Some Background

Before beginning to read the actual plays in earnest, I thought I should take in a bit of background material first. Luckily, it appears that the Riverside Edition is perfect for this, containing a good bit of succinct yet definitive background material (including cool pictures!). At first glance, it looks to contain plenty of historical context, general literary criticism, notes on language and style, and so forth. Everything you would expect, and then some, but not too much. Not wanting to go overboard on the background stuff (as you can imagine, there’s quite a bit of ancillary material floating around out there after more than four centuries; the library had almost an entire shelf devoted to it, easily outnumbering the stuff on-shelf actually written by Shakespeare), the Riverside introduction will have to do.