God's Secretaries - The Making of the King James Bible

A net of complex currents flowed across Jacobean England. This was the England of Shakespeare, Jonson and Bacon; of the Gunpowder Plot; the worst outbreak of the plague England had ever seen; Arcadian landscapes; murderous, toxic slums; and, above all, of sometimes overwhelming religious passion. Jacobean England was both more godly and less godly than it had ever been, and the entire culture was drawn taut between the polarities.

In this engaging text, Arthur Kinney introduces students to Shakespeare’s plays in the context of Elizabethan and Jacobean theater

• Introduces students to Shakespeare's plays in the context of Elizabethan and Jacobean theater.
• Focuses on the material conditions of playing and of playgoing.
• Covers venues, audiences, actors, society, government and regulation.
• Each topic is considered in relation to a selection of Shakespeare's plays.
• Shows students how the plays and the context in which they were produced illuminate one another.

Shakespeare’s Theater: A Sourcebook brings together in one volume the most significant Elizabethan and Jacobean texts on the morality of the theater.

• A collection of the most significant Elizabethan and Jacobean texts on the morality of the theater.
  
• Includes attacks on the stage by moralists, defences by actors and playwrights, letters by magistrates, mayors and aldermen of London, and extracts from legislation.
  
• Demonstrates just how heated debates about the theater became in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.
  
• A general introduction and short prefaces to each piece situate the writers and debates in the literary, social, political and religious history of the time.
  
• Brings together in one volume texts that would otherwise be hard to locate.
  
• Student-friendly - uses modern spelling and includes vocabulary glosses and annotation.