This is the fourth volume of a detailed play-by-play catalogue of drama written by English, Welsh, Irish, and Scottish authors during the 110 years between the English Reformation to the English Revolution, covering every known play, extant and lost, including some which have never before been identified. It is based on a complete, systematic survey of the whole of this body of work, presented in chronological order. Each entry contains comprehensive information about a single play: its various titles, authorship, and date; a summary of its plot, list of its roles, and details of the human and geographical world in which the fictional action takes place; a list of its sources, narrative and verbal, and a summary of its formal characteristics; details of its staging requirements; and an account of its early stage and textual history. Volume IV covers the period during which dramatic satire emerged, as well as the opening of the original Globe theatre in London.

Between 1599 and 1601, no fewer than five anthologies appeared in print with extracts from Shakespeare's works. Some featured whole poems, while others chose short passages from his poems and plays, gathered alongside lines on similar topics by his rivals and contemporaries. Appearing midway through his career, these anthologies marked a critical moment in Shakespeare's life. They testify to the reputation he had established as a poet and playwright by the end of the sixteenth century. In extracting passages from their contexts, though, they also read Shakespeare in ways that he might have imagined being read. After all, this was how early modern readers were taught to treat the texts they read, selecting choice excerpts and copying them into their notebooks. Taking its cue from these anthologies, Anthologizing Shakespeare, 1593-1603 offers new readings of the formative works of Shakespeare's first decade in print, from Venus and Adonis (1593) to Hamlet (1603). It illuminates a previously neglected period in Shakespeare's career, what it calls his 'anthology period'. It investigates what these anthologies made of Shakespeare, and what he made of being anthologized. And it shows how, from the early 1590s, his works were inflected by the culture of commonplacing and anthologizing in which they were written, and in which Shakespeare, no less than his readers, was schooled. In this book, Ted Tregear explores how Shakespeare appealed to the reading habits of his contemporaries, inviting and frustrating them in turn. Shakespeare, he argues, used the practice of anthologizing to open up questions at the heart of his poems and plays: questions of classical literature and the schoolrooms in which it was taught; of English poetry and its literary inheritance; of poetry's relationship with drama; and of the afterlife he and his works might win—at least in parts.

Using printed and manuscript texts composed between 1575 and 1672, Jennifer Heller defines the genre of the mother's legacy as a distinct branch of the advice tradition in early modern England that takes the form of a dying mother's pious counsel to her children. Reading these texts in light of specific cultural contexts, social trends, and historical events, Heller explores how legacy writers used the genre to secure personal and family status, to shape their children's beliefs and behaviors, and to intervene in the period's tumultuous religious and political debates. The author's attention to the fine details of the period's religious and political swings, drawn from sources such as royal proclamations, sermons, and first-hand accounts of book-burnings, creates a fuller context for her analysis of the legacies. Similarly, Heller explains the appeal of the genre by connecting it to social factors including mortality rates and inheritance practices. Analyses of related genres, such as conduct books and fathers' legacies, highlight the unique features and functions of mothers' legacies. Heller also attends to the personal side of the genre, demonstrating that a writer's education, marriages, children, and turns of fortune affect her work within the genre.

Using printed and manuscript texts composed between 1575 and 1672, Jennifer Heller defines the genre of the mother's legacy as a distinct branch of the advice tradition in early modern England that takes the form of a dying mother's pious counsel to her children. Reading these texts in light of specific cultural contexts, social trends, and historical events, Heller explores how legacy writers used the genre to secure personal and family status, to shape their children's beliefs and behaviors, and to intervene in the period's tumultuous religious and political debates. The author's attention to the fine details of the period's religious and political swings, drawn from sources such as royal proclamations, sermons, and first-hand accounts of book-burnings, creates a fuller context for her analysis of the legacies. Similarly, Heller explains the appeal of the genre by connecting it to social factors including mortality rates and inheritance practices. Analyses of related genres, such as conduct books and fathers' legacies, highlight the unique features and functions of mothers' legacies. Heller also attends to the personal side of the genre, demonstrating that a writer's education, marriages, children, and turns of fortune affect her work within the genre.