Based on the original and authoritative Revels texts, Plays on women brings together four plays which dramatise the lives of women in Shakespeare's England The only available anthology focusing on women and including the four plays most often discussed. . . .

The Witch of Edmonton has received considerable attention recently both from scholars and critics interested in witchcraft practices and also from the directors in the theatre. The play, based on a sensational witchcraft trial of 1621, presents Mother Sawyer and her local community in the grip of a witch-mania reflecting popular belief and superstition of the time. This edition offers a thorough reconsideration of the text with a complete transcription of the original pamphlet by Henry Goodcole. This edition will be of particular interest not only to students of Renaissance Drama but also of...

Accessible edition of the play considered to be Marston's masterpiece. This is one of the most original and complex plays of the Elizabethan theatre - complex in genre, structure and language. Uses the same authoritative text as the standard Revels edition with glosses to help the student understand the play's textual complexities. The introduction has been re-written to take account of recent scholarship.

This is the first edition for students and general readers of this pro-woman reply to Shakespeare's 'The Taming of the Shrew' by a playwright (John Fletcher) who was more admired than Shakespeare in the seventeenth century.
Co-edited by a feminist critic and a distinguished textual scholar, this new textbook makes clear why "The Tamer Tamed" should be restored to the theatrical repertoire and the literary canon. It includes the fullest commentary ever provided for the play, explaining for modern students Fletcher's verbal exuberance and his uninhibited sexual language. The full critical...

Expanded footnotes designed to help readers from all levels of familiarity with Elizabethan drama. Emphasis on the play as a theatre text - informative stage-directions. Stimulating introduction, which makes something of a break from the orthodox style .

Masques of difference presents an annotated edition of four seventeenth-century entertainments written by Ben Jonson for the court of James I. These masques reflect both the confidence and the anxieties of the English aristocracy at a time when notions of monarchy, empire, and national identity were being radically redefined. All four masques reflect the royal court's self-representation as moral, orderly, and just, in contrast to stylised images of chaotically (and exotically) 'othered' groups: Africans, the Irish, witches, and the homoeroticised figure of the Gypsy.
This edition...

Women Beware Women is among the most powerful and adroitly plotted of Jacobean tragedies. Written by Thomas Middleton, a later contemporary of Shakespeare, the play deals with topics of enduring fascination such as sexual and financial greed, the sexual exploitation of women by a manipulative older woman, murderous revenge and the sexual predatoriness of a man in a position of power. The storyline is based on the most public of Medici scandals in late sixteenth-century Florence, with the Grand Duke Francesco seducing and then marrying a beautiful Venetian runaway, after arranging the murder...

Dr Faustus, first published in 1604 long after Christopher Marlowe had died (in 1593) and then published in an expanded version in 1616, has long fascinated readers and scholars alike as one of the great puzzles in Renaissance English drama. Marlowe himself was highly controversial in his own day, and remains so today, as a daringly heterodox writer. The so-called A-text of 1604 is very short, with missing and misplaced scenes. Some passages are clearly not by Marlowe, but by some other dramatist commissioned by the theatre entrepreneur Philip Henslowe to supplement Marlowe's incomparable...