Here is a marvelous collection of plays from the English Renaissance period, offering prime examples of the "domestic drama" genre that first appeared around 1590. These four pioneering works, set in near-contemporary England and concerned with issues of marriage and crime rather than war and power, focus on the lives of ordinary people, instead of kings and queens and politicians.

Arden dramatizes a notorious murder case of forty years earlier, in which a wealthy husband was killed by his wife and her lover. In A Woman Killed with Kindness , a wife is caught by her husband in bed with his best friend.

The Witch of Edmonton combines a true-life story of witchcraft with a fictitious tale of bigamy and wife-murder, and The English Traveller deals with the unexpected changes people find when they return home after a lengthy absence.

Part of the Oxford English Drama series, this edition has modern-spelling, critical introductions, wide-ranging notes, a chronology of the plays, and appendices that address the question: who wrote Arden of Faversham and when did Thomas Heywood write The English Traveller .