One of the most thorough and interesting books of Shakespeare criticism that I've encountered is Marjorie Garber's Shakespeare After All (2004). It is thorough in many ways, but I'm thinking of two specifically today: The first is that she covers all the plays fairly, even those that are often undervalued, which makes the book very useful both as a reference and as a place from which to learn. Second, she does a splendid job of incorporating the positions and ideas of leading critics from both the past and present and interspersing them with brilliant original observations of her own. Here is one of the latter. In her must-read essay on The Winter's Tale, Garber points out the following: "Like a number of other Shakespeare plays, The Winter's Tale begins with a conversation that seems to take place half offstage and half on, so that the audience is invited to feel itself a privileged spectator, in effect eavesdropping on a private conversation before the public spectacle is put on show. This is a clever dramaturgical device, drawing us into the action and allowing us to consider the immediately succeeding episode, in this case the second half of the first scene, with a more careful and critical eye." It so happens that both King Lear and Antony and Cleopatra, the next two plays in my lecture series, also begin with the use of this technique, and her description of it made me consider both opening scenes from a new angle. I think the best thing that I can do to say thanks is to highly recommend her book.