Davina Morgan-Witts, BookBrowse editor

Each year, as the holiday season comes around and the news stories start to dry up, we look back into history for a snapshot of the news in centuries past. This year, we start in 1608 ....

While the early settlers at Jamestown struggled for survival, London was a hive of dramatic endeavor:

Ben Jonson's The Masque of Beauty and The Hue and Cry After Cupid were both published and performed for the first time. Thomas Heywood published The Rape of Lucrece; Thomas Middleton published The Family of Love, A Mad World, My Masters and A Trick to Catch the Old One; and William Shakespeare published King Lear - to name but a few.

Elizabethan dramatist and pamphleteer, Thomas Dekker, was also in fine voice, publishing two tracts: The Dead Term and The Bellman of London; and considering that he claimed credit for 240 plays during his 60-year lifetime, it seems likely that he turned out a few plays as well.

[More]