Renaissance and the early 17th Century

  • King Lear - Ed. Best & Joubin

    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

    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

    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

    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 Broadview Anthology of Tudor Drama

    The Broadview Anthology of Tudor Drama

    English drama between the late fifteenth and the late sixteenth centuries is as diverse as it is engaging; this anthology brings together eighteen of the…

  • The Tempest

    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

    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 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

    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

    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

    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

    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…

  • The Broadview Anthology of British Literature Volume 2: The Renaissance and the Early Seventeenth Century - Third Edition

    The Broadview Anthology of British Literature Volume 2: The Renaissance and the Early Seventeenth Century – Third Edition

    In all six of its volumes The Broadview Anthology of British Literature presents British literature in a truly distinctive light. Fully grounded in sound literary…

  • The Trial of Charles I: A History in Documents

    The Trial of Charles I: A History in Documents

    In January 1649, after years of civil war, King Charles I stood trial in a specially convened English court on charges of treason, murder, and…

  • Jack of Newbury

    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

    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

    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 – 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

    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

    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

    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

    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: 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

    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…