Thomas Dekker

Volume III of the Cambridge Dekker contains The Roaring Girl, If this be not a Good Play..., Troia-Nova Triumphans, Match me in London, The Virgin Martyr, The Witch of Edmonton and The Wonder of a Kingdom. Professor Bowers's edition is recognized as a model critical old-spelling text, where the techniques of strong textual and bibliographical study have been methodically applied to one of the least accessible of the Elizabethan dramatists. The introductions to each play provide textual analyses which set out the circumstances of publication and transmission. The critical apparatus gives press variants derived from collations, editorial emendations to the copy-text and other textual notes.

This was the first edition of Dekker's plays to appear in print since the late nineteenth century. Thus, for many years prior, Dekker had been the least accessible of the prominent Elizabethan dramatists, with the result that his anthologized plays had received undue attention at the expense of other highly readable works of the second rank. Professor Fredson Bowers here presents a critical old-spelling text of the ordinarily accepted canon, together with a few works not collected previously but which seem to merit inclusion in an edition of Dekker's plays. The text of the complete plays is in four volumes and a complementary four-volume set contains detailed introductions and notes to all the plays. In a general textual introduction Professor Bowers sets forth a reasoned account of his editorial method and procedures for a critical edition according to bibliographical principles. Separate introductions provide textual analyses of the individual plays, including the circumstances of publication and of textual transmission. Apparatus for each play consists of textual notes, tables of press-variants derived from collation of a substantial number of copies of original editions, lists of editorial emendations to the copy-text, and historical collations of all early editions.

Originally published in 1953, this was the first edition of Dekker's plays to appear in print since the late nineteenth century. Thus, for many years prior, Dekker had been the least accessible of the prominent Elizabethan dramatists, with the result that his anthologized plays had received undue attention at the expense of other highly readable works of the second rank. Professor Fredson Bowers here presents a critical old-spelling text of the ordinarily accepted canon, together with a few works not collected previously but which seem to merit inclusion in an edition of Dekker's plays. The text of the complete plays is in four volumes and a complementary four-volume set contains detailed introductions and notes to all the plays. In a general textual introduction Professor Bowers sets forth a reasoned account of his editorial method and procedures for a critical edition according to bibliographical principles.

'I know the trade: I learned it when I was in Wittenberg' Thus speaks Lacy, the gentleman who disguises himself as a simple shoemaker in order to win his true love, the grocer's daughter Rose. The Shoemaker's Holiday is one of the most engaging citizen comedies of the 17th century. Written and first performed at much the same time as Hamlet, it has an unexpected affinity with Shakespeare's tragedy: both feature a leading character who has spent time in Wittenberg, where he has learned something that has changed him. But whereas Hamlet's Wittenberg philosophy steers him into the realm of the individuated self, Lacy's Wittenberg trade directs him and his fellows into the world of the collectively crafted commodity. In the process, the play offers fascinating insight into the evolution of fashion and the growth of consumer culture in newly capitalist London. This new student edition contains a lengthy new Introduction with background on the author, date and sources, the play's major preoccupations, and stage history. The editor, Jonathan Gil Harris, is Professor of English at George Washington University. he is the author of Foreign Bodies and the Body Politic, Sick Economies, and Untimely Matter in the Time of Shakespeare.

Thomas Dekker: The Shoemaker's Holiday George Chapman, Ben Jonson, John Marston: Eastward Ho! Ben Jonson: Every Man In His Humour Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker: The Roaring Girl Oxford English Drama offers plays from the sixteenth to the early twentieth centuries in selections that make available both rarely printed and canonical works. The texts are freshly edited using modern spelling. Critical introductions, wide-ranging annotation, and informative bibliographies illuminate the plays' cultural contexts and theatrical potential for reader and performer alike. 'The series should reshape the canon in a number of significant areas. A splendid and imaginative project.' Professor Anne Barton, Cambridge University ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

Arden of Faversham * A Woman Killed with Kindness * The Witch of Edmonton * The English Traveller In about 1590, an unknown dramatist had the idea of writing a tragedy about the lives of ordinary people, instead of the genre's usual complement of kings and queens and politicians. His play, Arden of Faversham, inaugurated a new genre of 'domestic' drama, set in near-contemporary England and concerned with issues of marriage, crime, and property rather than war and power. Arden dramatizes a notorious murder case of forty years earlier, in which a wealthy husband was killed by his wife and her lover. In Thomas Heywood's A Woman Killed with Kindness, a wife is caught by her husband in bed with his best friend, only to find that he takes unusual reprisals. The Witch of Edmonton combines a true-life story of witchcraft with a fictitious tale of bigamy and wife-murder, and The English Traveller deals with the unexpected and unwelcome changes people find when they return home after a lengthy absence. Part of the Oxford English Drama series, this edition has modern-spelling texts; a critical introduction that outlines the way all four plays raise powerful and complex questions about the English society in which their tragic events unfold; wide-ranging notes; a chronology of the plays from their sources to recent performance; and appendices relating to two of the plays: who wrote Arden of Faversham and when did Heywood write The English Traveller. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.