First published in 1980.

At their most successful, Shakespeare's styles are strategies to make plain the limits of thought and feeling which define the significance of human actions. John Baxter analyses the way in which these limits are reached, and also provides a strong argument for the idea that the power of Shakespearean drama depends upon the co-operation of poetic style and dramatic form. Three plays are examined in detail in the text: The Tragedy of Mustapha by Fulke Greville and Richard II and Macbeth by Shakespeare.

Kimberly Anne Coles is Associate Professor of English at the University of Maryland. She is the author of Religion, Reform, and Women’s Writing in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2008) and recently co-edited The Cultural Politics of Blood, 1500–1900 (Palgrave, 2015), a collection of essays on race, embodiment, and humoral theory. She has published articles on the topics of women’s writing, gender, medical theory, and religion and race (and their intersection). Her current book project deals with the medical and philosophical context that makes moral constitution a heritable feature of the blood. She is co-editing the Bloomsbury Cultural History of Race in the Renaissance and Early Modern Age (1350–1550), and finishing a book project tentatively titled, "Bad Humour: Race, Religion, and the Constitution of Wrong Belief in Early Modern England."

Eve Keller is Professor of English at Fordham University. She is the author of Generating Bodies and Gendered Selves: The Rhetoric of Reproduction in Early-Modern England (University of Washington Press, 2007) and co-author of Two Rings (PublicAffairs, 2012), which has been published in seven languages. Past president of the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts, she is currently President of the Fordham University Faculty Senate and Director of the Honors Program at Fordham College at Rose Hill.