Structuring a critical review of this kind satisfactorily is an almost impossible task. Whatever system the reviewer adopts will necessarily fail to bring together work that may be usefully juxtaposed on one ground or another; and constraints of length, together with the sheer bulk of material to be covered, are such that the space for cross-reference is limited. This year I have decided to drop generic headings in order to be able to look at work that seems to group usefully around particular issues or critical approaches. This doesn't mean, however, that none of the discussion is grouped by dramatic genre. Much of it still is. I have simply tried to overcome the potential rigidity of any set of categories by allowing them to overlap.

The first category that seems to emerge out of the work I read this year turns out, with appropriate irony for the demands of a review of this kind, to be what might broadly be termed 'universality', and several important studies address this issue. Michael Bristol's Big-time Shakespeare has two related concerns: the commodification of 'Shakespeare' within the culture industry and the posthumous life of the artwork in 'great time'.