A Theatergoer's Guide to Shakespeare's Characters

More than eight hundred characters appear in Shakespeare's thirty-eight plays - an astonishing variety of kings and queens, mothers and fathers, clowns and fairies, peasants and dukes, villains and heroes, the young and the old, the sinning and the sinned against

The author has chosen some sixty of these figures to examine. With few exceptions, they are the ones that modern theatergoers are most likely to encounter in performance, those that have captured the imagination of audiences over the centuries - Lear, Hamlet, Cleopatra, Rosalind, Portia, and the like

But some lesser-known characters are offered for their inherent interest and their example of Shakespeare's "infinite variety"

"This book is as handy as they come ... distilled without being dunderheaded ... reader-friendly in the extreme" ~ American Theatre