'… scholarly and feisty book … Shell argues a powerful and painstaking case that the celebrated plays of Webster, Tourneur and Middleton are best read as vicious anti-Catholic polemics, making extensive use of images from Revelations to convince a Protestant audience that Italian Catholicism really was a serious threat to their safety … There can be few readers who will fail to rethink their understanding of English culture after reading this splendid book.' The Times Literary Supplement

• Acknowledgements; List of abbreviations; Note on the text; Introduction; Part I. Catholics and the Canon: 1. The livid flash: decadence, anti-Catholic revenge tragedy and the dehistoricised critic; 2. Catholic poetics and the Protestant canon; Part II. Loyalism and Exclusion: 3. Catholic loyalism: I. Elizabethan writers; 4. Catholic loyalism: II. Stuart writers; 5. The subject of exile: I; 6. The subject of exile: II; Conclusion; Notes; List of works frequently cited; Index.

'… scholarly and feisty book … Shell argues a powerful and painstaking case that the celebrated plays of Webster, Tourneur and Middleton are best read as vicious anti-Catholic polemics, making extensive use of images from Revelations to convince a Protestant audience that Italian Catholicism really was a serious threat to their safety … There can be few readers who will fail to rethink their understanding of English culture after reading this splendid book.' The Times Literary Supplement

• Acknowledgements; List of abbreviations; Note on the text; Introduction; Part I. Catholics and the Canon: 1. The livid flash: decadence, anti-Catholic revenge tragedy and the dehistoricised critic; 2. Catholic poetics and the Protestant canon; Part II. Loyalism and Exclusion: 3. Catholic loyalism: I. Elizabethan writers; 4. Catholic loyalism: II. Stuart writers; 5. The subject of exile: I; 6. The subject of exile: II; Conclusion; Notes; List of works frequently cited; Index.

'… scholarly and feisty book … Shell argues a powerful and painstaking case that the celebrated plays of Webster, Tourneur and Middleton are best read as vicious anti-Catholic polemics, making extensive use of images from Revelations to convince a Protestant audience that Italian Catholicism really was a serious threat to their safety … There can be few readers who will fail to rethink their understanding of English culture after reading this splendid book.' The Times Literary Supplement

• Acknowledgements; List of abbreviations; Note on the text; Introduction; Part I. Catholics and the Canon: 1. The livid flash: decadence, anti-Catholic revenge tragedy and the dehistoricised critic; 2. Catholic poetics and the Protestant canon; Part II. Loyalism and Exclusion: 3. Catholic loyalism: I. Elizabethan writers; 4. Catholic loyalism: II. Stuart writers; 5. The subject of exile: I; 6. The subject of exile: II; Conclusion; Notes; List of works frequently cited; Index.