"Joyce, T.S. Eliot, Auden, Beckett"

The four writers featured in this volume represent different aspects of the modernist response to Shakespeare. James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden and Samuel Beckett were all exceptionally learned and their art takes a delight in difficulty. But the scurrility, irreverence and playfulness they found in Shakespeare are essential features of what they themselves were to do with him. They were particularly drawn to Shakespeare's outcasts, and to the experiences of marginality, estrangement, indigence and craziness. In return they have helped to shape the ways in which we now read Shakespeare himself.