Three Revenge Tragedies: The Revenger's Tragedy; the White Devil; the Changeling Book

Many of us become besotted with Shakespeare and for many reasons. Some of the plays we have seen and read again and again, but what of his contemporaries? Revenger's Tragedy or Bartholomew Fair anyone? If you love Will, looking into some of the other dramas and playwrights kicking about during his time is well worthwhile. He must have seen them at the very least. I read this book because I am on a mission to learn more about Shakespeare's time. The crowds he wrote and played for, the pulse of the age, what was funny, what forbidden. Life looked different from Elizabethan times as they rolled into the Jacobean. Powder plots, economic worries, identity crises, plague...these things are hard to see at a cursory glance on the period that gave us the King James Bible and the Union Jack, both giant leaps forward in English culture but the man on the street seems perplexed, freaked out and the many dramas of the time seem to reflect that. This book has made me thirsty for more and brings me a little closer to Will from oblique, indirect angles.