This title is now available in a new format. Refer to Shakespeare: A Graphic Guide 9781848311152. His plays pack theatres and provide Hollywood blockbusters with scripts, and his works are considered fundamental to the teaching of English literature, inspiring millions of pages of scholarship and criticism every year around the globe. He has given us many of the very words we speak, and even the thoughts we think. But how did this happen? Who decided that Shakespeare deserved such fervent adoration? Can an Elizabethan playwright really be so relevant today, or are there other forces at work? Introducing Shakespeare answers these questions by looking at how The Bard has been worshipped at different times and in different places, demonstrating to what cultural and political ends Shakespeare has been put, and explaining the intensity of current critical disputes. The compelling and controversial conclusion is that, after centuries, Shakespeare remains the battlefield on which our very comprehension of humanity is being fought out.