A Study of Shakespeare

This volume offers a measured voyage through Shakespeare’s evolving craft, treating the playwright’s language as something to be heard rather than merely read. The author maps the poet’s stylistic currents, arranging the works into three distinct phases—early lyric and imaginative pieces, middle‑period comedies and histories, and later tragedies and romances—while drawing vivid nautical analogies that make the scholarly terrain feel like a sea to be navigated.

Beyond the main survey, the book includes lively appendices that touch on contemporary debates, a whimsical note on the historical play King Edward III, and an account of a Shakespeare society’s proceedings. The tone is both erudite and conversational, inviting listeners to join a longstanding tradition of readers who set out to understand the ever‑shifting tides of Shakespeare’s verse.