The Works of John Webster: Volume 4, Sir Thomas Wyatt, Westward Ho, Northward Ho, The Fair Maid of the Inn: Sir Thomas Wyatt, We

Description

This is the fourth and final volume of the Cambridge edition of the works of John Webster. It contains four plays Webster wrote in collaboration, one - Sir Thomas Wyatt, a historical tragedy based around Lady Jane Grey - as part of a team of five led by Thomas Dekker, two - Westward Ho and Northward Ho, city comedies that prompted Chapman, Jonson, and Marston's Eastward Ho - with Thomas Dekker alone, and one - The Fair Maid of the Inn, an Italianate tragicomedy of which Webster wrote the largest share - with John Fletcher, Philip Massinger and John Ford. With the inclusion of these four plays, this Cambridge edition becomes the first complete works of John Webster. The edition preserves the original spelling of the plays, poetry, and prose, and incorporates the most recent editorial scholarship, including information on Webster's share in the collaborative plays, and new critical methods, textual theory, and theatrical analysis.

David Gunby is Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Canterbury. David Carnegie is Emeritus Professor of Theatre at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. MacDonald P. Jackson is Emeritus Professor of English and Honorary Research Fellow, University of Auckland.

'... [a] thoroughly useful and enjoyable volume.' Jose A. Perez Diez, Early Theatre Review 'There is not much to contest or fault in this thoroughly useful and enjoyable volume.' Jose A. Perez Diez, Early Theatre 'These are very fine pieces of scholarship that examine each play in minute detail and provide a wealth of information about the plays in the context of their original performances, the Webster canon, and the wider literary tradition.' Brian Vickers, Early Theatre 'The logic of this final volume lies in its completion of the Webster edition through its focus on these collaborative plays. The set as a whole establishes the full canon of Webster's works, as is surely necessary ... the expanded set is now comprehensive as a starting-point for all future work on the dramatist.' John Jowett, Cahiers Elisabethains: A Journal of English Renaissance Studies 'The edition as a whole successfully replaces the pioneering but now seriously outdated edition of F. L. Lucas (1927). The hardback issue is an essential set for any institutional library that claims to cover the field of early modern English drama, and serious students of Webster will be grateful for the affordable paperback ... The editors are ... committed and adept explicators ... Each play is edited fully and explicated seriously. Webster's contribution is described firmly, clearly, and without territorial flag-waving. As a result, he emerges as a more various and wide-ranging dramatist than is suggested by the narrower canon of his better-known works: a writer who embraces co-authorship and adapts readily to a range of generic requirements. In a way that the three-volume set was not, the expanded set is now comprehensive as a starting-point for all future work on the dramatist.' John Jowett, Cahiers Elisabethains