Antonia Forest fans

Part of the Arden Shakespeare series, this fascinating study argues that although Shakespeare rarely wrote about London – none of his plays is set in the city of his own day – it played a central role in shaping his imagination: “The size, diversity, noise, smell, chaos, anarchy and sheer excitement of London can be felt in all that Shakespeare writes.” The exact date when the playwright moved to London is not known, but it’s clear that by 1592 he was living and working in the capital and would remain there for the next 20 years. The eight chapters (each on a separate play) explore the symbolic power of key locations, beginning in the west of the city and moving east. The first tackles Tyburn – the city’s place of execution where as many as 60,000 died – using London’s bloodiest site to frame his most violent play: Titus Andronicus. Later chapters move to Whitehall, then along the Strand, and finish at the Tower. It is an evocative journey that places Shakespeare’s plays in a revealing urban context.

In As You Like It, Shakespeare created one of his greatest and most complicated female roles. At a time when women were not allowed to act on stage, the role would have been taken by a young boy. But who? Actor, critic and academic Susan Hitch tries to find out

In doing so she looks at how Shakespeare wrote for his actors, the educational culture of Elizabethan England, and the brilliance of the makeup artists of Shakespeare's company. She talks to academic experts, to actor Adrian Lester who has played Rosalind, and to contemporary schoolboys and teachers about boys playing girls, and discovers how radically our ideas of intimacy and desire have changed in the last 400 years and how strong the power of theatre still is today.