Edward Gieskes is associate professor of English at the University of South Carolina, Columbia. He is the author of the monograph Representing the Professions (Delaware, 2006) and co-edited (with Kirk Melnikoff) Writing Robert Greene: New Essays on England’s First Notorious Professional Writer (Ashgate, 2008). Recent publications include: “Material and Institutional Contexts of Early Modern Drama: An A-Z” in the Arden Handbook to Shakespeare and Early Modern Drama (Arden Shakespeare, 2022), “‘materia conveniente modis’: Ovid and Drama” in Ovid and Adaptation in Early Modern English Theater (Edinburgh University Press, 2019), “Rumour’s Household: Truth, Memory, Fiction, History” in Shakespeare and Memory (Routledge, 2017), and “Learning and Teaching Resources: History, Politics, and Edward II” (Arden Shakespeare, 2017).

• Acknowledgements List of Tables Introduction 1. “Chaucer (of all admired) the story gives”: Shakespeare, Medieval Romance, and Generic Innovation2. “Mirrours more then one”: Spenser, Shakespeare, and Generic Change3. “King Cambyses’ vein”: Generic Change in the 1580s and 1590s4. “Lies like truth”: History, Fiction, Genre, Innovation 5. “What’s aught but as ’tis valued”: “History,” Truth, and Fiction 6. “When the bad bleed”: Tenants to Tragedy Bibliography Index

Generic Innovation in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries casts the familiar category of genre in a new light. It will help scholars and students of early modern drama use that category as early modern dramatists did — with an emphasis on its creative potential, not its limitations.