Untimely Deaths in Renaissance Drama

"English Renaissance scholars will find Andrew Griffin’s book an agreeable re-visioning of some familiar plays, while it brings attention to some neglected plays. It’s also an intriguing approach to late Elizabethan and Jacobean drama."

Margaret Rose Jaster, Pennsylvania State University at Harrisburg, Renaissance and Reformation / Renaissance et Réforme

"Andrew Griffin’s deeply learned and painstakingly written book argues that early modern drama participates in or functions as a form of early modern historiography, one in which the competing forms of memorializing human lives and deaths common to this transitional period of history writing ‘abrupt’ the dramatic narration."

Yvonne Bruce, Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Teaching

"Untimely Deaths in Renaissance Drama is a thoughtful, learned, and wide-ranging study of the interplay between historiography and Renaissance English drama. Taking the narrative problem of untimely death as a thematic through line, Andrew Griffin argues for the historiographical seriousness of major works of English drama and for the hybrid nature (that is, pointedly literary and mythic character) of even the most modern historical writing of the period."

Julia Lupton, Department of English, University of California, Irvine

"Untimely Deaths in Renaissance Drama makes a major contribution to the field of history writing in the English Renaissance, the genre of the history play on the English Renaissance stage, and the durable dilemma of how to narrate a life effectively."

Vin Nardizzi, Department of English, University of British Columbia

"Taking Shakespeare, Middleton, Marlowe, and Tourneur as case studies, Untimely Deaths in Renaissance Drama is an interesting, compelling, and original work that makes a useful intervention into early modern studies."

Brian Chalk, Department of English, Manhattan College