Shakespeare belonged to a talented and influential group of writers, poets and dramatists, all of whom are illustrated throughout with portraits, engravings and documents, showing how these writers saw themselves, and how Elizabethan society valued literary talent as well

This book is an account of a public seminar held in honour of Jan Kott's influential study, Shakespeare Our Contemporary. Attracting international contributors, the seminar focused on the relevance of her study for Shakespearian theatre today.

Applying recent developments in new historicism and cultural materialism-along with the new perspectives opened up by the current debate on intertextuality and the construction of the theatrical text-the essays collected here reconsider the pervasive infl