‘Shakespeare is a dead issue’ decides T. J. B. Spencer, and the words will alarm alike the incautious critic and the indolent reviewer. The remark is elegaic, however, rather than contentious—a threnody for the lost spirit of detraction in writing about Shakespeare. The lecture does more than remind us by frequent and (literally) far-fetched quotation that ‘the discussion of Shakespeare has been, in the past, far more defensive than is commonly supposed’: we are reminded, forcefully, that the history of Shakespeare criticism is more than ‘an account of the books written about him’, or ‘a record of progress’, or ‘a chronicle of opinion’, that indeed ‘It also has connections with literature, with the production of poetry’.