This volume offers a description of early modern habits of writing and reading, of publication and stage performance, and of political and religious writing.

• An introduction to early modern English literature for students and general readers.
  
• Considers the ways in which early modern writers construct the past, recover and adapt classical genres, write about people and places, and tackle religious and secular controversies.
  
• Illustrated with a profusion of excerpts from early modern texts.
  
• Writers represented include More, Erasmus, Spenser, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Donne, and Milton, as well as less well known authors.

Michael Hattaway is Professor of English Literature at the University of Sheffield. He is the author of Elizabethan Popular Theatre (1982) and Hamlet: The Critics Debate (1987), the editor of As You Like It and Henry VI Parts I–III for the New Cambridge Shakespeare, and also of A Companion to English Renaissance Literature and Culture (2000), The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare’s History Plays (2002), and plays by Jonson and Beaumont.