Reinventing Shakespeare: A Cultural History, from the Restoration to the Present

“It’s a very lively book. It’s a novel, in a way…There’s a sense of our hero moving through time and having different adventures along the way. That’s the narrative of this book. I think Taylor is a brilliant scholar, probably one of the most brilliant Shakespearians of our time. What he’s done in this book is condense a huge amount of work into something which is readable and interesting. He shows how people just wanted different things from Shakespeare at different times. Maybe at certain times they wanted him to be more classical, at others more English and his Englishness became important. Or they wanted to argue about whether the comedies or the tragedies were better, or whether he was good at women characters or not.” Read more...

The best books on Shakespeare’s Reception

Emma Smith, Literary Scholar