The first fully annotated, modern-spelling edition of Lyly's Pap with an Hatchet, this volume in the Revels Plays Companion Library series opens a window on the most neglected item in the Lylian canon. A response to a series of late sixteenth-century anti-episcopalian pamphlets issued under the pseudonym 'Martin Marprelate', Pap with an Hatchet seeks to beat Martin at his own game, employing all the devices deployed in the tracts to deride and subvert the Martinist position.
Wholly at odds with the twentieth-century construction of Lyly as an effete writer, ill-at-ease in the hurly-burly...

A knowledge of the history and evolution of the tales on which Shakespeare drew in the composition of his plays is essential for the understanding of his work. In re-telling a particular story, a Renaissance writer was not simply reshaping the structure of the narrative but participating in a species of debate with earlier writers and the meanings their tales had accrued. The stories upon which Shakespeare's plays are constructed did not descend to him as innocent collections of incidents, but brought with them considerable cultural baggage, substantially lost to the modern spectator but an...