"Short, cheap pamphlets were a common sight in early modern England. Bearing catchy titles and adorned with crude woodcuts, they told of notorious murders and of the sometimes providential means by which the culprit was captured and condemned to the scaffold. In this extraordinary and ambitious book, Peter Lake examines how different sections of sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England--protestant, puritan and catholic, the press and the popular stage--sought to enlist these pamphlets to their own ideological and commercial purposes." "The book takes us not merely to the print shops, book stalls and theatres, but also to the pulpits, prisons and public executions of post-reformation England. The deployment of these gory tales to attract paying audiences in theatres, and customers for pamphlets, was matched by their exploitation by clerics to attract the same broad congregation. While the godly attacked the depravity of Grub Street and of the theatre, the press and the stage retaliated by the use of anti-puritan stereotypes and stories."--Jacket.