Elizabethan Drama

Dorset, 1682. Catherine Carey was once a vivacious beauty with the world at her feet. One tragic accident was all it took to shatter her dreams, her spirit, her everything. Now, she only wants to hide her scarred face from the world. But if she thinks she’s safe at home, she is wrong. Her scheming brother wants to marry her off to a fortune-hunter, and he won’t take no for an answer. Out on a lonely walk, Catherine is attacked and left for dead. Could this be her brother’s doing?

C. S. Lewis offers a magisterial take on the literature and poetry of one of the most consequential periods in world history, providing deep insight into some of the greatest writers of the age, including Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare, William Tyndale, John Knox, Dr. Johnson, Richard Hooker, Hugh Latimer, Christopher Marlowe, John Donne, and Thomas Cranmer.

To Each Their Own is a modern-writ comedy in the style of the Theatre of Elizabeth the First, written with a scholar's research and a modern Shakespearean actor's wit. It includes many of the elements we are used to seeing in Shakespeare (sassy servants, pompous Noblemen, love-at-first-sight, shipwrecks, magic, fights, sacrifice, and slapstick) and language that conveys much more than single emotions.

The 1590s were bleak years for England. The queen was old, the succession unclear, and the treasury empty after decades of war. Amid the rising tension, William Shakespeare published a pair of poems dedicated to the young Earl of Southampton: Venus and Adonis in 1593 and The Rape of Lucrece a year later. Although wildly popular during Shakespeare's lifetime, to modern readers both works are almost impenetrable. But in her enthralling new book, the Shakespearean scholar Clare Asquith reveals their hidden contents.

In England in the Age of Shakespeare, Jeremy Black takes readers on a tour of life in the streets, homes, farms, churches, and palaces of the Bard’s era. Panning from play to audience and back again, Black shows how Shakespeare's plays would have been experienced and interpreted by those who paid to see them. From the dangers of travel to the indignities of everyday life in teeming London, Black explores the jokes, political and economic references, and small asides that Shakespeare’s audiences would have recognized.