has profoundly influenced comic writing up to the present day.

This play is the English theatre's first 'comedy of humours', in which the attitudes, behaviour, and social pretensions of contemporary men and women are satirised....

This is the first single volume edition of A Trick to Catch the Old One for many decades. This edition presents a thoroughly reconsidered text based on collation of all known copies of the 1608 quarto (including material unnoticed by earlier editors).

Textual analysis draws on detailed internal investigation and the printer's wider practice to propose that relatively improvisational procedures and a paper quota governed A Trick's printing operations. Discovery of an overlooked record revises the date of court performance to 1 January 1607, with implications for the play's early history....