Wendy Nelson-Cave

Very useful and precise.

Each entry is short and pithy, giving exactly what you need, to situate a character in your memory. And just enough to "get it" if you've never read the play. Most entries are a sentence or two.

Major characters get much larger entries, still fairly brief. They include a couple of quotes and a lengthier description of their role in the play/theme. These can be a page, or less.

Begins with an introduction written during the rebuilding of The Globe, in the 1990s, and referencing it with pictures, while also discussing (and including some pictures of contemporary works/drawings/texts) the contemporary aspects of theatre and such. Basically a simple and entirely unnecessary justification for the book, I guess. The intro is easily skippable, if not terrible.

All-in-all, this is a very useful and well-designed collection of Shakespeare's characters.… (meer)