The titles of these sixteen essays alone indicate the size and range of an area of study that elides ‘Shakespeare’ and ‘Language’, a subject that here includes style, speech, sound and sex. As the foremost Shakespeare publication, produced annually since 1948, Shakespeare Survey has been well placed to reflect trends and developments in academic approaches to Shakespeare and to language and this collection of essays, covering the period 1964 to 1997, considers the characteristics, excitement and unique qualities of Shakespeare's language, the relationship between language and event, and the social, theatrical and literary function of language.

The new introduction, by Jonathan Hope, explicates the differences between Shakespeare's language and our own, provides a theoretical and contextual framework for the pieces that follow, and makes transparent an aspect of Shakespeare's craft (and the critical response to it) that has frequently been opaque.