Locating the Queen's Men presents new and groundbreaking essays on early modern England's most prominent acting company, from their establishment in 1583 into the 1590s. Offering a far more detailed critical engagement with the plays than is available elsewhere, this volume situates the company in the theatrical and economic context of their time. The essays gathered here focus on four different aspects: playing spaces, repertory, play-types, and performance style, beginning with essays devoted to touring conditions, performances in university towns, London inns and theatres, and the patronage system under Queen Elizabeth. Repertory studies, unique to this volume, consider the elements of the company's distinctive style, and how this style may have influenced, for example, Shakespeare's Henry V. Contributors explore two distinct genres, the morality and the history play, especially focussing on the use of stock characters and on male/female relationships. Revising standard accounts of late Elizabeth theatre history, this collection shows that the Queen's Men, often understood as the last rear-guard of the old theatre, were a vital force that enjoyed continued success in the provinces and in London, representative of the abiding appeal of an older, more ostentatiously theatrical form of drama.

Robert Greene, contemporary of Shakespeare and Marlowe and member of the group of six known as the "University Wits," is the subject of this essay collection, the first to be dedicated solely to his work. Although in his short lifetime Greene published some three dozen prose works, composed at least five plays, and was one of the period's most recognized-even notorious-literary figures, his place within the canon of Renaissance writers has been marginal at best. Writing Robert Greene offers a reappraisal of Greene's career and of his contribution to Elizabethan culture. Rather than drawing lines between Greene's work for the pamphlet market and for the professional theatres, the essays in the volume imagine his writing on a continuum. Some essays trace the ways in which Greene's poetry and prose navigate differing cultural economies. Others consider how the full spectrum of his writing contributes to an emergent professional discourse about popular print and theatrical culture. The volume includes an annotated bibliography of recent scholarship on Greene and three valuable appendices (presenting apocrypha; edition information; and editions organized by year of publication).

Contributions to this volume explore the idea of Marlowe as a working artist, in keeping with John Addington Symonds' characterization of him as a "sculptor-poet." Throughout the body of his work-including not only the poems and plays, but also his forays into translation and imitation-a distinguished company of established and emerging literary scholars traces how Marlowe conceives an idea, shapes and refines it, then remakes and remodels it, only to refashion it further in his writing process. These essays necessarily overlap with one another in the categories of lives, stage, and page, which signals their interdependent nature regarding questions of authorship, theater and performance history, as well as interpretive issues within the works themselves. The contributors interpret and analyze the disputed facts of Marlowe's life, the textual difficulties that emerge from the staging of his plays, the critical investigations arising from analyses of individual works, and their relationship to those of his contemporaries. The collection engages in new ways the controversies and complexities of its subject's life and art. It reflects the flourishing state of Marlowe studies as it shapes the twenty-first century conception of the poet and playwright as master craftsman.

Shakespeare’s Forgotten Allegory posits three startling points: that we have today forgotten a cultural icon that helped to bring about the Renaissance; that this character, used to distil classical wisdom regarding how to raise children to become moral adults, consistently appeared in plays performed between 1350 and 1650; and that the character was often utilised by the likes of Shakespeare and Ben Jonson, and therefore adds a long forgotten allegorical narrative to their works. This evidence-based reappraisal of some of the most iconic works in Western literature suggests that a core element of their content has been ‘lost’ for centuries. This text will appeal to anyone with an interest in late medieval and early modern drama, especially the works of Shakespeare; to those interested in the history of teaching and child rearing; to anyone curious about the practical application of philosophy in society; to anyone that would like to know more about the crucial and defining period today known as the Renaissance, and how and why society was redesigned by those with influence; and to all those who would like to know more about how history, which though sometimes misplaced, continues to influenced our modern world.

A most thorough study of the Elizabethan Tragedy of Revenge, its origins, development, the ethical influence affecting it and the inter-relations of the plays. Originally published in 1966. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Drawing on a variety of disciplines and documents, Professor Agnew illuminates one of the most fascinating chapters in the formations of Anglo-American market culture. Worlds Apart traces the history of our concepts of the marketplace and the theatre and the ways in which these concepts are bound together. Focusing on Britain and America in the years 1550 to 1750, the book discusses the forms and conventions that structured both commerce and theatre. As marketing practice broke free of its traditional boundaries and restraints, it challenged longstanding popular assumptions about the constituents of value, the nature of identity, the signs of authenticity, and the limits of liability. New exchange relations bred new legal and commercial fictions to authorise them, but they also bred new doubts about the precise grounds upon which the self and its 'interests' were to be represented. Those same doubts, Professor Agnew shows, animated the theatre as well. As actors and playwrights shifted from ecclesiastical and civic drama to professional entertainments, they too devised authenticating fictions, fictions that effectively replicated the bewildering representational confusions of the new 'placeless market'.