Martin Wiggins is Senior Lecturer and Fellow, and Tutor for Research at The Shakespeare Institute at the University of Birmingham. From 1987-1990 he held a Junior Research Fellowship at Keble College. He has also taught at the University of Reading, Royal Holloway and Bedford New College, London, and The Roehampton Institute. His research interests cover the full corpus of dramatic works written in the British Isles between the English Reformation and the English Revolution, including both commercial and literary plays, masques and entertainments, and drama in Latin, Greek, Cornish, and Welsh. In 2006, he won the Calvin and Rose G. Hoffman Prize for distinguished work on Christopher Marlowe. He also writes regularly for the Globe's magazine, Around the Globe, on issues in dramatic history.

Much of the book is arcane literary detective work but no less fascinating for that, extending our sense of what constituted drama in Renaissance England, and how it could be used to massage public opinion as power shifted from one regime to another.

• Acknowledgements ; Abbreviations ; Introduction ; 1535: A Midsummer Night's Apocalypse ; 1559: The Taming of the Wolves ; 1603: Sycophancy and Old Clothes ; 1626: London's Labours Lost ; 1642: Closedown ; Appendix 1: Sir Thomas Cawarden's Masques for Queen Elizabeth I ; Appendix 2: William Beeston and Political Theatre During the Short Parliament ; DOCUMENTS: ; 1. Expenditure by the London Skinners' Company on the Lord Mayor's Midsummer Pageants, 1535 ; 2. Costumes for the Court Revels on 6 January 1559 ; 3. The Beautiful Hill: Thomas Middleton's verses for the Lord Mayor's pageant of 1626, The Triumphs of Health and Prosperity ; 4. Sir Thomas Salusbury's Untitled Comedy of a Citizen and his Wife ; Glossary ; Map of London ; Index

Martin Wiggins is Senior Lecturer and Fellow, and Tutor for Research at The Shakespeare Institute at the University of Birmingham. From 1987-1990 he held a Junior Research Fellowship at Keble College. He has also taught at the University of Reading, Royal Holloway and Bedford New College, London, and The Roehampton Institute. His research interests cover the full corpus of dramatic works written in the British Isles between the English Reformation and the English Revolution, including both commercial and literary plays, masques and entertainments, and drama in Latin, Greek, Cornish, and Welsh. In 2006, he won the Calvin and Rose G. Hoffman Prize for distinguished work on Christopher Marlowe. He also writes regularly for the Globe's magazine, Around the Globe, on issues in dramatic history.

Much of the book is arcane literary detective work but no less fascinating for that, extending our sense of what constituted drama in Renaissance England, and how it could be used to massage public opinion as power shifted from one regime to another.

• Acknowledgements ; Abbreviations ; Introduction ; 1535: A Midsummer Night's Apocalypse ; 1559: The Taming of the Wolves ; 1603: Sycophancy and Old Clothes ; 1626: London's Labours Lost ; 1642: Closedown ; Appendix 1: Sir Thomas Cawarden's Masques for Queen Elizabeth I ; Appendix 2: William Beeston and Political Theatre During the Short Parliament ; DOCUMENTS: ; 1. Expenditure by the London Skinners' Company on the Lord Mayor's Midsummer Pageants, 1535 ; 2. Costumes for the Court Revels on 6 January 1559 ; 3. The Beautiful Hill: Thomas Middleton's verses for the Lord Mayor's pageant of 1626, The Triumphs of Health and Prosperity ; 4. Sir Thomas Salusbury's Untitled Comedy of a Citizen and his Wife ; Glossary ; Map of London ; Index