Kirk Melnikoff

Robert A. Logan

Robert Greene was the most prolific and perhaps the most notorious professional writer in Elizabethan England, producing dozens of popular pamphlets and numerous professional plays during his short twelve-year career. The essays in this volume discuss Greene's reception both in the early modern period and in our present era, and the revisionist introduction organizes this reception generically while at the same time situating it in the context of recent critical methodologies.

Robert Greene

While Robert Greene was the most prolific and perhaps the most notorious professional writer in Elizabethan England, he continues to be best known for his 1592 quip comparing Shakespeare to "an upstart crow." In his short twelve-year career, Greene wrote dozens of popular pamphlets in a variety of genres and numerous professional plays. At his premature death in 1592, he was a bonafide London celebrity, simultaneously maligned as Grub-Street profligate and celebrated as literary prodigy. The present volume constitutes the first collection of Greene's reception both in the early modern period and in our present era, offering in its poems, prose passages, essays, and chapters that which is most singular among what has been written about Greene and his work. It also includes a complete list of Greene's contemporary reception until 1640. Kirk Melnikoff's wide-ranging and revisionist introduction organizes this reception generically while at the same time situating it in the context of recent critical methodologies.

Roslyn L. Knutson

Examines Christopher Marlowe and his work in the overlapping contexts of the professional theatre and the book trade.

Christopher Marlowe, Theatrical Commerce and the Book Trade

Presenting the first exploration of Christopher Marlowe's complex place in the canon, this collection reads Marlowe's work against an extensive backdrop of repertory, publication, transmission, and reception. Wide-ranging and thoughtful chapters consider Marlowe's deliberate engagements with the stage and print culture, the agents and methods involved in the transmission of his work, and his cultural reception in the light of repertory and print evidence. With contributions from major international scholars, the volume considers all of Marlowe's oeuvre, offering illuminating approaches to his extended animation in theatre and print, from the putative theatrical debut of Tamburlaine in 1587 to the most current editions of his work.

Christopher Marlowe, Theatrical Commerce, and the Book Trade

Outlining the full range of practises that publishers performed, including the acquisition of copy and titles, compiling, alteration to texts, and reissuing, Elizabethan Publishing and the Makings of Literary Culture considers links between the book trade and the literary culture of Elizabethan England.

Elizabethan Publishing and the Makings of Literary Culture

Edward Gieskes

Robert Greene, contemporary of Shakespeare and Marlowe and member of the group of six known as the "University Wits," is the subject of this essay collection, the first to be dedicated solely to his work. Although in his short lifetime Greene published some three dozen prose works, composed at least five plays, and was one of the period's most recognized-even notorious-literary figures, his place within the canon of Renaissance writers has been marginal at best. Writing Robert Greene offers a reappraisal of Greene's career and of his contribution to Elizabethan culture. Rather than drawing lines between Greene's work for the pamphlet market and for the professional theatres, the essays in the volume imagine his writing on a continuum. Some essays trace the ways in which Greene's poetry and prose navigate differing cultural economies. Others consider how the full spectrum of his writing contributes to an emergent professional discourse about popular print and theatrical culture. The volume includes an annotated bibliography of recent scholarship on Greene and three valuable appendices (presenting apocrypha; edition information; and editions organized by year of publication).

Kirk Melnikoff

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