The newly commissioned essays, written by the most distinguished historians and literary scholars working today (including Ian Archer, David Bevington, Michael Bristol, David Daniell, Richard Dutton, Andrew Gurr, Jean Howard, Roslyn Knutson, and Peter Lake), represent the very best of modem scholarship on Shakespeare and his world. 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. Including essays on the organization and regulation of Elizabethan playwrighting; on the printing, publication, and circulation of the play-texts; on Shakespeare's reading; on religion and political thought in England in late Elizabethan and Jacobean England; and on the linguistic and literary environment in which he wrote; A Companion to Shakespeare remarkably allows us to see the playwright anew by restoring his artistry to the rich interactions of the historical world in which he worked and flourished.

The lucid, engaging, and authoritative essays in this imaginatively conceived collection will definitively change theways in which we read, see, and perform Shakespeare's plays.