The Shoemakers Holiday

by Thomas Dekker

Published December 1926
Elizabethan comedy (1599) by Shakespeare's contemporary

Book 2

The Changeling

by Thomas Middleton and William Rowley

Published December 1958
Thomas Middleton (1580-1627), a bricklayer's son, rose to become one of the most eminent playwrights of the Jacobean period. Along with Ben Johnson he helped shape the dynamic course of drama in Renaissance England. His range is broad, as his work successfully covers comedy, tragedy, and history. Praised during...Read more

Book 26

'Tis Pity She's a Whore

by John Ford

Published 1 January 1966
The central situation of 'Tis Pity She's a Whore is an incestuous love between brother and sister, and it is hardly surprising that critics have differed widely in their interpretation of the exact meaning and significance of the play...All the love affairs in the play end in disaster ...it...Read more

The Roaring Girl

by Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker

Published 27 July 1987
A hilarious city comedy by the authors of A Mad World, My Masters and The Shoemaker's Holiday. Sebastian has a problem. He's in love with a girl but his father won't agree to their marriage because her family are too poor. In desperation he turns to the one person...Read more

The Broken Heart

by John Ford

Published January 1983
The Broken Heart is a Caroline era tragedy written by John Ford, and first published in 1633. "The play has long vied with 'Tis Pity She's a Whore as Ford's greatest work...the supreme reach of his genius...."

The date of the play's authorship is uncertain, and is...Read more

It is a historical phenomenon that while thousands of women were being burnt as witches in early modern Europe, the English - although there were a few celebrated trials and executions, one of which the play dramatises - were not widely infected by the witch-craze. The stage seems to...Read more

Women Beware Women

by Thomas Middleton

Published January 1968
Thomas Middleton (1580-1627), a bricklayer's son, rose to become one of the most eminent playwrights of the Jacobean period. Along with Ben Johnson he helped shape the dynamic course of drama in Renaissance England. His range is broad, as his work successfully covers comedy, tragedy, and history. Praised during...Read more

This New Mermaids anthology brings together the four most popular and widely studied of Thomas Middleton's plays - Women Beware Women; The Changeling; The Roaring Girl and A Chaste Maid in Cheapside - with a new introduction by William Carroll, examining the plays in the context of early modern...Read more

The Witch

by Thomas Middleton

Published 1 April 1990
This book is intended for students (graduate level and above) of Shakespeare and Renaissance drama, textual and bibliographical problems, and political and social history.

Francis Bacon described revenge as a ‘kind of wild justice’. Then as now, early modern playwrights and their theatre-going public were fascinated by the anarchic energies that a desire for retribution unleashes. Rather than rehearsing familiar conventions, each of these plays presents a unique social and cultural milieu where...Read more

"The Spanish Tragedy"

by Thomas Kyd

Published 25 August 2009
The first fully-fledged example of a revenge tragedy, the genre that became so influential in later Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, The Spanish Tragedy (1589) occupies a very special place in the history of English Renaissance drama. Hieronimo, Knight-Marshal of Spain during its war with Portugal, fails to obtain justice...Read more