Just as Shakespeare's theater was an economic gamble, subject to the workings of a market, so the plays themselves submit actions, persons, and motives to an audience's judgment. Such a theatrical economy, Lars Engle suggests, provides a model for the way in which truth is determined and assessed in the world at large a model much like that offered by contemporary pragmatism.
To Engle, the problems of worth, price, and value that appear so frequently in Shakespeare's works reveal a playwright dramatizing the negotiable nature of perception and belief in short, the nature of his audience's...

Popular in their own time, the 27 plays included here--by Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson, John Webster, Thomas Middleton, among many others--reveal why these playwrights' achievements, like Shakespeare's, deserve reading, teaching, and performing afresh in our time. Edited by a team of exceptional scholars and teachers, this anthology opens an extraordinary tradition in drama to new readers and audiences.

Studying Shakespeare's Contemporaries is an accessible guide to the non-Shakespearian drama of Renaissance England that can be read as complete subject overview or used as an indexed reference resource.