Modern Hamlets and their Soliloquies.

Students remain conservative readers of plays. Their earliest experience of drama has usually been through the media of film and television which favour realism. Introducing first year undergraduates to English Renaissance theatre can be a frustrating task as they persist in seeing Shakespeare through Ibsenite spectacles. Alan Dessen's excellent book never allows the reader to lose sight of the fact that Shakespeare and his contemporaries employed a very different theatre language to that of Ibsen and his successors. It is one of the few books that actually effects a change in the way we might read Shakespeare and will certainly find its way onto all undergraduate reading lists.

Dessen is thorough and thought-provoking. What always impresses is his range of examples and the way he uses them as evidence for his readings of selected plays. His study is based on the stage directions is approximately six …