Here is a marvelous collection of plays from the English Renaissance period, offering prime examples of the "domestic drama" genre that first appeared around 1590. These four pioneering works, set in near-contemporary England and concerned with issues of marriage and crime rather than war and power, focus on the lives of ordinary people, instead of kings and queens and politicians. Arden dramatizes a notorious murder case of forty years earlier, in which a wealthy husband was killed by his wife and her lover. In A Woman Killed with Kindness, a wife is caught by her husband in bed with his...