The Chief Elizabethan Dramatists

This richly edited volume gathers major Elizabethan and Jacobean plays beyond Shakespeare, presenting them in reliable modernized texts with notes, biographies, bibliographies, textual commentary, and helpful indexes. William Allan Neilson frames the collection as both a guide for students tracing the growth of English drama and an inviting entry point for general readers, while the contents survey the era's theatrical range through dramatists from Lyly and Marlowe to Jonson, Webster, Middleton, Ford, and Shirley. Among the highlights is John Lyly's Endymion, the Man in the Moon, a courtly fantasy of impossible love, wit, and allegory. Endymion's devotion to Cynthia is set against jealousy, enchantment, and comic parody, from Tellus's bitter schemes to Sir Tophas's mock-heroic swagger and the witch Dipsas's manipulations. The collection also includes a darker social drama in which constables, Bridewell, and a public trial expose theft, vice, punishment, and reform, as Bellafront, Matheo, Hippolito, and others collide in a world of corruption, disguise, and moral reckoning. This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design.