Books in the Plays by Renaissance and Restoration Dramatists series

This selection contains the three finest plays of the Stuart dramatist John Ford. The Broken Heart is a classical tragedy of suffering; 'Tis Pity She's a Whore, Ford's best-known play, is a tragic story of limitless ambition and social rivalry expressed in sexual terms; Perkin Warbeck is the last great successor to the history plays of Shakespeare.

Even among the richly talented generation who wrote for the stage during the Restoration, Etherege was, from the start, considered to be a very special kind of innovator. This edition includes annotated texts of all three plays, prefaced by an account of Etherege's life and the reception of his plays on the stage and in criticism.

T. S. Eliot said of the Jacobean dramatist Thomas Middleton (1580-1627) that 'he wrote one tragedy which more than any other play except those of Shakespeare has a profound and permanent moral value and horror': Middleton has increasingly been recognised as one of the most important, if not the most important, Jacobean dramatist after Shakespeare himself.

A volume containing three of Ben Jonson's greatest plays: Sejanus, Volpone and Epicoene.

In this volume Anthony Henderson recalls Congreve's successful career and provides the texts of his four comedies together with notes and a short critical biography, describing the conventions within which Congreve worked and the reception of his plays in his own day and thereafter.

This volume brings together four of Ben Jonson's plays, two of his major works - The Alchemist (1610) and Bartholomew Fair (1614) and two from his later oeuvre: The New Inn (1629) and A Tale of a Tub (1633).

The two plays which make up this volume are of different quality. While no one would claim that The Atheist's Tragedy is a masterpiece, it is an important play because in it the exhortation 'Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord' is acted upon with unusual consistency. The Revenger's Tragedy, on the other hand, is a masterpiece.

This volume provides a selection of four plays by Philip Massinger who, from 1625 to 1640, replaced John Fletcher as principal dramatist for the King's Men, the chief London theatre company for more than forty years. The selection consists of two of Massinger's finest comedies, A New Way to Pay Old Debts and The City Madam, and his two best known tragedies, The Duke of Milan and The Roman Actor.

This edition brings five of Marston's most interesting plays together in a readable and helpful form.

William Wycherley (1641-1715) is now only remembered for one play, The Country Wife. But Wycherley's satire is as sharp now as ever and his revelation of the follies and crimes of his society is still both wickedly funny and savagely perceptive.

The continuing debate about John Webster's political, religious and philosophical attitudes, his formal skills and the importance of his plays for understanding the changing culture in which they were written, make him the most controversial of all Jacobean dramatists.