A New Companion to Renaissance Drama

A New Companion to Renaissance Drama provides an invaluable and wide–ranging exploration of the plays, the playwrights, the theater, and the culture of Early Modern England. This expansive guide to Renaissance plays and the world they played to is comprised of an outstanding collection of essays, many written by internationally known authorities across both prominent and emerging scholarly fields. Together they cover matters of theatrical representation within its material, historical, and cultural contexts, offering an inter–disciplinary approach to Renaissance drama, the most popular literary form of its time. Alongside close readings of selected passages from Shakespeare and his contemporaries, the authors offer original interpretations which will open up important paths of inquiry for conversations in the years ahead.

The New Companion offers a significantly increased coverage of the field, drawing on the latest research and current scholarship. The editors have organized the chapters by cultural context throughout, covering genre studies, theoretical applications, and material studies.

This volume will be a key text not only for scholars and graduate students of Renaissance drama and individual playwrights, and undergraduates studying theatre and English, especially Shakespeare, but also for general readers interested in drama.

Arthur F. Kinney is Thomas W. Copeland Professor of Literary History Emeritus in the University of Massachusetts and Founding Director of the Massachusetts Center for Interdisciplinary Renaissance Studies; he is also Chair of the Faculty Senate Research Library Council. He is the author and editor of a number of books and essays, including Renaissance Drama (editor, 2005), Shakespeare and Cognition (2006), Elizabethan and Jacobean England (2010), The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare (editor, 2012) and Renaissance Reflections, Selected Essays 1976–2014 (2014). He is the only recipient of both the Paul Oskar Kristeller Lifetime Achievement Award from the Renaissance Society of America and the Jean Roberts Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Sidney Society.

Thomas Warren Hopper is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Massachusetts Amherst whose research focuses on classical reception. He has previously worked as the Walter T. Chmielewski Fellow for English Literary Renaissance, contributed to the editing of The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare (2012), and served on the committee of the University of Massachusetts Student Writing Anthology. He teaches at Eagle Hill School in Hardwick, MA.