"This Companion to Shakespeare is for students and teachers of Shakespeare, indeed for anyone with an interest in his plays. It offers a remarkably innovative and comprehensive picture of the theatrical, literary, intellectual, and social worlds in which Shakespeare wrote and in which his plays were produced. Each individual essay stands as an authoritative account of the state of knowledge in its field, and in their totality the essays provide a new and compelling portrait of the historical conditions, both imaginative and institutional, that enabled (and in some cases inhibited) Shakespeare's great art."--Jacket.