ABSTRACT
This anthology comprises a representative sample of drama written and performed in England between the 1560s and the 1630s. A few of the plays will be familiar, and have appeared regularly in other anthologies—Doctor Faustus, The Duchess of Malfi, Women Beware Women, and Eastward Ho—but most of them will likely be unfamiliar, even to students of the period. More than half of the plays have never been anthologized before, and many have never even been given a modern-spelling edition. Like other volumes of its kind, this anthology represents the remarkable theatrical and verbal creativity, the astonishing range of styles and forms, that characterized early modern English drama. By giving so much space to plays that are so seldom read or written about, we hope that this anthology will also be an opportunity for students and scholars to make new discoveries about the nature of dramatic form, and the interrelation between dramatic forms, in the age of Shakespeare and his contemporaries.
