Books by Douglas Bruster

Shakespeare is the most frequently quoted author of the English-speaking world. His plays, in turn, "quote" a wide variety of sources, from books and ballads to persons and events. This title demonstrates that such borrowing can illuminate the world in which Shakespeare and his contemporary playwrights lived and worked.

Douglas Bruster's provocative study of English Renaissance drama explores its links with Elizabethan and Jacobean economy and society, looking at the status of playwrights such as Shakespeare and the establishment of commercial theatres.

This remarkable study shows how prologues ushered audience and actors through a rite of passage and how they can be seen to offer rich insight into what the early modern theatre was thought capable of achieving.