John Marston – författare

As the Elizabethan era gave way to the reign of James I, England grappled with corruption within the royal court and widespread religious anxiety. Dramatists responded with morally complex plays of dark wit and violent spectacle, exploring the nature of death, the abuse of power and vigilante justice. In Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy a father failed by the Spanish court seeks his own bloody retribution for his son's murder. Shakespeare's 1603 version of Hamlet creates an avenging Prince of unique psychological depth, while Chettle's The Tragedy of Hoffman is a fascinating reworking of Hamlet's themes, probably for a rival theatre company. In Marston's Antonio's Revenge, thwarted love leads inexorably to gory reprisals and in Middleton's The Revenger's Tragedy, malcontent Vindice unleashes an escalating orgy of mayhem on a debauched Duke for his bride's murder, in a ferocious satire reflecting the mounting disillusionment of the age. Emma Smith's introduction considers the political and religious climate behind the plays and the dramatic conventions within them. This edition includes a chronology, playwrights' biographies and suggestions for further reading.

Cases and Commentary on Tort features a range of extracts from significant cases which form a useful portfolio of primary sources for undergraduate students. The authors' succinct and engaging commentary offers insight into the basic principles of tort law and highlights the role the key cases play in the wider context of the subject. The extracts have been carefully selected to ensure they are of a manageable length while also providing an accurate picture of the main principles of tort law, making this an ideal text for students studying this area of law for the first time.Questions at the end of chapters prompt further discussion of the wider issues involved, while annotated further reading lists highlight useful texts and articles for students wishing to undertake more in-depth study in areas of particular interest.

A student edition of Marston's classic play The Malcontent is a tragicomedy deriving from the tradition of the revenge play. The verbal ingenuity of Malevole, the "malcontent", and the extravagance of the drama, push the relentlessness of intrigue to its logical conclusion, exposing the basically comic aspect of the genre. The conventional function of the climactic masque is inverted, leading to the essential resolution of the comedy.This edition comes with full commentary and notes, together with photos of Jonathan Miller's acclaimed 1973 production at the Nottingham Playhouse.

This edition brings five of Marston's most interesting plays together in a readable and helpful form. They are collected with modern spelling, full commentaries, textual notes and introductions, in texts newly edited from the original quartos. A survey of criticism of Marston is included. The edition of Sophonisba (a play highly praised by T. S. Eliot) is the first modernised text to appear in one hundred years. Another textual innovation is the relegation to an appendix of Webster's obtrusive additions to The Malcontent. Marston's plays have enjoyed popular revivals in English theatres over the last decade, and the authors' commentary is designed to alert readers to theatrical effects. The playwright's language is elucidated here far more fully than in any other collection.

This collaborative masterpiece of hilarious city comedy was performed by the Children of the Revels at the Blackfriars playhouse in 1605. The story is of an allegorical simplicity that lends itself to satire of civic mores and traditions as well as to parody of the sentimental, idealising London comedy presented at the amphitheatres in the suburbs: Goldsmith Touchstone, an upright London citizen, has one modest and one ambitious daughter, one righteous and one disreputable apprentice; virtue is rewarded, ruthlessness comes to grief - and receives a drenching in the muddy Thames. The introduction to this edition discusses various methods of establishing authorship and highlights the irony of the collaborators' comic vision of contemporary London life.

"This Malevole is one of the most prodigious affections that ever conversed with nature: a man, or rather a monster, more discontent than Lucifer." The Malcontent is a striking example of the new satiric tone and moral seriousness in English comedy of the early 1600s. The play's vision of a fallen humanity driven by lust and ambition is created partly by its depiction of Machiavellian intrigue in the court of Genoa, and partly by the disaffected Malevole, the malcontent of the title, who is actually the deposed Duke Altofronto in disguise. Marston's tragi-comedy is full of reversals, surprises and moral transformations and offers a thin disguise for the Jacobean court and its vices. This new student edition contains a lengthy new Introduction with background on the author, date and sources, theme, critical interpretation and stage history.

Although it was written shortly before or after Queen Elizabeth's death in 1603 and performed by the boy company at Blackfriars, this play foreshadows the light ladies and callous gallants of Restoration comedy. Passion is a scourge, love is humiliation, and friends might as well be enemies. Freevill discards his concubine Franceschina and, for a joke, sets his straight-laced friend Malheureux on to her, who falls for her and promises to carry out her revenge on Freevill by killing him. The play in the theatre, which is fully imagined in the introduction to this edition, impresses on the audience the spuriousness of rigid moral persuasions, especially when they are tried by fits of sexual passion.

This volume showcases some of the most current and exciting research being done on Cambodian religious ideas and practices by a new generation of scholars from a variety of disciplines. The different contributors examine in some manner the relationship between religion and the ideas and institutions that have given shape to Cambodia as a social and political body, or nation. Although they do not share the same approach to the idea of ""nation,"" all are concerned with the processes of religion that give meaning to social interaction, which in some way includes ""Cambodian"" identity. Chapters touch on such far-reaching theoretical issues as the relation to religion of Southeast Asian polity; the nature of colonial religious transformation; ""syncretism"" in Southeast Asian Buddhism; the relation of religious icon to national identity, religion, and gender; transnationalism and social movements; and identity among diaspora communities. While much has been published on Cambodia's recent civil war and the Pol Pot period and its aftermath, few English-language works are available on Cambodian religion. This book takes a major step in filling that gap, offering a broad overview of the subject that is relevant not only for the field of Cambodian studies, but also for students and scholars of Southeast Asian history, Buddhism, comparative religion, and anthropology.