Thanks to the pioneering work of Professor Lisa Hopkins, the field of early modern English drama is now much more attuned to the various edges, spaces, and intersections that characterise the dramatic output of the period. This focus has done much to recover the rich tapestry of early modern drama, and as the chapters in this collection show, considering the edges helps to fill gaps in the centre.

This collection examines works by a range of dramatists—including Beaumont, Dekker, Fletcher, Heywood, Jonson, Lyly, Marlowe, Massinger, Middleton, Sampson, and Shakespeare—and demonstrates that paying close attention to the edges of these dramatic works reveals much about the conditions in which these texts were conceived, produced, and received.

Spanning the familiar and the unfamiliar, this collection reinforces the need to dispense with notions of canon and canonicity, and to think more holistically about early modern drama than the lens ‘Shakespeare and his contemporaries’ generally allows.