Shakespeare's Books - A Dictionary of Shakespeare's Sources

Entries cover writers and works whose importance to Shakespeare has emerged more clearly in recent years thanks to new research. Others describe and explain current thinking on long-recognized sources as Plutarch, Ovid, Holinshed, Ariosto and Montaigne. Entries for all major sources, over 80 in number, feature surveys of the writer's place in Shakespeare's time, detailed dicussion of the relationship to Shakespeare's plays and poems, and full bibliography. Sample passages from writers and texts of early modern England allow the volume to be used also as a reader in the literature commonly known in Shakespeare's era; these excerpts, together with reproductions of pages and illustrations from the original texts, convey something of the flavour of the material as Shakespeare would have encountered it.