Unlike some other reproductions of classic texts (1) We have not used OCR(Optical Character Recognition), as this leads to bad quality books with introduced typos. (2) In books where there are images such as portraits, maps, sketches etc We have endeavoured to keep the quality of these images, so they represent accurately the original artefact. Although occasionally there may be certain imperfections with these old texts, we feel they deserve to be made available for future generations to enjoy.

The Duchess of Malfi is generally regarded as John Webster's finest play, a masterpiece of tragic depth and emotional complexity. The conflict between private love and public political behaviour for a passionate but circumscribed woman is as theatrically pertinent now as when first performed. This timely Handbook: - Examines the play's sources and its cultural context - Offers a detailed theatrical commentary that aids visualisation of the underlying dynamics and structure of the play in performance, and explores performance possibilities - Analyses influential productions on stage and screen, from when it was first performed by the actors of Shakespeare's theatre company, the King's Men, to the present day - Presents key critical debates and assessments of The Duchess of Malfi

This is the fourth and final volume of the Cambridge edition of the works of John Webster. It contains four plays Webster wrote in collaboration, one - Sir Thomas Wyatt, a historical tragedy based around Lady Jane Grey - as part of a team of five led by Thomas Dekker, two - Westward Ho and Northward Ho, city comedies that prompted Chapman, Jonson, and Marston's Eastward Ho - with Thomas Dekker alone, and one - The Fair Maid of the Inn, an Italianate tragicomedy of which Webster wrote the largest share - with John Fletcher, Philip Massinger and John Ford. With the inclusion of these four plays, this Cambridge edition becomes the first complete works of John Webster. The edition preserves the original spelling of the plays, poetry, and prose, and incorporates the most recent editorial scholarship, including information on Webster's share in the collaborative plays, and new critical methods, textual theory, and theatrical analysis.

This is the third and final volume of the Cambridge edition of the works of John Webster. It contains the final complete play in the edition, the City comedy Anything for a Quiet Life, as well as Webster's spectacular Lord Mayor's pageant Monuments of Honour and his Induction and additions to John Marston's The Malcontent. Webster's non-dramatic work is also included: the deeply felt verse elegy to Prince Henry entitled A Monumental Column, his various shorter poems, including verses for the engraving of The Progeny of ... Prince James, and the thirty-two New Characters added to the sixth edition of Sir Thomas Overbury's Characters. This Cambridge critical edition preserves the original spelling of all the plays, poetry and prose, and incorporates the most recent editorial scholarship, including valuable information on Webster's share in the collaborative plays, and new critical methods and textual theory.

This is the first volume to appear in the Cambridge edition of the works of John Webster, beginning with the plays The White Devil and The Duchess of Malfi. The following volume planned for publication will include the other plays as well as the poems and prose. While both The White Devil and The Duchess of Malfi are available in modernized versions, the Cambridge edition incorporates the more recent editorial scholarship including valuable information on Webster's biography, critical methods, and textual theory. In particular, the edition integrates theatrical aspects of the texts with their bibliographical and literary features in a way not previously attempted for a scholarly edition of a Jacobean dramatist. The edition also presents previously unpublished material including a fragment of an otherwise lost play and a hitherto unknown poem and provides a brief biography of Webster, a history of the Webster canon, and reception history for each play.

This is the second volume to appear in the Cambridge edition of the works of John Webster and includes The Devil's Law-Case, A Cure for a Cuckold and Appius and Virginia. This critical edition preserves the original spelling of all the plays; incorporates editorial scholarship, including valuable information on Webster's share in the collaborative plays; and employs alternative critical methods and textual theory. In particular, the edition integrates theatrical aspects of the plays with their bibliographical and literary features in a way not previously attempted in a scholarly edition of a Jacobean dramatist. The edition presents all of Webster's plays (with the exception of those collaborative plays already published in the Cambridge editions of Dekker, and Beaumont and Fletcher) and provides a brief biography, an account of Webster canon, illustrations, and critical and theatrical history of each play.

The second volume in the Cambridge Edition of the Works of John Webster contains The Devil's Law-Case, A Cure for a Cuckold, and Appius and Virginia. This critical edition preserves the original spelling and incorporates the most recent editorial scholarship, including valuable information on Webster's share in the collaborative plays. In particular, it integrates the plays' theatrical aspects with bibliographical and literary features.

Twelfth Night has seldom been off the stage since Shakespeare's day. It has been performed for its romantic high comedy and its boisterous low comedy; with an emphasis on farce or on autumnal melancholy; as straightforward celebration of heterosexual love and marriage or as exploration of the complexity of gender. David Carnegie and Mark Houlahan's introduction to the play provides a lively discussion of the play's performance history, and encourages readers to think about stagecraft and the play as a performance text, while the historical appendices provide materials that illuminate different thematic elements of the play. Extended notes interleaved throughout the play present relevant illustrations and expand on mythological, historical, and religious references in the play. The accompanying online text will offer additional commentary on staging alternatives and more extensive visual materials.

This book is about the search for a lost play. Celebrating the quatercentenary of publication of the first translation of Don Quixote, it is the first collection of essays entirely devoted to The History of Cardenio, a play based on Cervantes and probably written in that same year. It was said to be written by Shakespeare and the young man who was taking his place, John Fletcher, the most successful English playwright of the seventeenth century. The book brings together leading scholars, critics, and theatre practitioners to discuss the lost (or partially lost) play. It also re-examines Lewis Theobald's 1727 Double Falsehood, allegedly based on Cardenio. A range of approaches -new archival evidence, employment of advanced computer-aided stylometric tests for authorship attribution, early modern theatre history, literary and theatrical analysis, musicology, and recent theatrical productions and adaptations - produces new research findings about the play, Shakespeare, Fletcher, Cervantes, and the early modern relationship between Spanish and English culture. The book establishes the dates, venues, and audience for two performances of Cardenio by the King's Men in 1613, and identifies glimpses of the play in several seventeenth-century documents. It also provides much new evidence and analysis of Double Falsehood, which Theobald claimed was based on previously unknown manuscripts of a play by Shakespeare. His enemies, especially Pope, denied the Shakespeare attribution. Debate has continued ever since. While some contributors advocate sceptical caution, new research provides stronger evidence than ever before that a lost Fletcher/Shakespeare Cardenio can be discerned within Double Falsehood. Uniquely, this collection combines archival research and literary analysis with accounts of recent theatrical experiments, which explore the Cardenio problem by reviving or adapting Double Falsehood, and demonstrate that such practical theatrical work throws valuable light on some of the problems that have obstructed traditional scholarly approaches. It thus offers a new paradigm for the creative interaction of scholarship and performance.