This is the first book to offer a comprehensive study of Shakespearean ballets and their unique interpretive possibilities.

Organised around adaptations of key plays, each chapter offers close study of the contrasting interpretations and styles of a number of choreographers and illuminates issues of gender, sexuality, race and politics.

While Shakespeare's work is recreated in diverse forms in theatres all over the world, ballet is potentially one of the most international and inclusive forms of theatrical expression, based in the fundamental expressive potential of the body. Since it moved into the avant-garde more than a century ago, it has been in the forefront of invention and experiment in the theatrical arts. But though ballet and Shakespeare together are prominent in the world of the creative arts of performance the hundreds of ballets which have been based on Shakespeare's work are relatively unconsidered in Shakespearean scholarship and criticism.

David Fuller considers a full range of Shakespeare's oeuvre as it has been recreated in this form, with studies of some of his most famous works, including The Taming of the Shrew, A Midsummer Night's Dream, the Sonnets, Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, The Winter's Tale and The Tempest. It discusses contrasting interpretations from the 1940s to the present by British, American and European choreographers, reading these as forms of creative criticism which reflect wider developments in society and in so doing show Shakespeare as perpetually contemporary.