I continue to get the feeling that we're still quite a long way from fully understanding Shakespeare's work. Having spent a fair bit of time recently with the splendid Shakespeare: An Anthology of Criticism and Theory: 1945-2000 (Russ McDonald, editor), and taking in its overview of the trends and highlights of the last fifty years of Shakespeare scholarship, I was most impressed at how he still manages to stay ahead of everyone. The fact that one writer could inspire so many different ideas, so many schools of thought, for 400 years- it's simply staggering. And although I was impressed by the variety of thought, I'm not sure that the book shows that many strides have been made toward understanding either the size of Shakespeare's accomplishment or the sophistication of his themes and techniques. Furthermore, many important plays and poems are practically not discussed at all, in favour of the more familiar ones, those we would find in high school programs. That's fair enough I suppose, but I do hope that some progress is made on all the fronts mentioned above in the fifty years to follow. To sum up: I do recommend the book, but Shakespeare, for the most part, remains an undiscovered country.