“The attempt to write about Shakespeare is like going into a large, spacious and splendid Dome through the conveyance of a narrow and obscure entry.”(Theobalt, 231) William Shakespeare is acknowledged as world’s greatest English language playwright and poet who possessed great wit and wisdom. His works are still admired by day to day people. He has written about almost all fields of knowledge. His plays not only entertain us but they give us insightful advice and wise suggestions for life. We have Shakespearean plays on varied human affairs like war, love, different family crises, problems etc. It seems that all the plays are written to keep live situations of our day to day affairs. For Shakespeare’s universal Fame Pope in his Preface to Shakespeare says: “If ever any author deserved the name of an original, it was Shakespeare” (2).

An ingenious combination of William Shakespeare's classic quotations and a commentary on today's leadership principles. The perfect gift for busy executives, managers, parents, teachers, and anyone in a leadership role, here is a great source of inspiration and insight in bite-sized form.

“Whatsoever a great man does, the same is done by others as well”, says the Bhagavadgītā. Shakespeare is one of such great men. He decocted man’s cosmic world into his plays, and his characters display greatness along with humility and frailty. His plays, which so lucidly articulate the hidden process of interiority of the protagonists, are a living force even today. The problems that they portray and the consequences that they map are not dissimilar to those that the leaders of today’s businesses encounter. Today’s leaders are, of course, equipped with better tools to manage these, but they may not be superior to the spiritual depth or moral strength that we experience in these classics. In a refreshing approach, this book delineates theories of leadership and management through the characters and the themes of the Bard’s plays, contextualizing their infinite variety to the concepts being expounded in today’s business environment.

Arjan Plaisier believes audiences who view Shakespeare performances and readers who study the plays deserve better than some of the recent interpretations of the Bard's work. In their attempt to be "modern," these interpreters commit historical amnesia by slighting the Christian ethos of the early Renaissance period in which Shakespeare wrote and by riding roughshod over the religious underpinnings of his plays. This neglect skews the playwright's intentions, confuses the audience, and diminishes the full effect of the play. Plaisier, too, is modern--and in a more profound sense. He sets forth how Shakespeare shapes his plots to conform at an ultimate level to timeless biblical narrative patterns (like Northrop Frye, he regards the Bible as a "code book"), so that there is a "right" ending to the work. And in an Appendix, Plaisier provides some kindly advice to his fellow pastors. You do well, he says to them, to enrich your noble calling with attention to literature. To do this, he says, you will find Shakespeare most helpful. Yes, and Plaisier's perceptive essays point to the deep wisdom in Shakespeare by which we can all live.

Part I provides some contexts for what is inevitably our reading of the history plays, so that perhaps we may guess at the impact they may have had on their contemporaries. The author suggests, by implication, a way of approaching Elizabethan drama that may be generally useful. Part II is a consideration of what the author thinks are some major issues in the Ricardian plays.

It was after midnight in 1990, and a group of NASA technicians are playing chess in the lounge. They never notice the soft clicking noises as radiation detectors kick in and a strange code begins taking over a computer monitor. As a glowing saucer zips past the Voyager, locks itself into orbit around Neptune, rolls over, and then disappears from view, the technicians loudly argue over the rules of the gameunaware that aliens are headed toward Earth. Unfortunately, the amphibian-like creatureswho reproduce in alarming numbershave made a serious mistake. They have chosen a small town in Iowa as the place to launch their invasion, mistakenly thinking they can attack under a cloak of invisibility. But this rural setting is protected by the Pirates, an elite team of adventurers and foilers of evil plots comprised of the most dangerous creatures on planet Earthyoung boys. As the alien invaders kidnap one of the pirates and begin to examine him for weaknesses, they have no idea that they have in their possession the girl-hating, chaos-creating nuisance that is the bane of all fourth-grade math teachers in town. It may be the last mistake theyll ever make.