A Bibliography of the Writings of George Peele

Thomas Middleton, dramatist (1580–1627), was not by any means the literary discoverer of the rogue's fascination. Even the moral Harman had lost himself, at times, in the romantic appeal of the vagrants he pictured, and Greene, after a perfunctory moral preface to his series of Conny-catching Pamphlets (1591–92), had given himself more and more unreservedly to revealing the adventurous life of rogues.

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2. Theatre in Shakespeare’s time

10.1093/actrade/9780198718628.003.0002 ◽

2015 ◽

Author(s):

Stanley Wells

Keyword(s):

Christopher Marlowe ◽

Early Career ◽

Early Years ◽

Robert Greene ◽

John Lyly ◽

George Peele ◽

King's Men ◽

Thomas Lodge ◽

Narrative Poems ◽

The University

Both drama and theatre were developing rapidly in Shakespeare’s early years. ‘Theatre in Shakespeare’s time’ explains how Shakespeare followed in the footsteps of the first great wave of stage writers known as the University Wits—John Lyly, Thomas Lodge, Christopher Marlowe, George Peele, Thomas Nashe, and Robert Greene—learning from them and collaborating with them. It describes the London theatrical scene, the playing spaces, and the actors of the time before outlining Shakespeare’s early career, the narrative poems that kept him afloat financially, and introducing the Lord Chamberlain’s, and later King’s Men, the acting company that formed in 1594.

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Immunities and Monasticism

10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199660889.013.20 ◽

2017 ◽

Author(s):

Joshua Phillips

Keyword(s):

William Shakespeare ◽

Sixteenth Century ◽

Social Practice ◽

Legal History ◽

National Sovereignty ◽

John Bale ◽

George Peele ◽

Failed Attempt ◽

Politics And Law ◽

King John

Over the course of the sixteenth century, numerous playwrights composed plays about King John of England (r. 1199–1216). While representing the king’s failed attempt to assert national sovereignty over papal control, the plays explore an even more subtle problem: the legal threat that monastic immunity poses to papal and monarchical power. The chapter examines how plays written by John Bale, George Peele, and William Shakespeare used their representations of King John to attend, in a post-Reformation context, to the legal complexities of monasticism as a social practice. In articulating the difficulties that communal formations and monasticism as a social practice create for post-Reformation politics and law, sixteenth-century dramatists—this chapter argues—shape a new version of legal history.

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