The Elizabethan Underworld collects together sixteen of the more important tracts from the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries dealing with the lives and misdoings of thieves, rogues, and tricksters. For the most part the original authors were men of experience - watchmen, constables and those who drifted into the London underworld and learnt its tricks. A thorough introduction contributes a full historical background and outlines contemporary social contexts.

Why does Shakespearean tragedy continue to move spectators even though Elizabethan philosophical assumptions have faded from belief? Shakespearean Tragedy and Its Double seeks answers in the moment-by-moment dynamics of performance and response, and the Shakespearean text signals those possibilities. Shakespearean Tragedy and Its Double investigates the poetics of audience response. Approaching tragedy through the rhythms of spectatorial engagement and detachment ("aesthetic distance"), Kent Cartwright provides a performance-oriented and phenomenological perspective. Shakespearean Tragedy and Its Double analyzes the development of the tragic audience as it oscillates between engagement—an immersion in narrative, character, and physical action—and detachment—a consciousness of its own comparative judgments, its doubts, and of acting and theatricality. Cartwright contends that the spectator emerges as a character implied and acted upon by the play. He supports his theory with close readings of individual plays from the perspective of a particular element of spectatorial response: the carnivalesque qualities of Romeo and Juliet; the rhythm of similitude, displacement, and wonder in the audience's relationships to Hamlet; aesthetic distance as scenic structure in Othello; the influence of secondary characters and ensemble acting on the Quarto King Lear; and spectatorship as action itself in Antony and Cleopatra. Shakespearean Tragedy and Its Double treats the dramatic moment in Shakespearean tragedy as uncommonly charged, various, indeterminate, always negotiating unpredictably between the necessary and the spontaneous. Cartwright argues that, for the audience, the very dynamism of tragedy confers a certain enfranchisement, and the spectator's experience emerges as analogous to, though different from, that of the protagonist. Through its own engagement and detachments the audience becomes the final performer creating the play's meaning.

DigiCat Publishing presents to you this special edition of "A Glossary of Stuart and Tudor Words especially from the dramatists" by Walter William Skeat. DigiCat Publishing considers every written word to be a legacy of humankind. Every DigiCat book has been carefully reproduced for republishing in a new modern format. The books are available in print, as well as ebooks. DigiCat hopes you will treat this work with the acknowledgment and passion it deserves as a classic of world literature.

This multidisciplinary collection is unique both in its conceptual and empirical breadth.

Nineteen scholars offer readings that address the continuity or discontinuity between the literature of the Renaissance and Middle Ages. Essays by Arthur F. Kinney, R. A. Shoaf, and O. B. Hardison focus on broader trends while shorter essays approach the periods by addressing particular themes in their literature or thought.