Renaissance and the early 17th Century Editions

• 

  King Lear – Ed. Best & Joubin

  King Lear is a play for our times. The central characters experience intense suffering in a hostile and unpredictable world. They face domestic cruelty, political…

• 

  The Knight of the Burning Pestle

  This volume presents a fresh new edition of the most important play by one of Shakespeare’s most creative contemporaries. Francis Beaumont’s The Knight of the…

• 

  Selimus

  This Broadview Edition of Robert Greene’s Selimus is the first single-volume, modernized edition of this underrated dramatic gem in over a century. First published in…

• 

  The Witch of Edmonton

  At the center of this remarkable 1621 play is the story of Elizabeth Sawyer, the titular “Witch of Edmonton,” a woman who had in fact…

• 

  The Tempest

  The world that William Shakespeare creates in The Tempest has many features that make it recognizably like our own. There are bad, self-seeking people; brothers…

• 

  The Alchemist

  The Alchemist has long been admired as one of Ben Jonson’s best dramas; its satiric cleverness and metatheatricality have delighted audiences from its first performance…

• 

  The Roaring Girl

  The titular “Roaring Girl” of Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker’s comedy is Moll Cutpurse, a fictionalized version of Mary Frith, who attained legendary status in…

• 

  Hamlet

  In the introduction to this new edition, David Bevington explores some key dilemmas and puzzles in this most famous of Shakespeare’s tragedies. What is the…

• 

  Othello

  Although other Shakespeare plays offer higher body counts, more gore, and more plentiful scenes of heartbreak, Othello packs an unusually powerful affective punch, stunning us…

• 

  Coryats Crudities: Selections

  The early seventeenth-century traveler Thomas Coryate’s five-month tour of Western Europe culminated in Coryats Crudities, one of the strangest travelogues published in early modern England.…

• 

  The Spanish Tragedy

  The Spanish Tragedy became one of the most successful plays on the Elizabethan English stage and laid the foundation of the revenge tragedy, a genre…

• 

  Jack of Newbury

  Jack of Newbury is an incisive yet remarkably entertaining work of narrative prose—and one that was extremely popular when it was published in the 1590s.…

• 

  The Merchant of Venice

  The Merchant of Venice is best known for its complex and ambiguous portrait of the Jewish moneylender Shylock—and of European anti-Semitism. Fascinating in its engagement…

• 

  The Winter’s Tale

  Neither comedy nor tragedy, The Winter’s Tale contains elements of each genre, and defies easy classification. It experiments, like many of Shakespeare’s late plays, with…

• 

  Twelfth Night – ISE – Ed. Carnegie & Houlahan

  Twelfth Night has seldom been off the stage since Shakespeare’s day. It has been performed for its romantic high comedy and its boisterous low comedy;…

• 

  Henry V

  Upon opening their expensive new book in 1623, buyers of the folio collection of William Shakespeare’s plays were promised The Life of Henry the Fift.…

• 

  Tamburlaine the Great

  Tamburlaine the Great, Part One and Part Two are the first plays that Christopher Marlowe wrote for London’s then new freestanding, open-air public playhouses. They…

• 

  Samson Agonistes and Other Poems

  In Samson Agonistes, Milton’s last great work, he addresses questions that pressed insistently on the imagination of all who were unhappy with the changes wrought…

• 

  Henry IV – Part One

  Henry IV, Part One has been one of Shakespeare’s most popular plays since it was first produced, and was reprinted several times during the playwright’s…

• 

  Doctor Faustus: The B Text

  Doctor Faustus is one of early modern English drama’s most fascinating characters, and Doctor Faustus one of its most problematic plays. Selling his soul to…

• 

  Julius Caesar

  Julius Caesar is a key link between Shakespeare’s histories and his tragedies. Unlike the Caesar drawn by Plutarch in a source text, Shakespeare’s Caesar is…

• 

  As You Like It

  Both a witty satire of literary cliché and a tender meditation on the varieties of love, As You Like It continues to be one of…

• 

  Paradise Lost

  John Milton’s epic story of cosmic rebellion and the beginning of human history has long been considered one of the greatest and most gripping narratives…

• 

  The Jew of Malta

  First performed by Shakespeare’s rivals in the 1590s, Christopher Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta was a trend-setting, innovative play whose black comedy and final tragic…