Companion guide to the fourth volume of Dekker's plays, with introductions and commentary on The Sun's Darling, Britannia Honour, London's Tempe, Lust's Dominion, The Noble Spanish Soldier, The Welsh Ambassador.

A dictionary of playwrights which contains 485 entries, each of which includes biographical information on the playwright, complete lists of published works (with dates of performance) and a bibliography of critical studies on the playwright.

Turning Turk looks at contact between the English and other cultures in the early modern Mediterranean, and analyzes the representation of that experience on the London stage. Vitkus's book demonstrates that the English encounter with exotic alterity, and the theatrical representations inspired by that encounter, helped to form the emergent identity of an English nation that was eagerly fantasizing about having an empire, but was still in the preliminary phase of its colonizing drive. Vitkus' research shows how plays about the multi-cultural Mediterranean participated in this process of identity formation, and how anxieties about religious conversion, foreign trade and miscegenation were crucial factors in the formation of that identity.

Thomas Dekker's The Shoemaker's Holiday is one of the most popular of Elizabethan plays--entertaining, racy and vivid in its characterization. Revealing a vital portrait of Elizabethan London and the interaction of social classes within the city, its social commentary is on the whole optimistic, though darker tones are discernible. The play has had a lively history of performance on both the professional and amateur stage.