King Richard ll

Andrew Gurr is Professor Emeritus at the University of Reading, and for the past thirty years has been Director of Research in London for the Globe Theatre. His books include The Shakespearean Stage 1574–1642 (Cambridge, 4th edition, 2009), The Shakespearian Playing Companies (1996), Staging in Shakespeare's Theatres (with Mariko Ichikawa, 2000), Playgoing in Shakespeare's London (Cambridge, 2004), The Shakespeare Company 1594–1642 (Cambridge, 2010), Shakespeare's Opposites: The Admiral's Company, 1594-1625 (Cambridge, 2012) and Shakespeare's Workplace: Essays on Shakespearean Theatre (Cambridge, 2017). He has also edited the New Cambridge Shakespeare edition of King Henry V. Claire McEachern is Professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is the author of Believing in Shakespeare: Studies in Longing (Cambridge, 2018); The Poetics of English Nationhood, 1590–1612 (Cambridge, 1996); and editor of eight of Shakespeare's plays including the Arden 3 Much Ado About Nothing (2015). Her essay collections include the Cambridge Companion to Shakespearean Tragedy (Cambridge, 2nd edition, 2015), and, with Debora Shuger, Religion and Culture in Renaissance England (Cambridge, 1997).

• Introduction; The play; Textual analysis; Appendixes: 1. Shakespeare's use of Holinshed; 2. Extracts from Daniel's The Civil Wars; 3. 'An Homilie against Disobedience'; 4. Extracts from England's Parnassus; Reading list.