ABSTRACT
In the course of the last twenty-five years there have been great changes in the way Shakespeare is studied at undergraduate level and above. These changes are only now beginning to take hold in schools and colleges, where character, plot and theme – ideas that rarely appear in contemporary Shakespeare studies – have until the very recent past been dominant. This can mean that when students arrive at university, they feel unprepared and surprised at what they encounter when they start to work on Shakespeare. This book attempts to address the gap between the old and the new approaches by providing a thorough general introduction to Shakespeare which is based on the way his plays are often understood at the beginning of the twenty-first century.
