This is an excellent collection of seven essays on Shakespeare, but whether they challenge “many of the current trends in Shakespeare studies,” as the blurb states, is open to question. Sokol's introduction claims much more unity of purpose than we actually find, although there is a strong emphasis throughout on Melanie Klein (who actually, in the Index, has a few more references than Freud). There is a certain danger in the psychoanalytic approach to Shakespeare because there is no basis for believing that psychoanalytic assumptions necessarily yield better results than nonpsychoanalytic ones. Thus, although Sokol's own long essay on The Tempest presents itself as a Kleinian reading, it nevertheless goes over ideas that are fairly familiar in the literary criticism of the play. The Kleinian conceptual language does not stir up as much original insight as Sokol thinks.