Chambers’s The Mediaeval Stage.
Allbright’s The Shakespearean Stage.
Lawrence’s Elizabethan Playhouse and Other Studies.
Smith’s York Plays (Clarendon Press).
Symonds’s Shakespeare’s Predecessors in the English
Chambers’s The Mediaeval Stage.
Allbright’s The Shakespearean Stage.
Lawrence’s Elizabethan Playhouse and Other Studies.
Smith’s York Plays (Clarendon Press).
Symonds’s Shakespeare’s Predecessors in the English Drama.
Bates’s The English Religious Drama.
Manly’s Specimens of the Pre-Shakespearean Drama.
Wallace’s The Evolution of the English Drama up to Shakespeare.
Ingram’s Christopher Marlowe and his Associates.
Dowden’s Transcripts and Studies (Marlowe).
Symonds’s Ben Jonson.
Swinburne’s A Study of Ben Jonson.
Lee’s A Life of William Shakespeare.
Furnivall and Munro’s Shakespeare: Life and Work.
Harris’s The Man Shakespeare and his Tragic Life Story.
Halliwell-Phillipps’s Outlines of the Life of Shakespeare.
Baker’s The Development of Shakespeare as a Dramatist.
MacCracken, Pierce, and Durham’s An Introduction to Shakespeare.
Bradley’s Shakespearean Tragedy (excellent).
Bradley’s Oxford Lectures on Poetry.
Dowden’s Shakespeare, His Mind and Art.
Coleridge’s Lectures on Shakespeare (pp. 21-58 of Beers’s Selections from the Prose writings of Coleridge).
Lowell’s Shakespeare Once More, in Among My Books.
Wallace’s Shakespeare, the Globe, and Blackfriars.
How Shakespeare’s Senses were Trained, Chap. X. in Halleck’s Education of the Central Nervous System.
Rolfe’s Shakespeare the Boy.
Boswell-Stone’s Shakespeare’s Holinshed.
Brooke’s Shakespeare’s Plutarch, 2 vols.
Madden’s The Diary of Master William Silence: A Study of Shakespeare and of Elizabethan Sport.
Winter’s Shakespeare on the Stage.
Elizabethan Prose.—Good selections from Ascham, Hakluyt, Raleigh, Holinshed, Stow, Camden, North, Sidney, Foxe, Hooker, Lyly, Greene, Lodge, and Nashe are given in Craik, I. Chambers, I. and Manly, II. also give a number of selections. Deloney’s The Gentle Craft may be found in the Clarendon Press edition of his Works. For Bacon, see Craik, II.
These selections will give the student a broader grasp of the Elizabethan age. The style and subject matter of Lyly’s Euphues, Sidney’s Arcadia, Hooker’s Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, and Bacon’s Essays should be specially noted. Which one of these authors exerted the strongest influence on his own age? Which one makes the strongest appeal to modern times? In what respects does the style of any Elizabethan prose writer show an improvement over that of Mandeville and Malory?