"Shakespeare, the King's Playwright is distinguished, readable. and in its own way, counterrevolutionary. It is a corrective to much recent criticism". -- Ralph Berry, Times Higher Education Supplement

"For all its sophistication ... this is not the book of an academic sophisticate. It has none of the cleverness, the wordplay, and the winking to insiders that characterize so much current literary criticism". -- Robert Darnton, New York Review of Books

"Kernan's book is learned, elegantly and accessibly written, and clearly the product of a highly cultivated mind". -- Stanley Wells, Sunday Times (London)

"This scholarly, occasionally quirky, and splendidly provocative work belongs to that highly select group of books which actually have something genuinely new to say about Shakespeare". -- John Adamson, Sunday Telegraph