The Chief Elizabethan Dramatists

This richly edited volume gathers major Elizabethan and Jacobean plays beyond Shakespeare, presenting them in reliable modernized texts with notes, biographies, bibliographies, textual commentary, and helpful indexes. William Allan Neilson frames the collection as both a guide for students tracing the growth of English drama and an inviting entry point for general readers, while the contents survey the era's theatrical range through dramatists from Lyly and Marlowe to Jonson, Webster, Middleton, Ford, and Shirley. Among the highlights is John Lyly's Endymion, the Man in the Moon, a courtly fantasy of impossible love, wit, and allegory. Endymion's devotion to Cynthia is set against jealousy, enchantment, and comic parody, from Tellus's bitter schemes to Sir Tophas's mock-heroic swagger and the witch Dipsas's manipulations. The collection also includes a darker social drama in which constables, Bridewell, and a public trial expose theft, vice, punishment, and reform, as Bellafront, Matheo, Hippolito, and others collide in a world of corruption, disguise, and moral reckoning. This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design.

William Allan Neilson was a distinguished Scottish-born scholar, teacher, and literary critic whose career helped shape the study of English literature in the early twentieth century. Educated at the University of Edinburgh and later at Harvard, he built a reputation as an exacting but generous editor, administrator, and interpreter of the literary past, serving for many years in academic leadership while also writing with unusual clarity for a broad readership. He is best remembered for his influential work on Elizabethan drama and for helping establish a more modern, historically grounded approach to literary scholarship, especially through his careful attention to the range of playwrights who flourished in Shakespeare’s age. Neilson’s writing often reflects the conviction that literature should be studied not as isolated masterpieces alone, but as part of a living cultural world shaped by language, performance, politics, and social change. That perspective remains strikingly relevant today, when readers are increasingly interested in the contexts that produce art and in recovering voices that have been overshadowed by a few canonical giants. His legacy lies not only in his scholarship but also in his role as a teacher and institutional builder who helped make literary study more rigorous, accessible, and humane. Readers who enjoy thoughtful criticism, the history of English drama, and books that illuminate the wider literary landscape beyond the most famous names will find Neilson especially rewarding.