Renaissance Drama offers an in-depth examination of what is arguably the most exciting and innovative period of English drama: the emergence of commercial theatre in the 1570s, to the closure of theatres in the 1640s. It will investigate the preoccupations of early modern dramatists, as they wrote about their city and country, native citizens, strangers, aliens and outsiders and developed the language and technical resources of the theatre. We will explore the early London theatre, through plays about the capital leading into looking at how the stage imagined itself and complicated the act of playing through meta-theatricality. We will also explore themes that appeared repeatedly in Renaissance plays: early modern attitudes to strangers and others, the nature of urban space, gender and sexuality.