The two essays which begin the collection present broad overviews of Elizabethan drama and discuss Shakespeare's first great editor, Theobald. Together with the final essay – on publication and performance in early Stuart drama – these form the frame of the mirror held up to Shakespeare in the other eighteen essays, whether they of general themes running through some or all of Shakespeare's plays or the plays his contemporaries, or whether they treat of specific plays. There is an especially rich concentration on Macbeth and Coriolanus.
Jack Cooper Gray was a member of the Department of English at the University of Waterloo