Product Description: Here is a marvelous collection of plays from the English Renaissance period, offering prime examples of the "domestic drama" genre that first appeared around 1590. These four pioneering works, set in near-contemporary England and concerned with issues of marriage and crime rather than war and power, focus on the lives of ordinary people, instead of kings and queens and politicians...read more

Oxford Shakespeare Topics provides students, teachers, and interested readers with short books on important aspects of Shakespeare criticism and scholarship. Each book is written by an authority in its field, and combines accessible style with original discussion of its subject. Notes and a critical guide to further reading equip the interested reader with the means to broaden research. William Shakespeare lived and worked during an extraordinary quarter-century in the history of English drama, which saw the development of new kinds of tragedy and comedy, and the birth of the entirely new genre of tragicomedy. Beginning with the institutional foundations that were laid with the emergence of the commercial theater business in 1570s London, Shakespeare and the Drama of His Time describes the principal audience fashions, artistic conventions, and professional circumstances which defined, and enabled, his remarkable plays and those of his colleagues. Throughout, Shakespeare's plays are shown to be intimately associated with those of his contemporaries, notably Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Kyd, George Chapman, Ben Jonson, John Marston, and John Fletcher. (view table of contents)

Product Description: Jacobean Tragedy explores the tensions between the disruptive energies of sex and seventeenth century social, cultural and political values with an exceptional frankness, and the plays collected in this volume demonstrate the genre at its most sinister and explicit...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)