Simon Barker. Ed. 1997. 'Tis Pity She's a Whore. London: Routledge. 156pp. ISBN 0-415-04947-4. £10.99 / $17.95.

David Bevington. Ed. 1996. The Spanish Tragedy. Manchester: Manchester University Press. 143pp. ISBN 0-7190-4344-1. £5.99.

R.A. Foakes. Ed. 1996. The Revenger's Tragedy. Manchester: Manchester University Press. 137pp. ISBN 0-7190-4375-1. £5.99.

Derek Roper. Ed. 1997. 'Tis Pity She's a Whore. Manchester: Manchester University Press. 124pp. ISBN 0-7190-4359-X. £5.99.

John Russell Brown. Ed. 1997. The Duchess of Malfi. Manchester: Manchester University Press. 186pp. ISBN 0-7190-4357-3. £5.99.

John Russell Brown. Ed. 1996. The White Devil. Manchester: Manchester University Press. 168pp. ISBN 0-7190-4355-7. £5.99.

Michael Taylor. Ed. 1995. A Mad World, My Masters and Other Plays. Oxford: Oxford University Press. xxvi + 389pp. ISBN 0-19-282255-1. £6.99.

1. Competing editions of Renaissance texts targeted specifically at the student market are proliferating; World's Classics are offering several volumes of collected plays, the admirable Revels series is launching a separate line of cheaper, slimmer, Revels Student Editions, and there is even a second foray into Renaissance drama by the Routledge English Texts Series, which so far has covered only The Alchemist, but now adds Simon Barker's 'Tis Pity She's a Whore. Sadly, this is a rather unfortunate volume, marred by misprints and inaccuracies - 'Jacopa Sannazaro', 'Marian Lomax' for 'Marion', 'The Painter's Palace of Pleasure', 'destabalized', 'phamphlets', 'Glasgow Citizen's Theatre', 'George Dekker', and 'the Sperone Speroni', author, apparently, of a Spanish play, as well as an attribution of The Revenger's Tragedy unproblematically to Tourneur. Barker also overlooks Antony Telford Moore's discovery that the accepted date of Ford's baptism is wrong, even though Marion Lomax had drawn attention to this in her edition. Indeed, there is no reference in the bibliography to any work written later than 1990, although Barker's edition was not itself published until 1997; and Derek Roper's Revels edition, omitted entirely from the account of important editions of the play (which bizarrely includes Weber's), is mentioned later only to be castigated for its failure to discuss at sufficient length the parallel between 'Tis Pity and Romeo and Juliet - a 'neglect' which Barker strangely attributes to a 'possible...residue of nineteenth-century condemnations of Ford's subject matter'. The critical material here is bitty and unilluminating, with no real sense of the power or nature of the play, and not especially helpful: it is rather misleading, for instance, to say that 'Ford dealt with incest in The Broken Heart', and though Barker refers repeatedly to 'Ford's intellectual circle', he never specifies a member of it, nor points a student to any source (such as Roper's Revels edition) which could.

2. Derek Roper's slimmed-down Revels Student version of his earlier edition is infinitely more informative about Ford, about early modern London, and about the social construction of incest. It offers a complete rethinking and updating of the 1975 edition, and is concisely and crisply written. It is not just students but their tutors, too, who could benefit from this, even though the very startling cover image may mean that you will have to keep it in a brown paper bag.

3. R.A. Foakes's Revels Student The Revenger's Tragedy has also been completely updated since the 1966 original. It is attributed on the cover to Thomas Middleton / Cyril Tourneur, which should help students to track it down, and it contains a concise review of the history and current status of the authorship debate. It also provides a good summary of the text's links with other plays like Hamlet and Hoffman, and Foakes is especially interesting when analysing the comedy of the play and when considering how its representations of Italy may shade into imagings of London.

4. The latter idea has become something of an idée fixe in John Russell Brown's Revels Student editions of The White Devil and The Duchess of Malfi; he sees The Duchess of Malfi and Antonio as figuring James I and his male favourites, finds echoes of the Overbury murder wherever he turns, and even suggests that The White Devil's references to tightrope walkers and dogcatchers show that the playwright is really thinking of London rather than Italy. This is only one of a number of rather eccentric features of these two editions. The Duchess of Malfi, like The Revenger's Tragedy and 'Tis Pity She's a Whore, includes a preface explaining that it has been completely updated since Russell Brown's previous Revels edition; The White Devil does not, but it does include some reference to modern criticism and also engages in an apparent critique of the insufficiently politicised approach of the earlier Revels introductory material, without explaining that it is the same author writing. Despite these odd features, however, both editions offer pleasing attention to the particularities of dramaturgy, informed by an understanding of performance dynamics. There are full and detailed stage histories, and especially in the case of the Duchess (reflecting its greater popularity in the theatre).

5. The Spanish Tragedy is the only one of these volumes which is not a revision of a previous Revels edition, and perhaps because of that, it is many ways the weakest, with a noticeably shorter introduction and no list of further reading or history of productions. There is disappointingly little on the language, and Bevington also offers a bizarre conspiracy-theory reading, involving Lorenzo having deliberately engineered Andrea's death, as the best way of making sense of the play. Although the analysis of Kyd's use of Senecan techniques is useful, I would have liked clearer, more detailed guidance for the proposed student readership, and I shall continue to rely on Mulryne's New Mermaids edition for teaching purposes.

6. Middleton's A Mad World, My Masters and Other Plays is from a different series, the Oxford World's Classics. Containing , as well as the title play, Michaelmas Term, A Trick to Catch the Old One and No Wit, No Help Like a Woman's, it offers an illuminating and judicious introduction dealing with such topics as love and money, the city, and self-fashioning, and a good bibliography, notes and glossary, making it an attractive and useful volume. It takes its place alongside similar four-play selections from Marlowe, Jonson, Webster and Ford in the same series, which also include a volume called Four Revenge Tragedies, containing The Spanish Tragedy, The Revenger's Tragedy, The Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois and The Atheist's Tragedy. On a cost-per-play basis, this series is extremely good value and introduces students to some important lesser-known plays.