This enthralling tour de force of literary criticism, unprecedented in Shakespeare studies for its scope and daring, is nothing less than an attempt to show the Complete Works - dramatic and poetic - as a single, tightly integrated, evolving organism. Hughes supports his thesis with erudition and a painstakingly close analysis of language, plots and characters. A multitude of dazzling insights, such as only one great poet can offer into the work of another, is generated in the process, and our entire understanding of Shakespeare, his art and imagination, is radically transformed.

‘[This] huge study of Shakespeare, more than ten years in the making, is an unprecedented act of critical witness.’ London Review of Books