Shakespeare: A Playgoer's and Reader's Guide edited by Stanley Wells and Michael Dobson

Older readers may recall a series of booklets in the 1970s and ‘80s called The Bluffer's Guide To… enabling you to grasp just enough information and insight into jazz, opera, theatre, philosophy, to be able to hold an intelligent conversation about it.

While the OUP's Shakespeare: A Playgoer's and Reader's Guide is a little too high-minded to fall into the ‘bluffer’ category, its accessibility and reader-friendly layout suggests the publishers were chasing down a format that would appeal equally to scholars and theatregoers.

Have they succeeded? Definitely in terms of the content, provided by Stanley Wells and Michael Dobson, arguably the UK's two foremost Shakespeare scholars, neither of whom ever lets their forensic knowledge obscure the need to be clear and readable. They worked together on the weightier Complete Oxford Shakespeare for OUP and indeed much of its content is recycled here.