"Indispensable to all academic collections...will give students, scholars, and general readers a new context in which to understand the emergence of early-modern literary culture."--Choice

"Invaluable...In the pages of this volume, the voices of [Shakespeare's] contemporaries make it abundantly clear that his verbal mastery was no accident."--The Providence Journal

"Brian Vickers has performed an important service for scholars of the English Renaissance by providing a superb anthology of literary critical texts. The introductory materials and the notes to each selection readily demonstrate Vickers's precise and authoritative scholarship."--Sixteenth Century Journal

"[It] may well become the standard reference collection."--Alastair Fowler, Times Literary Supplement

"Vickers is still one of the liveliest of grand old men of Shakespeare scholarship.... The book is now available in paperback and would be excellent for college courses in criticism."--Bibliothèque d'Humanisme et Renaissance