This expansive, inter-disciplinary guide to Renaissance plays and the world they played to gives readers a colorful overview of England's great dramatic age.

In its pages, today's best Renaissance scholars chart the cross-currents of belief and daily experience that illuminate the meaning of works by Marlowe, Jonson, Middleton or Webster, as it has changed over time, place and audience. They explain why the plays do or say what they do, and raise provocative possibilities of what the plays might have said to Tudor and Stuart playgoers by discussing values, attitudes, and the material conditions of performance, along with the lives and particular ideas of individual playwrights.

Arthur F. Kinney is Copeland Professor of Literary History at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and Director of the Massachusetts Center for Renaissance Studies. He is the editor of A Companion to Renaissance Drama (Blackwell, 2002) and of the journal English Literary Renaissance. His other recent publications include Lies like Truth: Shakespeare, Macbeth, and the Cultural Moment (2001) and Shakespeare by Stages (Blackwell, 2002).