'The Jacobean dramatists make better sense if seen as working in Shakespeare's light'. This premise underlies Dr Frost's study of the influence of Shakespeare upon his contemporaries. Certain writers - Middleton especially - he shows to have been radically transformed, while Webster and Ford reacted against the dominant tragic mode, and yet exploited the master for their own purposes. Almost all Shakespeare's successors were happy to lift an idea, a phrase, a character or a scene. More important, Shakespeare's influence revolutionised two dramatic forms, the revenge play and the romance. In removing an artificial barrier that divided the isolated genius from 'the rest', this original 1968 publication illustrates Shakespeare's impact on his age, and produces supporting evidence from records of publication, play performance and contemporary comment to overthrow the long-held doctrine of relative neglect. Dr Frost's interest in literary indebtedness is critical as much as scholarly, while his discussion of the romance offers an approach to Shakespeare's final plays. His general thesis is challenging, and is likely to affect the readers' views on the history of drama and of taste, as well as their estimate of the writers themselves.

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. This volume contains The Changeling (of which Eliot gave so high an estimate), together with Middleton's other surviving tragedy, Women Beware Women, his best comedy, A Chaste Maid in Cheapside, and a more light-hearted early play, A Mad World, My Masters. Though Middleton is typical of many university-trained writers of the period who eked out a living in popular entertainment, his work has a cold satiric stance, a grimly determinist flavour and a savage economy which make it unique. He wrote plays for the boys' companies in the early 1600s and later for Shakespeare's own company, the King's Men, but seems never to have established himself as more than a jobbing dramatist.

First published in 1976, The Cambridge Liturgical Psalter is a modern English-language version prepared for public and private worship by a panel of eight Hebrew specialists drawn from various Christian traditions, working over a period of six years and in collaboration with a single literary scholar who was conversant with the long tradition of translations into English of this ancient Biblical text. Excerpted in a Penguin classic, The Psalms in English (1996), as one of only two versions chosen to represent the twentieth Century, it went into six national prayer books, was bound up as The Liturgical Psalter in An Alternative Service Book 1980, and was authorised for use in various Churches world-wide. It remains a version licensed for use in the Church of England. The Cambridge Liturgical Psalter represents the best modern understanding of what is on occasions a very difficult Hebrew text. Recognized by Jews and Christians as a reliable translation, it is here published for the first time with Notes prepared by the Secretary of the original Hebrew panel to explain the reasoning behind their decisions. 'A masterly production' JOHN CROOK, Professor of Ancient History, University of Cambridge. 'This is the version we should henceforth teach our children' GORDON WAKEFIELD, Moderator of the United Reformed Church.