Originally published between 1978 and 1990 this set is reissued here in paperback. This set provides students with the best plays (in some cases, the complete plays) of the major English Renaissance and Restoration dramatists, excluding Shakespeare.  Meer

This volume contains three of Ben Jonson's greatest plays - Sejanus (1603), Volpone (1606) and Epicoene, or The Silent Woman (1609). Sejanus, an experimental tragedy written in the classical manner, was labelled a seditious work at the time of its first production and embroiled Jonson with the Privy Council.  Meer

The two plays which make up this volume are of different quality. While no one would claim that The Atheist's Tragedy is a masterpiece, it is an important play because in it the exhortation 'Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord' is acted upon with unusual consistency, and because stringent `puritan' moral attitudes are dramatised in the context of traditional revenge themes.  Meer

This edition brings five of Marston's most interesting plays together in a readable and helpful form. They are collected with modern spelling, full commentaries, textual notes and introductions, in texts newly edited from the original quartos.  Meer

This selection contains the three finest plays of the Stuart dramatist John Ford. The Broken Heart is a classical tragedy of suffering; 'Tis Pity She's a Whore, Ford's best-known play and one still frequently performed, is a tragic story of limitless ambition and social rivalry expressed in sexual terms; Perkin Warbeck is the last great successor to the history plays of Shakespeare.  Meer

`Mr Wycherley is universally allowed the first place among the English comic poets who have writ since Ben Jonson. His Plain-Dealer is the best comedy that ever was composed in any language.  Meer

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.  Meer

This volume provides a selection of four plays by Philip Massinger who, from 1625 to 1640, replaced John Fletcher as principal dramatist for the King's Men, the chief London theatre company for more than forty years.  Meer

The plays of John Webster are read and seen more widely today than at any time since they were written - provoking much disagreement in the process. The continuing debate about his political, religious and philosophical attitudes, his formal skills and the importance of his plays for understanding the changing culture in which they were written, make Webster the most controversial of all Jacobean dramatists.  Meer

This volume brings together four of Ben Jonson's plays, two of his major works - The Alchemist (1610) and Bartholomew Fair (1614) and two from his later oeuvre: The New Inn (1629) and A Tale of a Tub (1633).  Meer

Even among the richly talented generation who wrote for the stage during the Restoration, Etherege was, from the start, considered to be a very special kind of innovator.  Meer

The career of William Congreve as comic dramatist was brief but highly successful. From the beginning he showed a useful knack for cultivating influential literary friends and for giving audiences what they were sure to like.  Meer