Wendy Nelson-Cave

Very useful and precise.

Each entry is short and pithy, giving exactly what you need, to situate a character in your memory. And just enough to "get it" if you've never read the play. Most entries are a sentence or two.

Major characters get much larger entries, still fairly brief. They include a couple of quotes and a lengthier description of their role in the play/theme. These can be a page, or less.

Begins with an introduction written during the rebuilding of The Globe, in the 1990s, and show more referencing it with pictures, while also discussing (and including some pictures of contemporary works/drawings/texts) the contemporary aspects of theatre and such. Basically a simple and entirely unnecessary justification for the book, I guess. The intro is easily skippable, if not terrible.

All-in-all, this is a very useful and well-designed collection of Shakespeare's characters. show less

Alphabetically lists and describes the significance of the characters in Shakespeare's plays.