Series: New Mermaids

This new edition of Webster’s macabre masterpiece, The Duchess of Malfi, is accompanied by insightful commentary notes and a detailed introductory analysis of the play written by Karen Britland, making this the perfect edition for students. As well as the complete text of the play, this revised New Mermaid edition includes: A detailed plot summary and annotations throughout the text...

This fully re-edited, modernised play text is accompanied by commentary notes and an introduction written by Paul Menzer, guiding you through the fume of fact and legend that have accompanied the play across the centuries.As well as the complete text of the play, this re-edited New Mermaids edition includes:· A detailed plot summary and annotations throughout the text· An annotated...

'Shaw's refusal to moralise about the sex trade, only about the system that supports it, provides the play with its dramatic tension and surprising modernity.' GuardianShaw's 1893 play centres on the mother and daughter relationship between Kitty Warren and her Cambridge-educated daughter, Vivie, who is currently enjoying a comfortable and financially untroubled life. Kitty's own upbringing was far from easy,...

The sharpest, funniest comedy about money and morals in the 17th century is still the sharpest and funniest about those things in the 21st. The full play text is accompanied by incisive commentary notes which communicate the devastating comic energy of Volpone’s satire. The introduction provides a firm grounding in the play’s social and literary contexts, demonstrates how careful close-reading...

Written for the adult players at the open-air Swan theatre in 1613, this masterpiece of Jacobean city comedy signals its ironic nature even in the title: chaste maids, like most other goods and people in London's busiest commercial area, are likely to be fake. Money is more important than either happiness or honour; and the most coveted commodities to be...

This lamentable and true tragedy, as it is announced on its title page, dramatises a domestic murder of the sort that nowadays scandalises and thrills the readers of tabloid newspapers. Although the title advertises the great malice and dissimulation of a wicked woman and her unsatiable desire of filthie lust, the unknown playwright with great dramatic skill and psychological insight...

The Alchemist is set during a plague epidemic in the Liberty of Blackfriars in 1610 and was first performed on tour in 1610 by the company whose London home at Blackfriars was temporarily closed due to a plague epidemic. The play is a sublimely accomplished satirical farce about people's diverse dreams of self-refinement: they all want to transform themselves into...

This New Mermaids anthology brings together the four most popular and widely studied of Christopher Marlowe's plays: Tamburlaine, Parts 1 and 2, The Jew of Malta, Edward II, and Dr Faustus. The new introduction by Brian Gibbons explores the plays in the context of early modern theatre, culture, and politics, as well as examining their language, characters, and themes. On-page...

Francis Bacon described revenge as a ‘kind of wild justice’. Then as now, early modern playwrights and their theatre-going public were fascinated by the anarchic energies that a desire for retribution unleashes. Rather than rehearsing familiar conventions, each of these plays presents a unique social and cultural milieu where dark fantasies of revenge are variously played out. In Kyd’s The...

The action of She Stoops to Conquer (1773) is largely confined to a night and a day in Squire Hardcastle's somewhat dilapidated country house. Young Marlow, on his way there to meet the bride his father has chosen for him, loses his way and arrives at the house assuming it is an inn. The prospect of meeting the genteel Miss...

The Importance of Being Earnest is one of the most enduringly popular British comic dramas and a mainstay of English literature and drama courses at college and university level. This is an ideal edition for students, featuring on-page notes to help clarify meaning and a completely new introduction. In the new introduction, Francesca Coppa explores recent critical approaches to the...

Arguably the most perfectly poised of Restoration wit comedies, The Man of Mode is a finished exercise in dramatic sprezzatura, or nonchalance, matching the beguiling ‘easiness’ and ‘complaisance’ of its central character. The play's imaginative brilliance depends upon its author's ability to hint at the dark abyss of passion and emotional violence at whose edge the modish denizens of the...

Both Sheridan and Goldsmith lamented the popularity of sentimental comedy in the later eighteenth century and wrote their witty and satirical plays (though never lascivious in the manner of Restoration comedies) to counteract the sentimental mode. The Rivals (1775) was a qualified success: the suave young officer who is ‘forced’ by his father to marry the very girl to whom...

Carnival time in The Rover is a period when prohibitions are temporarily removed, privileges and rank suspended, and women—from convent girls to courtesans—take the initiative. Featuring multiple plot lines, which deal with the adventures of a group of love-struck Englishmen in Naples, Aphra Behn's play explores issues of love, trickery and deception, forced marriage, male power, fidelity, and the excesses...

In The School for Scandal, Sheridan's artificial world of heightened wit and heightened folly delights its audience. At times, it engages them with moments of human pain and happiness, before delivering them back to its comedy.