This engaging book draws on all of Shakespeare's plays to show they can still be used as a guide to life.

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• Introduces beginning students and general readers to Shakespeare's plays by highlighting the connections between the issues addressed by the plays and those of our own time.
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• Focuses on the characters, situations and stories in Shakespeare which are still familiar today.
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• Shows how Shakespeare's plays illustrate some of life's most familiar stories - love and obsession, parents and children, sex and politics, suffering and revenge
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• Makes Shakespeare’s plays accessible to the widest possible audience.

Laurie Maguire is a Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford and a Lecturer in English at Oxford University. She is the author of Shakespearean Suspect Texts (1996) and co-editor of Textual Formations and Reformations (1998), among other publications.