Jonson, Marston, Chapman, Middleton, Heywood, Webster and Fletcher are playwrights of the Jacobean stage whose outstanding literary achievements have to some extent been obscured or misunderstood in Shakespeare's shadow. This timely reassessment, based on the accumulated scholarship of the decades since Una Ellis-Fermor's Jacobean Drama in 1936, comes when the opening of the Swan Theatre at Stratford-upon-Avon gives the public, at last, the chance to see on the professional stage some of the neglected masterpieces of the richest period of our theatre.