Constructing the Canon of Early Modern Drama

For one hundred years the drama of Shakespeare''s contemporaries has been consistently represented in anthologies, edited texts, and the critical tradition by a familiar group of about two dozen plays running from Kyd''s Spanish Tragedy to Ford''s ''Tis Pity She''s a Whore by way of Dekker, Jonson, Middleton and Webster. How was this canon created, and what ideological and institutional functions ...