Reception Theory provides readers with a unique overview and understanding of the ways in which both audiences and readers have reacted to Shakespeare's works historically and in the present. Bridging both reader response and audience response, the volume showcases how these are employed to interpret Shakespeare's plays. The volume addresses too the impact of more recent approaches, including cognitive science and the ways in which technology affects and shapes spectatorship today. When we read narratives, what factors shape our response to them? Can we engage more deeply with them by bringing our own experiences and intuitions to our reading? And how do playtexts - especially in their Early Modern form - allow us to infer meanings? This study demonstrates how recent emphases on a reader's and a spectator's role in the creation of meaning might allow us to contemplate Shakespeare's work in fresh and often provocative ways. Among the plays included as case studies are Measure for Measure , The Tempest , King Lear and Henry V . Shakespeare and Reception Theory pays close attention to Early Modern modes of interaction in the playhouse alongside more recent assumptions that underlie spectating and performing.