academic versus theatrical values
and contemporary authors
Category=ATD
Category=DSG
Category=NHTB
early modern book trade
English Renaissance literary culture
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eq_biography-true-stories
eq_history
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eq_non-fiction
forthcoming
Late Elizabethan satire
literary ambition and disillusionment
Marlowe
modernised critical edition
Shakespeare and the Lord Chamberlain's Men
Spenser
Thomas Nashe and pamphleteering
university life and arts degrees
Product details
- ISBN 9781526165527
- Dimensions: 138 x 216mm
- Publication Date: 13 Oct 2026
- Publisher: Manchester University Press
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Hardback
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The Parnassus Plays are a trilogy of university plays, written in English rather than Latin at the end of Queen Elizabeth’s reign, possibly by multiple authors. They offer a unique perspective on the student experience, on literary aspiration and economic reality, and on the London literary scene at the height of the English Renaissance. One of the central characters is based on the prose satirist, Thomas Nashe, and the plays comment extensively on other contemporary writers, including Shakespeare. These plays are presented for the first time in a modernised text which reveals their sparkling satire, while addressing issues of economic precarity that will be immediately familiar to a modern audience.
Andrew Hadfield is Emeritus Professor at the University of Sussex and a visiting Professor at University College, London
Neil Rhodes is Emeritus Professor of English Literature at the University of St Andrews
