Instead, I wanted to write something for readers, theatregoers, students and all those who feel they missed out on Shakespeare at some earlier point and are willing to have another pop at these extraordinary works. This Is Shakespeare connects the plays with their own contexts and ours, bringing in divergent sources to illuminate Shakespeare, from Ovid and Aristotle to The Simpsons and Charlie Chaplin. This Shakespeare has views on intersectionality, on global economics, on postmodernity, as well as on queer desire, on Elizabethan succession politics, and on the human need for make-believe that makes theatre our most searingly realistic art form.

My argument is that Shakespeare’s works hold our attention because they are fundamentally incomplete and unstable: they need us, in all our idiosyncratic diversity and with the perspective of our post-Shakespearean world, to make sense. This Shakespeare isn’t full of prophetic wisdom and inspiring quotations about tolerance and the human condition, expressed in beautiful, if sometimes rather wordy, poetry. Nope. His works are more questioning, more intrinsically ambiguous. You don’t need a book to explain Shakespeare: rather, this book tries to unexplain and to let the works speak their own troubled, unresolved understanding of their issues and characters.

Above all I want to emphasise Shakespeare’s silences, inconsistencies, and the sheer, permissive energy of what I call his ‘gappiness’. Shakespeare’s plays are incomplete, woven of what’s said and what’s unsaid, with holes in between. From what characters look like to how they act at particular moments, this is a drama made of gaps, airholes giving life to our interpretative engagement. By asking some fundamental questions about twenty of Shakespeare’s plays, This Is Shakespeare opens up space for readers. I don’t have a grand theory of Shakespeare to inculcate, still less do I think I have access to what Shakespeare meant. (Confession: I don’t really care what he might have meant, and nor should you.) I want us to explore instead the ways in which Shakespeare’s plays are spacious texts to think with - about agency, friendship, sex, politics, suffering, laughter, and about art itself.