Reading Room - Dramatic Techniques & Forms

Lawrence Danson, Shakespeare's Dramatic Genres (2000) – excellent introduction to comedy, tragedy, history and Shakespeare's mixing of genres

Madeleine Doran, Endeavors of Art: A Study of Form in Elizabethan Drama (1954) – learned, wide-ranging, full of sense

Harley Granville-Barker, Prefaces to Shakespeare (2 vols, 1946-7) – exemplary readings of ten major plays by one of the early twentieth century's greatest men of the theatre

John Meagher, Shakespeare's Shakespeare: How the Plays were Made (2000) – much under-rated study of Shakespeare's dramaturgy

Anne Righter, Shakespeare and the Idea of the Play (1962) – pioneering study of theatrical self-consciousness

Tiffany Stern, Making Shakespeare: from Stage to Page (2004) – very useful introduction to practical processes

There are hundreds more fine books on Shakespeare, but anyone who reads The RSC Shakespeare: Complete Works from cover to cover and then devours a reasonable proportion of the above will have earned the right to consider themselves an exceptionally highly informed Shakespearean.