Michael Macrone. Brush up Your Shakespeare! (1991)

     Michael Macrone. Brush up Your Shakespeare! (1991) If you like compilations of odd facts, you’ll like this book, even if Shakespeare’s not your favourite playwright. It’s a dictionary of Shakespeare quotes. Macrone gives you the speech, the context, original meanings of words, how we’ve misunderstood or misappropriated Shakespeare’s words, and occasionally puns or other witticisms. He also reminds Shakespeare and theatre lovers why they keep returning to this most archaic of story-telling modes. There are a few typos of the kind that spell-checking software misses, but they don’t detract from the score: *** (2012)

Update 20230621: Reread this recently, enjoyed it perhaps even more than the first time. Made me go back to the scripts, read most of Richard III.