George Hibbard has always endorsed T.S. Eliot's idea that 'we must know all of Shakespeare's work in order to know any of it,' and this idea, implicit in the first essay in this volume, informs the whole collection, written in honour of one of Canada's leading Shakespearian editors and scholars.

The two essays which begin the collection present broad overviews of Elizabethan drama and discuss Shakespeare's first great editor, Theobald. Together with the final essay – on publication and performance in early Stuart drama – these form the frame of the mirror held up to Shakespeare in the other eighteen essays, whether they of general themes running through some or all of Shakespeare's plays or the plays his contemporaries, or whether they treat of specific plays. There is an especially rich concentration on Macbeth and Coriolanus.