JONATHON HART is Director of Comparative Literature and Professor of English at University of Alberta, Canada.

• Introduction PART I: POETRY Contexts Venus and Adonis Rape of Lucrece Sonnets PART II: CULTURE AND HISTORY Barbarism and Its Contexts Shakespeare's Representation of History Shakespeare's England and Italy Gender in the Second Tetralogy Henry V Henry VIII Conclusion

"I am happy to have this volume on my shelves because it contains edited, student-accessible texts of a number of plays that would otherwise be more difficult to read and teach: this is a major publication in the area of non-Shakespearean drama, even if relation to Shakespeare is both its organizing principle and its commercial selling point." (SEL Studies in English Literature, Vol. 56 (2), 2016)