This volume provides a simple and handy index to all aspects of Shakespearian lore over four centuries. As the autjor himself explains, "It is a handbook not only to Shakespeare’s life and works, to his friends and acquaintances, to his poems and plays and their characters, but also to Elizabethan-Jacobean theatre, the other dramatists who wrote for it, their most important plays and the companies that performed them, and to the history up to the present day of Shakespeare’s work both on the stage and in the study, to his printers and publishers, players and producers, editors and adapters, scholars and critics."