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This course explores plays from the development of England’s first ‘fixed’ stages until the closing of the theaters at the start of the English Civil War (1642). What were Shakespeare’s contemporaries writing? How did their experimentation transform not only English theater, but European literary history. In this class we will study not only some of the most important and popular plays from this period, but strange, elusive, and enigmatic material as well, in order to consider how writers such as Marlowe, Dekker, Jonson, Middleton, and Ford spoke to and participated in their wider cultural context.