Beginning Shakespeare introduces students to the study of Shakespeare and grounds their understanding of his work in theoretical discourses. It breaks down fears and preconceptions to offer students both a map of the current critical practices of others and a sense of the possibilities for developing their own. After an introductory survey of dominant approaches of the past, seven further chapters introduce students to all the major current critical approaches to Shakespeare, with separate chapters on psychoanalysis, New Historicism, Cultural Materialism, gender studies and queer theory, postcolonial criticism and performance criticism, as well as one which looks at the growing roles of biography, attribution studies, and textual studies. Each chapter also offers a list of suggested further reading and interactive exercises focusing on key facts and issues raised in the chapter. The way in which each chapter analyses the strengths and weaknesses of the perspective on which it focuses allows students a clear critical purchase on the respective approaches and enables them to make informed choices between them, thus suggesting ways of continuing to make meaning out of Shakespeare which are both theoretically informed and new. An invaluable introduction for anyone studying English at university, Beginning Shakespeare, by addressing what is primarily at stake in these various theoretical approaches and by mapping the territory, ultimately allows students to negotiate it for themselves