For this updated critical edition of Romeo and Juliet, Hester Lees-Jeffries has written a completely new introduction. It draws on recent research in theatre to set Romeo and Juliet in its mid-1590s context, making connections with other plays by Shakespeare and other literature of the period, as well as with the social and cultural contexts of the day, with discussions of London and Italy, dancing and duelling, marriage, gender and sexuality. It includes detailed discussion of the play in performance from the Restoration to the present day, with a particular focus on film (including global cinema), music and dance, and also explores other adaptations and afterlives, including young-adult fiction. The edition retains the commentary and Textual Analysis of the previous editor, G. Blakemore Evans; the Textual Analysis is prefaced with a short note contextualising its conclusions in the light of more recent research.

Hamlet's father's Ghost asks his son to 'Remember me!', but how did people remember around 1600? And how do we remember now? Shakespeare and Memory brings together classical and early modern sources, theatre history, performance, material culture, and cognitive psychology and neuroscience in order to explore ideas about memory in Shakespeare's plays and poems. It argues that, when Shakespeare was writing, ideas about memory were undergoing a kind of crisis, as both the technologies of memory (print, the theatre itself) and the belief structures underpinning ideas about memory underwent rapid change. And it suggests that this crisis might be mirrored in our own time, when, despite all the increasing gadgetry at our disposal, memory can still be recovered, falsified, corrupted, or wiped: only we ourselves can remember, but the workings of memory remain mysterious. Shakespeare and Memory draws on works from all stages of Shakespeare's career, with a particular focus on Hamlet, the Sonnets, Twelfth Night, and The Winter's Tale. It considers some little things: what's Hamlet writing on? And why does Orsino think he smells violets? And it asks some big questions: how should the dead be remembered? What's the relationship between memory and identity? And is it art, above all, that enables love and beauty, memory and identity, to endure in the face of loss, time, and death?