This book assembles in one volume the introductions Tony Tanner wrote for the Everyman Library seven-volume Shakespeare, first published between 1992 and 1996. In an era where hyper-professionalisation and specialisation (even more so in America than in the UK) discourage scholars from moving beyond their official fields, the spectacle of a brilliant critic of nineteenth-century British and American literature following in the footsteps of Johnson and Coleridge and Hazlitt and reflecting upon the Shakespearian corpus is a refreshing surprise. The nearest equivalent to Tanner's project would be Harold Bloom's Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (1998), which also addresses all the plays – but Tanner's meditations are more capacious, much less polemical, and in the end rather more humane than Bloom's. One is struck, first of all, by the testimony of the table of contents to the author's own preferences. This volume divides the plays by genre, and none of them is skimped, but the general introductions preceding the individual discussions of comedies and romances are much more detailed than those preceding the major tragedies, the histories, and the Greek and Roman plays. Essays on As You Like It, Twelfth Night, All's Well That Ends Well, Cymbeline, and The Winter's Tale are significantly longer than those on Hamlet and Othello (Tanner's wonderful account of Cymbeline runs to thirty-five pages). (Romeo and Juliet, which in Tanner's words, ‘fails of being a comedy by something under a minute’ (p. 92) is classified with the comedies.) Tanner's particular genius is for comedy and romance: he delights in the hints of everyday magic in the comedies, in the matrix of wonder, dream, and art that both transcends and reaffirms ‘natural magic’ in the romances. His prefaces could be thought of as offering an overview of Shakespeare's own Metamorphoses (and are exquisitely attentive to the playwright's recursive transformation of his dramatic preoccupations across the course of his career), but they celebrate a metamorphic universe where ‘all the changes take place inside’ (p. 14), where language itself is transfigured, and where there is abiding and productive tension between Shakespearian comedy's celebration of flexibility and adaptability and its competing desire for ‘continuity, fidelity, trust’, and stable identities (p. 63).