The Student's Guide to Shakespeare

This book is a 'one-stop-shop' for the busy undergraduate studying Shakespeare. Offering detailed guidance to the plays most often taught on undergraduate courses, the volume targets the topics tutors choose for essay questions and is organised to help students find the information they need quickly. Each text discussion contains sections on sources, characters, performance, themes, language, and critical history, helping students identify the different ways of approaching a text. The book's unique play-based structure and character-centre approach allows students to easily navigate the material. The flexibility of the design allows students to either read cover-to-cover, target a specific play, or explore elements of a narrative unit such as imagery or characterisation. The reader will gain quickly a full grasp of the kind of dramatist William Shakespeare was - and is.

William McKenzie is a Career Development Fellow at St. Hilda's College Oxford. He is the co-editor of Shakespeare and I (Bloomsbury, 2012) and is currently working on a monograph about narcissism in Renaissance France.