Smith gracefully weaves the stories of his bittersweet childhood and his life's work with illuminating passages from Shakespeare's plays and sonnets. A brilliant reminder of the redemptive power of literature, it will make readers fall in love with Shakespeare again or for the first time.

A study of actresses playing the role of Hamlet on stage and screen.

What is the role of costume in Shakespeare production? Shakespeare and Costume in Practice argues that costume design choices are central not only to the creation of period setting and the actor’s work on character, but to the cultural, political, and psychological meanings that the theatre makes of Shakespeare. The book explores questions about what the first Hamlet looked like in his mourning cloak; how costumes for a Shakespeare comedy can reflect or critique the collective nostalgias a culture has for its past; how costume and casting work together to ask new questions about Shakespeare and race. Using production case studies of Hamlet, Much Ado About Nothing, and The Tempest, the book demonstrates that costume design can be a site of experimentation, playfulness, and transgression in the theatre – and that it can provoke audiences to think again about what power, race, and gender look like on the Shakespearean stage.

John R Leigh, born in Bolton, Lancashire, and educated in Cambridge, was musical, mathematical, scientific and literary. At school in the 1930s, his headmaster told him there would be no more wars and no need for more scientists. His life then ranged first from languages teacher, radar technician and RAF flight lieutenant in WWII, to marriage with a talented and literary American wife. After the war, John changed career to retrain in engineering—for a married man, a brave decision. Over the years, the keen theatre-going couple saw many diverse plays. Convinced that he had found an original approach to seeing Shakespearean dramas, he spent happy years describing and refining his thoughts: what ideas, prejudices and religious beliefs would surface in the minds of Shakespeare’s own audience, the groundlings and nobles? In our day, we cannot help but react with our own beliefs and social customs; yet in Globe Theatre, how would people have responded to seeing a ghost in the early sixteenth century? Rather differently than nowadays, John thought. (Hamlet studies form the greater part of his collected work.) Suppose you were seeing Hamlet for the first time: hence the title ‘The Naïve Shakespearean’.