William Shakespeare: Romeo and Juliet. Ed. Gordon McMullan (Norton Critical Editions).

• Ian Felce

In his introduction to this superb new edition of Romeo and Juliet, Gordon McMullan expresses a hope that readers will repeatedly come back to it over the course of their lives. ‘More fun than Julius Caesar and less gory than Macbeth’, he laments the fact that the play’s reputation for being accessible has meant that teenagers often read it at school never to return to it at university or afterwards. McMullan’s central thesis is that Romeo and Juliet is more complex than it is generally thought to be and that, like Hamlet, it rewards rereading at different stages of life. Indeed, he takes Frank Kermode’s statement that to suppose the play is simple ‘would be the most elementary mistake one could make concerning it’ as the central moral of this volume.