Customer Reviews

English Renaissance Drama

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This is an excellent selection of plays from authors contemporary to Shakespeare. There are some real masterpieces here, such as Women Beware Women and the Maid's Tragedy, that have been unfairly neglected due to the looming presence of Shakespeare. The editing is generally fine, although perhaps a bit overdone. According to the editors, every second line includes a sexual reference. The introductions to individual plays are helpful AFTER you've read the play. For English Majors and scholars, these plays are an unexplored gold mine!!

This is an excellent anthology--good selection, fine editing, helpful notes, BUT it is printed on incredibly light-weight paper. So much so that it can be hard to read because the printing from the other side of the page always shows through.

I'm very impressed with this anthology. Explanatory notes and definitions are added in all the right places, making the plays easier to understand than any other annotated Renaissance literature I've read (including Shakespeare). I've read about six of these plays and still haven't had to consult a dictionary; the brief definitions in the margins explain nearly all archaic words and phrases. And the notes are always on the same page as the text, no disruptive endnotes! This anthology is, as a result, remarkably readable.

Many of the important plays of Shakespeare's contemporaries are included in this excellent collection. In other editions of these plays, the reader is left to his or her own devices, but this edition has thorough notes and introductions of the type one usually only sees in Shakespeare collections. Plays that one has often read about, but not actually read, such as Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy, become wonderfully accessible in this superb edition.

I bought this book for a class on Shakespeare's contemporaries and have enjoyed reading many of the plays in this book including Volpone, The Alchemist, Dr. Faustus, The Duchess of Malfi and The Changeling. The editors have done a great job of helping with the outdated language by giving translations and footnotes that help the reader understand what the playwright wrote and meant. I heartily recommend this book to anyone who wants to know what other plays were like during Shakespeare's time.

If you looking for Shakespeare's contemporaries (or if you are adamantly against Shakespeare and looking for some other good English Renaissance plays), this is the book for you. It has good footnotes for all the plays and the intros are well written. It includes Marlowe, Webster, and a lot of other playwrights as well; the plays that are collected are several and thoroughly wonderful. I recommend reading the intro and bookmarking the dramatis persona page for recall (these plays have a lot of characters). Overall, great book, which goes well with any Elizabethan or Jacobean class you might be taking.

This book is the perfect anthology for someone who is studying or interested in English Renaissance drama. The selected plays are very enjoyable to read and the many notes are great in helping the reader better comprehend the works. The only problem with the book is the fact that it uses extremely lightweight paper, making it difficult to write one's own notes without damaging the print.