The most extenisve new collection in this field published in more than three decades, English Renaissance Drama: A Norton Anthology surveys the astonishing, and astonishingly varied, dramatic works written and performed in Elizabethan and Jacobean England. Popular in their own time, the 27 plays included here—by Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson, John Webster, Thomas Middleton, among many others—reveal why these playwrights' achievements, like Shakespeare's, deserve reading, teaching, and performing afresh in our time. Edited by a team of exceptional scholars and teachers, this anthology opens an extraordinary tradition in drama to new readers and audiences.

Ground-breaking essays comparing Shakespeare and Montaigne Introduces and explores a wide range of fresh approaches to comparative study of Shakespeare and Montaigne Illuminates connections, parallels, and discontinuities between the artistry of Shakespeare's plays and the complexity of Montaigne's thought Considers Shakespeare and Montaigne within the intellectual history of the Renaissance and the Reformation Reflects on Shakespeare and Montaigne as thinkers and innovators speaking to the present day, as well as their own more immediate historical moment Examines arguments for and against Shakespeare and Montaigne as forerunners of modernity Shakespeare and Montaigne share a grounded, genial sense of the lived reality of human experience, as well as a surprising depth of engagement with history, literature and philosophy. With celebrated subtlety and incisive humour, both authors investigate abiding questions of epistemology, psychology, theology, ethics, politics and aesthetics. In this collection, distinguished contributors consider these influential, much-beloved figures in light of each other. The English playwright and the French essayist, each in his own fashion, reflect on and evaluate the Renaissance, the Reformation and the rise of new modern perspectives many of us now might readily recognise as our own.

Shakespeare and Montaigne share a grounded, genial sense of the lived reality of human experience, as well as a surprising depth of engagement with history, literature and philosophy. With celebrated subtlety and incisive humour, both authors investigate abiding questions of epistemology, psychology, theology, ethics, politics and aesthetics. In this collection, distinguished contributors consider these influential, much-beloved figures in light of each other. The English playwright and the French essayist, each in his own fashion, reflect on and evaluate the Renaissance, the Reformation and the rise of new modern perspectives many of us now might readily recognise as our own.

Just as Shakespeare's theatre was an economic gamble, subject to the workings of a market, so the plays themselves submit actions, persons, and motives to an audience's judgement. Such a theatrical economy, Lars Engle suggests, provides a model for the way in which truth is determined and assessed in the world at large - a model much like that offered by contemporary pragmatism. To Engle, the problems of worth, price, and value that appear so frequently in Shakespeare's works reveal a playwright dramatizing the negotiable nature of perception and belief - in short, the nature of his audience's purchase on reality. This innovative argument views Shakespeare in the context of contemporary pragmatism and to shows that Shakespeare in many ways anticipated pragmatism as it has been developed in the thought of Richard Rorty, Barbara Herrnstein Smith, and others. With detailed reference to the sonnets and plays, Engle explores Shakespeare's tendency to treat knowledge, truth, and certainty as relatively stable goods within a theatrical economy of social interaction. He shows the playwright recasting kingship, aristocracy, and poetic immortality in pragmatic terms. As attentive to history as it is to contemporary theory, this book mediates between current and traditional accounts of Shakespeare.