Table of Contents

Acknowledgments; Introduction; 1. The humanism of acting: John Heywood's The Foure PP; 2. Wit and Science and the dramaturgy of learning; 3. Playing against type: Gammer Gurton's Needle; 4. Time, tyranny and suspense in political drama of the 1560s; 5. Humanism and the dramatizing of women; 6. The confusions of Gallathea: John Lyly as popular dramatist; 7. Bearing witness to Tamburlaine, Part 1; 8. Robert Greene's Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay: the commonwealth at the present moment; Afterword; Notes; Index.

Promotional Information

An account of one hundred years of English drama 1490–1590.

Reviews

'… Cartwright's fundamental reassessment of the roots of Renaissance drama is absorbing to read and compelling in its argument … In painstaking historical detail, in close textual observation, in imagined performative spectacle, Cartwright's view is not only modifying and corrective. It is seminal.' Arthur F. Kinney, Shakespeare Quarterly