This collection of essays adopts a novel, interdisciplinary approach to a diverse group of texts composed in London during the Renaissance. Eight literary scholars and eight historians from two continents have been paired to write companion essays on each text. This original method opens up rich insights into London's social, political, and cultural life which would have eluded members of either discipline working in isolation. 'Theatrical' is taken to be a very flexible term, and is applied to the civic rituals and public spectacles of the capital (for example, the execution of King Charles I) as well as to the elite and popular theatre. The eight texts therefore include historical accounts, political documents and polemical works as well as plays.

David Martin Bevington (born May 13, 1931) is an American literary scholar. He is Phyllis Fay Horton Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus in the Humanities and in English Language & Literature, Comparative Literature, and the College at the University of Chicago, where he has taught since 1967, as well as chair of Theatre and Performance Studies. "One of the most learned and devoted of Shakespeareans," so called by Harold Bloom, he specializes in British drama of the Renaissance, and has edited and introduced the complete works of William Shakespeare in both the 29-volume, Bantam Classics paperback editions and the single-volume Longman edition. Bevington remains the only living scholar to have personally edited Shakespeare's complete corpus.

He also edits the Norton Anthology of Renaissance Drama and an important anthology of Medieval English Drama, the latter of which was just re-released by Hackett for the first time in nearly four decades. Bevington's editorial scholarship is so extensive that Richard Strier, an early modern colleague at the University of Chicago, was moved to comment: "Every time I turn around, he has edited a new Renaissance text. Bevington has endless energy for editorial projects." In addition to his work as an editor, he has published studies of Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, and the Stuart Court Masque, among others, though it is for his work as an editor that he is primarily known.

Despite his formal retirement, Bevington continues to teach and publish. Most recently he authored Shakespeare and Biography, a study of the history of Shakespearean biography and of such biographers, as well as Murder Most Foul: Hamlet Through the Ages. In August, 2012, after a decade of research, he released the first complete edition of Ben Jonson published in over a half-century with Ian Donaldson and Martin Butler from the Cambridge Press. In addition to his preeminence among scholars of William Shakespeare, he is a much beloved teacher, winning a Quantrell Award in 1979.