Reading Room - Sources and Literary/Dramatic Contexts

T. W. Baldwin, William Shakspere's Small Latine and Lesse Greeke (2 vols, 1944) – magisterial account of the Elizabethan grammar school curriculum and how it shaped Shakespeare's mind, now freely available online ( http://durer.press.uiuc.edu/baldwin/)

Jonathan Bate, Shakespeare and Ovid (1993) – his reading of his favourite classical poet

Stuart Gillespie, Shakespeare's Books (2001) – comprehensive A-Z guide to his reading

Richard Lanham, The Motives of Eloquence: Literary Rhetoric in the Renaissance (1976) – dazzling study of Renaissance rhetorical formations of the self, which deserves to be as well-known as the work of Greenblatt and others, but is not

Peter Mack, Shakespeare, Montaigne and Renaissance Ethical Reading (forthcoming, 2008) – groundbreaking account of how Shakespeare read

Robert Miola, Shakespeare's Reading (2000) – sound introduction to what Shakespeare read

Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare , edited by Geoffrey Bullough (8 vols, 1957-75) – comprehensive collection of raw materials

Martin Wiggins, Shakespeare and the Drama of his Time (2000) – excellent placing of Shakespeare in the context of the plays of his contemporaries

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.