The forty-one plays gathered in these volumes constitute the most extensive new survey of Renaissance drama in over forty years, and reflect both changes in taste and advances in scholarship since earlier collections. The editors have attempted to provide the materials for a truer view of the theater in which Shakespeare worked than has hiterto been possible in anthologies. Marlowe, Jonson, and Webster, by most accounts the best of Shakepare's contemporaries, are reporesented by their major plays. -- Preface.