After Shakespeare: An Anthology

Has this really never been done before for Shakespeare? Certainly not as well or as comprehensively as this. Now at least Shakespeare catches up with Sherlock Holmes in this respect. Perhaps he is just too big to have allowed for such a compilation before, but that notion is disproved by John Gross’s marvelous anthology. Criticism, comment, pastiche, parody, poetry are all here, and much more besides. The sources are as varied as their names: novelists, critics, politicians, film makers, composers, philosophers, poets and others. Their range is just as wide, across the works, across themes and responses, and across the...