Shakespeare is a towering presence in English and indeed global culture. Yet considered alongside his contemporaries he was not an isolated phenomenon, but the product of a period of astonishing creative fertility. This was an age when new media - popular drama and print - were seized upon avidly and inventively by a generation of exceptionally talented writers. In her sparkling new book, Helen Hackett explores the historical contexts of English Renaissance drama by situating it in the wider history of ideas. She traces the origins of Renaissance theatre in communal religious drama, civic pageantry and court entertainment and vividly describes the playing conditions of Elizabethan and Jacobean playhouses. Examining Marlowe, Shakespeare and Jonson in turn, the author assesses the distinctive contribution made by each playwright to the creation of English drama. She then turns to revenge tragedy, with its gothic poetry of sex and death; city comedy, domestic tragedy and tragicomedy; and gender and drama, with female roles played by boy actors in commercial playhouses while women participated in drama at court and elsewhere. The book places Renaissance drama in the exciting and vibrant cosmopolitanism of sixteenth-century London.

Helen Hackett is a Professor of English at UCL, where she runs the Shakespeare course. Her publications include A Short History of English Renaissance Drama (2012), Shakespeare and Elizabeth: The Meeting of Two Myths (2009), and the introduction to the Penguin edition of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (2005). She enjoys setting Shakespeare’s works in the historical contexts of their time, and also investigating how Shakespeare’s cultural meaning has developed over the centuries up to the present. She also has a particular interest in Renaissance literature by and about women, as explored in her books Virgin Mother, Maiden Queen: Elizabeth I and the Cult of the Virgin Mary (1995) and Women and Romance Fiction in the English Renaissance (2000). Helen is co-director of the UCL Centre for Early Modern Exchanges: this fosters research into all kinds of intercultural exchange in the period 1450-1800, including travel, trade, translation, and the circulation of ideas. Her web-page is at http://www.ucl.ac.uk/english/about/staff/hh.htm.