In his plays and poems, Shakespeare returns again and again to theatrical ideas and images. Shakespeare scholar Nick de Somogyi draws together all the set pieces such as 'All the world's a stage', Hamlet's encounters with the Players and Bottom's amateur dramatics along with less well-known but equally revealing passages. Interspersed throughout are insights into theatre practice from Shakespeare's contemporaries. The result is that we are almost able to smell the greasepaint issuing from the tiring house and hear the roar of the crowd foregathered in the Globe...