Thomas Dekker

Part of the Globe Quartos series, co-published with Shakespeare's Globe marking their rediscoveries of forgotten plays by Shakespeare's contemporaries. A revenge tragedy set in the Spanish court, Thomas Dekker's The Noble Spanish Soldier begins with the king rejecting his betrothed lover Onelia, with whom he has a son, and instead marrying the Italian princess Paulina. As the King becomes a tyrant, a faction of courtiers grows against him, led by the Duke of Medina, the Cardinal, and the eponymous noble soldier, Balthazar. Meanwhile, Queen Paulina and her evil henchman Malateste plot to kill Onelia and her son. Filled with powerful dramatic moments of violence, pathos, satire and humour, The Noble Spanish Soldier is an under-performed and under-studied Renaissance play that deserves wider appreciation. This edition of the play is edited by Zachary Lesser.

This Jacobean city comedy is a curiosity in that it presents a real-life character, the notorious cross-dresser Moll Frith, who probably was among the first audiences of 'her' play before she was taken up for public misconduct. Middleton and Dekker's 'roaring girl' may outrage her society with her pipe, bluster and swagger, but she turns out to be the moral centre of the play. Her code of honour leads her to call the bluff on rogues and conspicuous consumers, to thrash a hypocritical gallant in a duel, and to act as go-between for the young lovers thwarted by parental tyranny. This wry dramatisation of female deviancy exposing male ineffectuality is as much to the point today as it was in King James's England. An appendix helps the modern reader to appreciate the canting terms used by the low-life characters.

Drama Classics: The World's Great Plays at a Great Little Price A rumbustious Elizabethan comedy featuring identity fraud, love triangles and a marriage proposal disguised as a shoe fitting. Thomas Dekker's play The Shoemaker's Holiday was first staged in London in 1599. This edition of the play, in the Nick Hern Books Drama Classics series, is edited and introduced by Peter J. Smith.

It is a historical phenomenon that while thousands of women were being burnt as witches in early modern Europe, the English - although there were a few celebrated trials and executions, one of which the play dramatises - were not widely infected by the witch-craze. The stage seems to have provided an outlet for anxieties about witchcraft, as well as an opportunity for public analysis. The Witch of Edmonton (1621) manifests this fundamentally reasonable attitude, with Dekker insisting on justice for the poor and oppressed, Ford providing psychological character studies, and Rowley the clowning. The village community of Edmonton feels threatened by two misfits, Old Mother Sawyer, who has turned to the devil to aid her against her unfeeling neighbours, and Frank, who refuses to marry the woman of his father's choice and ends up murdering her. This edition shows how the play generates sympathy for both and how contemporaries would have responded to its presentation of village life and witchcraft.

A passionate tale of paternal disapproval and sexual deceit, following the lives of a princess and a whore. Although set in Italy, The Honest Whore is full of the flavour of the underworld of Jacobean London, with its asylums and prisons, gambling and prostitution. This edition of Thomas Dekker's play The Honest Whore, in the Globe Quarto series co published with Shakespeare's Globe to mark the rediscovery of forgotten plays by Shakespeare's contemporaries, includes both parts of the play, which was revived in a condensed version at the Globe Theatre, London, in 1998. 'A darkly satisfying piece... a surprisingly modern work about sexual betrayal and emotional violence, relieved by moments of cruel comedy' — Daily Telegraph