This book reexamines some of Shakespeare's best-known texts in the light of their engagement with the forms of deprivation that threatened domestic security in early modern England. Burglary, the loss of home, and the early deaths of parents emerge as central and very telling issues in Shakespearean drama. Dubrow relates the plays to Shakespeare's poetry (The Rape of Lucrece and the sonnets), and to early modern cultural texts such as the literature of roguery; she also introduces illuminating perspectives from contemporary social problems (notably crime), twentieth-century poetry, and popular culture.