Elizabethan Plays and Players is the story of the men who made Elizabethan drama—actors, dramatists, speculators, and patrons—from the building of the first English playhouse in 1576 to the death of the old Queen and the end of the age. The book is an exciting chronicle of personalities, censorship, interference, and defiance of authority, homicides and the plague, rivalries and feuds. It records the fortunes of the different companies and playhouses, and the personal relationship of the great writers—Marlowe, Kyd, Chapman, Shakespeare, Ben Jonson. It provides a vivid and essential background for the intelligent understanding of the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries.