The aim of this module is to read Shakespeare’s plays in company with the works of other Renaissance and Eighteenth-Century writers, and to take a comparative approach to reading and interpreting his works from theatrical and cultural perspectives, both within and beyond his own time. Attention will be paid to Shakespeare’s contemporaries, such as Marlowe, Jonson and Milton, as well as to his Restoration and eighteenth-century adapters and ‘improvers’, such as Colley Cibber and David Garrick.