Thorough annotation and commentary. Emphasis on the political, historical and religious allusions in the play. Presented in a clear and lucid form.

Full and comprehensive commentary. Solid and scholarly introduction. A welcome edition to this renouned series.

Scholarly and detailed annotations. Provides a thorough sense of the plays background and content. Full and comprehensive introduction.

This is the most thoroughly investigated edition of Volpone to date, based on a wider collation of the 1607 quarto and 1616 folio versions than was previously possible. It calls into question several accepted textual conclusions.
The introduction sets Volpone in the context of Jonson's career at the time of writing and introduces new material on its relation to the Reynard beast epic and the commedia dell' arte. Ambiguities in the play are discussed with reference to two Renaissance perversions of the myth of the Golden Age. Particular attention is paid to the rhythmic effects of the play...

The New Inn is one of the most neglected of Jonson's plays which is now finding a new and appreciative audience. May be read, according to this Editor's introduction, as a tribute to Shakespeare, and as a belated recognition that the fantasies of romance contain profound truths. The spelling has been modernised and the text updated and corrected for this paperback edition. There is also a critical introduction, helpful appendices and a commentary which explains difficult or significant passages within the play.

'The most Pirandellish thing that ever existed' or else 'a wild farrago of reasonless absurdity': James Agate was unable to decide. But 'The Knight of The Burning Pestle' is both. It is a carnival celebration of London life and London theatre in which Francis Beaumont's comic genius is given free rein. A grocer, his wife and their two apprentices attending the theatre in holiday mood interrupt and finally replace a fatuous love comedy with their own heart's desire: exotic spectacle and sound English sentiment. This edition presents an accurate modern-spelling text, the first since 1908 to...

Michaelmas Term is one of five satiric city comedies that the young playwright Thomas Middleton wrote for the boy players of St Paul's Cathedral, sometime before 1607. Set in a vividly detailed, realistic urban milieu at the start of London's social season, the play comes alive through the central contest between Ephestian Quomodo, an ambitious, land-hungry city merchant, and Richard Easy, a naive landowning gallant just arrived in the city. Easy is soon deep in debt and his struggle to recoup his debts and reclaim his land from Quomodo takes places against a sharply drawn set of London types...

Galatea and Midas are two of John Lyly's most engaging plays. Shortly after his early success with Capaspe and Sappho and Phao in 1583-84, he took up the story of two young women, Galatea (or Gallathea) and Phillida who are dressed up in male clothes by their fathers so that they can avoid the requirement of the god Neptune that every year 'the fairest and chastest virgin in all the country' be sacrificed to a sea-monster. Hiding together in the forest, the two maidens fall in love, each supposing the other to be a young man. This leads to delightful complications that remind us of the...

A. T. Moore's thorough commentary on "Love's Sacrifice" is designed to be of use to all kinds of readers, from students of Early Modern drama to specialists in the field. The notes provide full explanations of obscure words and phrases, and offer analyzes of many aspects of staging and interpretation. The text for this edition is based on a fresh study of the quarto of 1633, the only authoritative early text. In his introduction to the play, Moore reappraises the evidence for the play's date of composition. He also looks at the circumstances of the play's genesis, presenting detailed...

"This thoroughly annotated volume provides a detailed study of the play's sources. " Patrick Richards, Day by Day His last known work and the only one to be written primarily in verse, The Woman in the Moon is among Lyly's most entertaining plays. Turning upon the construction of the female character, it has been read as highly misogynistic, and as a sixteenth-century feminist manifesto. The biblical version of the creation of woman is overturned in the first scene when the play's supreme deity, Nature, presents her ultimate creation, Pandora (memorably played in 1928 by Katharine Hepburn),...