First published in 1987.
This study removes some of the critical puzzles that Shakespeare's comedies of love have posed in the past. The author shows that what distinguishes the comedies is not their similarity but their variety - the way in which each play is a new combination of essentially similar ingredients, so that, for example, the boy/girl changes in The Merchant of Venice are seen to have a quite different significance from those in As You Like It.

William Shakespeare s Macbeth is a timeless tale of love, greed and power, which has given rise to heated debates around such issues as the representation of gender roles, political violence and the dramatisation of evil.

Taking the form of a sourcebook, this guide to Shakespeare s play presents:

• extensive introductory comment on the contexts, critical history and performance of the text, from publication to present
• annotated extracts from key contextual documents, reviews, critical works and the text itself
• cross-references between documents...