William Rowley

Arden of Faversham * A Woman Killed with Kindness * The Witch of Edmonton * The English Traveller In about 1590, an unknown dramatist had the idea of writing a tragedy about the lives of ordinary people, instead of the genre's usual complement of kings and queens and politicians. His play, Arden of Faversham, inaugurated a new genre of 'domestic' drama, set in near-contemporary England and concerned with issues of marriage, crime, and property rather than war and power. Arden dramatizes a notorious murder case of forty years earlier, in which a wealthy husband was killed by his wife and her lover. In Thomas Heywood's A Woman Killed with Kindness, a wife is caught by her husband in bed with his best friend, only to find that he takes unusual reprisals. The Witch of Edmonton combines a true-life story of witchcraft with a fictitious tale of bigamy and wife-murder, and The English Traveller deals with the unexpected and unwelcome changes people find when they return home after a lengthy absence. Part of the Oxford English Drama series, this edition has modern-spelling texts; a critical introduction that outlines the way all four plays raise powerful and complex questions about the English society in which their tragic events unfold; wide-ranging notes; a chronology of the plays from their sources to recent performance; and appendices relating to two of the plays: who wrote Arden of Faversham and when did Heywood write The English Traveller. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

RSC Gunpowder Season – explosive Elizabethan and Jacobean dramas of dissent, staged by the Royal Shakespeare Company in 2005. A black comedy about a question that haunts us today - what to do about an ageing population. The Old Law is passed. At the ages of eighty and sixty respectively, all men and women are to be put to death as they are of no further use to society. Thomas Middleton and William Rowley's A New Way to Please You is a play full of cross-generational fireworks, tackling underlying questions about the law and ageing. It was first published in 1656 (as The Old Law, or A New Way to Please You), but is thought to have been premiered in c.1618.

An entertainingly far-fetched play combining mythical tales of the origin of St Alban's with folklore about the craft of shoemaking to produce a comic history which draws together the foundations of British nationhood, the establishment of the Church of England, and the beginnings of dynastic rule. This edition of William Rowley's play A Shoemaker, A Gentleman, in the Globe Quarto series co-published with Shakespeare's Globe to mark the rediscovery of forgotten plays by Shakespeare's contemporaries, is edited by Trudi Darby.

Drama Classics: The World's Great Plays at a Great Little Price Middleton and Rowley's masterpiece, a tale of murder, lust, seduction and blackmail in the seventeenth century. Alsemero has fallen in love with the beautiful Beatrice after a chance meeting in a church – but Beatrice has already been promised to another man. Unable to marry the man she loves, she employs the hated De Flores, her father's servant, to murder the man her father bids her marry. As payment, De Flores demands Beatrice. And then things get worse... Thomas Middleton and William Rowley's play The Changeling was mostly likely first performed in 1622. This edition of the play in the Nick Hern Books Drama Classics series is edited and introduced by Trevor Griffiths. Set Text >> The Changeling is a set text for AQA Drama and Theatre Studies A/AS Level, AQA English Literature A/AS Level, OCR English Literature A/AS Level and WJEC English Literature A/AS Level.

It is a historical phenomenon that while thousands of women were being burnt as witches in early modern Europe, the English - although there were a few celebrated trials and executions, one of which the play dramatises - were not widely infected by the witch-craze. The stage seems to have provided an outlet for anxieties about witchcraft, as well as an opportunity for public analysis. The Witch of Edmonton (1621) manifests this fundamentally reasonable attitude, with Dekker insisting on justice for the poor and oppressed, Ford providing psychological character studies, and Rowley the clowning. The village community of Edmonton feels threatened by two misfits, Old Mother Sawyer, who has turned to the devil to aid her against her unfeeling neighbours, and Frank, who refuses to marry the woman of his father's choice and ends up murdering her. This edition shows how the play generates sympathy for both and how contemporaries would have responded to its presentation of village life and witchcraft.

This book offers a fully-collated text of William Rowley's "A New Wonder, A Woman Never Vext," along with a full textual and critical apparatus.

The Changeling is a powerful psychological tragedy of the moral degeneration of a highborn Spanish girl through a crime prompted by obsessive love. Thomas Middleton was probably responsible for the tragic plot, and William Rowley for the comic subplot concerning the antics of a young rake who contrives to have himself committed to an insane asylum for love of the proprietor's handsome wife.