The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare

From the preface:"This book is intended as an aid to the enjoyment of the plays and poems of William Shakespeare, a writer, actor, and man of the theatre who lived from 1564 to 1616. In pursuit of this objective, it hopes to contribute to a better understanding of the place occupied by his writings both in the Elizabethan and Jacobean era in which they were composed and in the many subsequent periods in which they have been read, performed, and reinterpreted. In so far as the two aims are separable, The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare is designed primarily to inform readers about Shakespeare’s works, times, lives, and afterlives rather than to interpret them, so we have preferred to balance its composition in favour of short, informative entries as against chapter-length meditations on large topics. A map of the coverage which these entries offer of the many different fields of knowledge which the word ‘Shakespeare’ has come to include—biography, theatre history, printing and publishing, criticism, translation, and so on—is provided by the thematic listing of entries.