Shakespeare's Reading

Oxford Shakespeare Topics (General Editors Peter Holland and Stanley Wells) provide students, teachers, and interested readers with short books on important aspects of Shakespeare criticism and scholarship, including some general anthologies relating to Shakespeare.

Shakespeare's Reading explores Shakespeare's marvellous reshaping of sources into new creations. Beginning with a discussion of how and what Elizabethans read - manuscripts, popular pamphlets, and books - Robert S. Miola goes on to examine Shakespeare's general habits of reading and track his use of specific texts and traditions in the poems, histories, comedies, tragedies, and romances. This is a lucid, entertaining, and comprehensive account of how, throughout his career, Shakespeare fused imaginative invention with remembered sources and inherited traditions in the creative act of composition. Repeated references to the plays in performance enliven and enrich the account.