Elizabethan Popular Theatre surveys the Golden Age of English popular theatre: the 1590s, the age of Marlowe and the young Shakespeare. The book describes the staging practices, performance conditions and acting techniques of the period, focusing on five popular dramas: The Spanish Tragedy, Mucedorus, Edward II, Doctor Faustus and Titus Andronicus, as well as providing a comprehensive history of a variety of contemporary playhouse stages, performances, and players.

Shakespeare's history plays have been performed in recent years more than ever before throughout Britain, North America, and Europe. This volume is an accessible introduction to Shakespeare's historical and classical plays. Comprehensive in scope, it offers chapters on the individual plays and accounts of the genre of the history play, Renaissance theories of history, and masques and pageants. It compares them with other European history plays, and includes an account of women's roles, genealogical tables and a list of principal and recurrent characters.

This volume offers a description of early modern habits of writing and reading, of publication and stage performance, and of political and religious writing.

• An introduction to early modern English literature for students and general readers.
  
• Considers the ways in which early modern writers construct the past, recover and adapt classical genres, write about people and places, and tackle religious and secular controversies.
  
• Illustrated with a profusion of excerpts from early modern texts.
  
• Writers represented include More, Erasmus,...