This book is a study of four of Shakespeare's major tragedies - "Hamlet," "Othello," "King Lear" and "Macbeth." It looks at these plays in a variety of contexts - both in isolation and in relation to each other and to the cultural, ideological, social and political contexts which produced them.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Biomimetic and Biohybrid Systems, Living Machines 2017, held in Stanford, CA, USA, in July 2017.The 42 full and 19 short papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 63 submissions.