Blackwell Reference Online

This expansive, inter-disciplinary guide to Renaissance plays and the world they played to gives readers a colourful overview of England's great dramatic age.

In its pages, today's best Renaissance scholars chart the cross-currents of belief and daily experience that illuminate the meaning of works by Marlowe, Jonson, Middleton, or Webster, as it has changed over time, place, and audience. The contributors explain why the plays do or say what they do, and raise provocative possibilities of what the plays might have said to Tudor and Stuart playgoers by discussing values, attitudes, and the material conditions of performance, along with the lives and particular ideas of individual playwrights.