Chris Fitter is Professor of English at Rutgers University. He gained his PhD from St. John's College, University of Oxford and has taught at Wroxton College and the University of Mississippi. His leading interests are in literature and the natural world, the politics of Shakespearean drama, and representations of poverty in Western literature.

• 1: Chris Fitter: Introduction: Rethinking Shakespeare in the Social Depth of Politics 2: Peter Lake: The Paradoxes of 'Popularity' in Shakespeare's History Plays 3: David Rollison: Shakespeare's Commonwealth 4: Andy Wood: Brave Minds and Hard Hands: Work, Drama, and Social Relations in the Hungry 1590s 5: Thomas Cartelli: The Speaking Silence of Citizens in Shakespeare's Richard III: Hidden and Public Transcripts 6: Stephen Longstaffe: The Plebeians Revise the Uprising: What the Actors Made of Shakespeare's Jack Cade - or, Laughing with the English Radical Tradition 7: Paola Pugliatti: Shakespeare and the 'Military Revolution': The Cultural and Social Weapons of Reformed War 8: Markku Peltonen: Popularity and the Art of Rhetoric: Julius Caesar in Context 9: David Norbrook: Rehearsing the Plebeians: Coriolanus and the Reading of Roman History 10: Chris Fitter: 'As full of grief as age': Protesting the Poor Law in King Lear 11: Jeffrey S. Doty: Experiences of Authority in The Tempest

Chris Fitter's rich introduction to this collection masterfully surveys recent developments in the 'new social history' and then considers the range of contemporary criticism in terms of the politics of the plays ... Taken as a whole, this collection demonstrates that there really is a 'new', or newly rediscovered, social criticism that excavates the voices and politics of commoners.