In this study, Shakespeare's own life story and the development of English theatrical history are placed in the wider context of Elizabethan and Jacobean times but the works themselves are the final objective of this 'applied biography'.

The first edition of this book formed the basis of the modern approach to Elizabethan poetic drama as a performing art, an approach pursued in subsequent volumes by Professor Bradbrook. Its influence has also extended to other fields; it has been studied by Grigori Kozintesev and Sergei Eisenstein for instance. Conventions of open stage, stylized plot and characters, and actors' traditions of presentation are related to the special expectations which a rhetorical training produced in the listeners. The general discussion of tragic conventions is followed by individual studies of how these...

Throughout, the work takes full account of developments in stage history which have altered thinking about Shakespeare's stage.

This book considers the critical point of knowledge of Lowry's life, and the ways it is absorbed in his writings.

This 1936 book discusses Sir Walter Raleigh's connection to the intellectual environment of his time.