Shakespeare is usually set apart from his contemporaries, in kind no less than quality. This book, the long-awaited final volume in the Oxford History of English Literature, sees Elizabethan drama as drawn together by a shared need to deal with contradictory pressures from heterogeneous audiences, censorious authorities, profit driven managers, and authors looking for classic status and social esteem. Hunter follows the compromises and contradictions of the Elizabethan repertory, examining how Shakespeare and his fellow dramatists were able to move easily from vulgar realism to poetic transcendence.

This guide provides the best practices and reference resources, both print and electronic, that can be used in conducting research on literature of the British Renaissance and Early Modern Period. This volume seeks to address specific research characteristics integral to studying the period, including a more inclusive canon and the predominance of Shakespeare.

This bibliographic guide directs the reader to a prize selection of the best modern, analytical studies of every play, anonymous play, masque, pageant, and "entertainment" written by more than two dozen contemporaries of Shakespeare in the years between 1580 and 1642. Together with Shakespeare's plays, these works comprise the most illustrious body of drama in the English language.

This Companion is devoted to the life and works of Shakespeare and contemporary playwrights in early modern London.

Through its exploration of the intersections between the culture of the wool broadcloth industry and the literature of the early modern period, this study contributes to the expanding field of material studies in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. The author argues that it is impossible to comprehend the development of emerging English nationalism during that time period, without considering the culture of the cloth industry. She shows that, reaching far beyond its status as a commodity of production and exchange, that industry was also a locus for organizing sentiments of national solidarity across social and economic divisions. Hentschell looks to textual productions-both imaginative and non-fiction works that often treat the cloth industry with mythic importance-to help explain how cloth came to be a catalyst for nationalism. Each chapter ties a particular mode, such as pastoral, prose romance, travel propaganda, satire, and drama, with a specific issue of the cloth industry, demonstrating the distinct work different literary genres contributed to what the author terms the 'culture of cloth'.

This study of Elizabethan and Jacobean royal entertainments, including tiltyard speeches and court masques, is the first to look in detail at the surviving material texts. It examines the 1602 Harefield entertainment, the 1575 Woodstock entertainment, the Merchant Taylors' and Theobalds' entertainments, and Ben Jonson's work for the Jacobean court.

Originally published in 1990, Medieval English Drama is an exhaustive bibliography of scholarship on medieval English drama. Each item has been annotated in the bibliography with considerable care; these annotations are descriptive rather than critical and give a clear synopsis of the content of each reference, the texts with which it deals, and a brief indication of its critical position. The bibliography is divided into two sections; editions and collections of plays, and critical works. The bibliography is exhaustive rather than selective and provides English annotations for foreign language works, as well as a list of reviews for most books. The book covers liturgical and folk drama, other forms of entertainment, and related material useful to researchers in the field. The book provides an update of sources not listed in Carl J. Stratman's comprehensive Bibliography of Medieval Drama published in 1972.

No volume about the spectacles and public performances of early modern England could pretend to treat comprehensively a body of materials so conspicuously vast. Rather than efforts to survey the territory, these essays are best understood in the original sense of the term as “essays”—as trials, attempts, experiments to open alternative ways of understanding that vast corpus of mystery plays, civic pageants, court masques and professional dramas that constitute its subject. The book crosses traditional period lines, including studies of Medieval as well as Renaissance entertainments. Once more, the essays are not organized according to a single critical or historical methodology. They employ an eclectic range of interpretive practices, reflecting the variety of interpretive approaches now current in the field. Contributors include: Tiffany J. Alkan, Robert W. Barrett, Jr., Sarah Beckwith, Tom Bishop, Peter Cockett, Richard K. Emmerson, Peter Holland, Nora Johnson, Richard C. McCoy, Lauren Shohet, and Robert E. Stillman.