Reading Shakespeare

MICHAEL ALEXANDER is Emeritus Professor of English Literature, University of St Andrews, UK. He is a poet and translator and has international experience of teaching English literature, both medieval and modern. He is the author of Palgrave's bestselling A History of English Literature now in its second edition and his Penguin translations of Beowulf and other Old English poems have sold a million copies.

Preface.- First Things.- Career in brief.- Authorship.- Play and page.-Printed Books.- Posthumous Publication.- The Recorded Life.- Stratford and Family.- Education.- Plays.- Shake-scene.- What kind of Scene?.- Immediate Predecessors.- First Plays.- Language.- Verse.- Dramatist.- Love's Labour's Lost.- Romeo and Juliet.- A Midsummer Night's Dream.- Histories.- Richard II.- Henry IV.- Henry V.- Comprehensiveness.- Versatilty.- The Merchant: Changing Contexts.- To the Globe.- Much Ado About Nothing.- Julius Caesar.- As You Like It.- Twelfth Night.- Shake-speare's Sonnets.- Horatio's Question: Hamlet.- Taken to Extremes.- Problem plays.- Measure for Measure.- Tragedies.- Othello.- King Lear.- Macbeth.- Antony and Cleopatra.- Late Romances.- The Winter's Tale.- The Tempest.- Retrospect.- His supposed point of view.- 'Read him therefore'.- Order of Composition.- Chronology of Publication.- Further Reading.- Abbreviations and References.- Notes.- Index.