'This is a free-spirited book - and in this sense, it practises the individualism that it preaches - in its inventive interweaving of its discussion of Shakespeare with numerous exponents and inflectors of liberal/individualist thought, including Montaigne, Blake, Coleridge, William Hazlitt, Frederick James Furnivall, John Stuart Mill, A. C. Bradley, André Gide, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. One of the undoubted strengths of this approach is the way it enables Holbrook to embark on a number of different excursions into his topic, with each one frequently adding a fresh angle, implication, or alignment.' Cahiers Élisabéthains