Book excerpt: These essays offer fresh ideas about Shakespeare. Everett argues that patterns in the major tragedies are drawn from the most common human experiences, and that Shakespeare used his great public settings to suggest myths of the personal life. The first essay "Growing," proposes a new reading that recovers an older forgotten view of the place of the young within the social order. Other essays exemplify a wide range of approaches to Shakespeare's tragic texts, including a reading of Romeo and Juliet that presents the Nurse as a key to Shakepeare's tragic conception, and an essay on the "inaction" of Troilus and Cressida that brings out the extraordinary originality of this unclassifiable play. In addition, the book provides ancillary studies of Hamlet and Othello, together with new approaches to the texts which show how these plays manifest their meanings, even in the smallest details of word and phrase.