This book has over 1,183 entries in the dictionary section, these being mainly on playwrights and plays, but others as well including managers and critics, and also on specific theatres, legislative acts and some technical jargon. Then there are entries on the different genres, from comedy to tragedy and everything in between. Inevitably, the chronology is quite long as it has a long period to cover and the introduction provides the necessary overview. The Historical Dictionary of British Theatre: Early Period concludes with a pretty massive bibliography. That will be of use to particularly assiduous researchers, but this book itself is a good place to start any research since it covers periods that are far less well-known and documented, and ordinary theatre-goers will also find useful information.

Darryll Grantley has spent 26 years teaching theatre history at the University of Kent, and also amassing numerous facts for this fact-filled volume. In his courses, he covers all periods of British theatre, with an emphasis on the late medieval and early modern periods. In this time, he has written numerous articles and authored, edited or contributed to over a dozen books, including London in Early Modern Drama, The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Theatre and The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and his Contemporaries.