Romeo and Juliet

Hester Lees-Jeffries has been teaching Shakespeare and early modern literature at the University of Cambridge for more than twenty years, and also has extensive experience working with secondary school teachers. She is the author of two books, England's Helicon (2007) and Shakespeare and Memory (2013), and many articles and essays on Shakespeare and his contemporaries; she is particularly interested in performance and in visual and material culture. She is a member of the editorial board of Shakespeare Survey and the advisory board of Cambridge Shakespeare Editions. Since 2018, she has written a daily #SlowShakespeare blog, reading a single play over many months and tweeting @starcrossed2018.

'Sometimes, Romeo and Juliet's very familiarity makes it surprisingly difficult to read, to teach, and to perform. Hester Lees-Jeffries' wonderful introduction refreshes its lyric and emotional possibilities. She combines empathy with analysis, uncovering a play that is at once deeply rooted in Elizabethan poetry and in the ongoing psychology of ideas about love, youth, and tragedy. I felt she was giving us this most famous of plays anew.' Emma Smith, University of Oxford

• Introduction; Help and Advice; Note on the Text; List of Characters; The Play; Supplementary Notes; Note on Textual Analysis; Textual Analysis; Reading List.