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Biographical note
Helen Cooper is Professor of Medieval and Renaissance English at the University of Cambridge. She is the author of The English Romance in Time: Transforming Motifs from Geoffrey of Monmouth to the Death of ShakespeareCooper's book must surely take the prize for the most significant contribution to the appreciation of this drama since V. A. Kolve's work, <i>The Play Called Corpus Christi</i>. . . She has shown that far from being a "foreign country," the Middle Ages was a place with which Shakespeare was totally familiar in terms of the built environment in which he moved, the literary and dramatic conventions that he and his audience understood, and even the religious culture that had crossed the divide of the Reformation.
- Margaret Rogerson, Studies in the Age of Chaucer
Cooper's book is a timely one, and deserves to be a significant one, in reorienting perspectives to the important place of the medieval, visible and invisible, direct and intangible, in Shakespeare's mind . . . It covers a vast array of material with a swiftness of pace and ease of style that are sufficient to inform the under-graduate or interested layperson, without being laborious for the scholar . . . It will give Shakespeareans of all shades a fuller understanding of the world in which he lived and thought, and the ones he created.
- Joanna Bellis, Pembroke College, Cambridge, Marginalia
Arden Critical Companions make leading contemporary scholarship accessible and provide fresh insight to the student, scholar and theatre-goer. By putting Shakespeare's work into context, each volumes helps the reader develop a richer understanding of both individual plays and his work as whole.
General Editors: Professor Andrew Hadfield, University of Sussex and Professor Paul Hammond, University of Leeds.