The Broadview Editions Bookshelf
The Broadview Editions Bookshelf provides digital access to over 450 meticulously edited works of literature. For more than 30 years, Broadview’s editions have presented classic works of literature, both canonical and lesser-known, in a reader-friendly format with scholarly introductions, footnotes, and appendices to situate each work in its historical and cultural moment. This new digital…
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 that playwrights returned to throughout the early modern era and that endures even today. The story surrounds the civil servant Hieronimo, who joins Bel-imperia of the royal family to take…
The Broadview British Bookshelf
The Broadview British Bookshelf provides digital access to over 330 meticulously edited works of British Literature. For more than 30 years, Broadview’s editions have presented classic works of literature, both canonical and lesser-known, in a reader-friendly format with scholarly introductions, footnotes, and appendices to situate each work in its historical and cultural moment. This new…
New to the Broadview Anthology of British Literature: Thomas Dekker’s Plague Pamphlets
Broadview recently released a third edition of The Broadview Anthology of British Literature Volume 2: The Renaissance and the Early Seventeenth Century. As with all new editions of our anthology, the third edition of Volume 2 features exciting new material. In this entry of the Broadview Blog, we present a sample of this material: two…
Medieval and Renaissance
Old English Poetry: An Anthology (BABL Edition)The Medieval Bestiary in English (10th-13th Century)Beowulf, second edition (c.1000)Beowulf, second edition. Facing Page Translation (c.1000)The Four Branches of The Mabinogi (c.1100)The History of the Kings of Britain (12th C) Geoffrey of MonmouthThe Lais of Marie de France (12th C)The Alexandreis (c.1175) Walter of ChâtillonThe Miracles of the Virgin…
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 trace the progress of Tamburlaine, a Central Asian leader, as he “scourge[s] kingdoms with his conquering sword” and rises to imperial power. The plays were a powerful beginning to Marlowe’s…
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 irony illuminate the darker regions of the Elizabethan cultural imagination. Although Jews were banished from England in 1291, the Jew in the form of Barabas, the play’s protagonist, returns on…
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 Lucifer in return for twenty-four years of power, wealth, knowledge, and sex, Doctor Faustus is at once an aspiring Renaissance magus and the hardened reprobate of Protestant theology. The introduction,…
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 1594, the play grippingly stages the bloody fratricidal warfare inaugurating the reign of Selim I (1512-20) as emperor of the Ottoman Empire. Contributing to the expansion of the range of…