Jeremy Lopez is Associate Professor of English at the University of Toronto. He is the author of Theatrical Convention and Audience Response in Early Modern Drama (2003), the editor of New Critical Essays: Richard II (2012) and has written numerous articles on the drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. From 2003 to 2013 he served as theatre review editor for Shakespeare Bulletin, and he is currently, with Paul Menzer (Mary Baldwin College), editor of the on-line early modern studies journal The Hare.

• Part I. Early Modern Dramatic Canons: Origins: 1. Excluding Shakespeare; 2. Trollope's Dilke; 3. What is an anthology? (Part 1); 4. Collecting early modern drama, 1744 to the present; 5. Ejecta; 6. How to use this book; 7. Table of contents; 8. Autogenesis: The Custom of The Country (Part 1); 9. Endless tragedy; 10. Negative canon; Attachments: 11. Lamb in the library; 12. Dodsley's Hog; 13. Blunt instrument; 14. Fragments; 15. Comedy and tragedy; 16. The Mermaid series; 17. The Keltie exception; 18. The ties that bind: The Custom of The Country (Part 2); 19. Hints of designs; 20. What is an anthology? (Part 2); Paradoxes: 21. Introductory; 22. Bullen's Nero; 23. Collier's Reed's Dodsley; 24. Beaumont our contemporary; 25. History in disguise; 26. The aesthetic under erasure; 27. The turn of the corkscrew; 28. Return of the repressed: The Custom of The Country (Part 3); 29. The Changeling; 30. The greatness of English Renaissance drama; Interlude: reading a bad play: The Fair Maid of Bristow; Part II. Early Modern Dramatic Forms: Bifurcation: 31. The Bowers Dekker; 32. Fletcher's Shakespeare; 33. Early modern dramatic form; 34. The Bloody Brother; 35. Early modern dramatic forms; 36. What is an anthology? (Part 3); 37. Apples and oranges; 38. The sleepwalker: Northward Ho (Part 1); 39. The war in The Shoemaker's Holiday; 40. The Holaday Chapman; Opposition: 41. Laws of canon; 42. Rowley's sow; 43. Form in collaboration; 44. Love's Labors Won; 45. 'A sort of dramatic monster'; 46. What should an anthology be?; 47. The surviving image; 48. Other voices: Northward Ho (Part 2); 49. Disappearing act; 50. Anon., anon; Inheritance: 51. Voluminous Heywood; 52. Ford's Webster; 53. Labored forms; 54. The Triumph of Time; 55. Moral Massinger; 56. No heir; 57. Apocalypse now; 58. Bedlam at Ware: Northward Ho (Part 3); 59. Modern times; 60. Principles of selection and exclusion; Afterword; List of primary-text editions; Bibliography.

'This is a remarkable book: confidently and wittily written, exhaustively and widely researched, timely, provocative, enlightening and highly original. The strength of Lopez's argument is that he resists the impulse to shape his own anthology, offering instead a history and a method of critical enquiry and appreciation that completely destabilise current practice.' Richard Cave, Royal Holloway, University of London