Shakespeare's use of his classical sources, and his relationships to classical authors, have attracted a great deal of critical attention in recent years, with a wealth of scholarship focusing variously on his use of Ovid, Seneca, Plutarch and Greek tragedians. In their introduction to this substantial and wide-ranging volume, Sean Keilen and Nick Moschovakis explain that theirs is a rather different perspective, and that this study is concerned not only with Shakespeare's use of the ancient classics (as the title might suggest) but also with the extent to which Shakespeare is himself a classic, 'an artwork valued among the best of its era' (1). The volume consciously combines these interrelated senses of the 'classic', asking 'how important is this ancient inheritance to whatever qualities still make Shakespeare. .. arguably the "classic" of modern world literature and drama?' and, more generally, 'Can the ancient classics help us to make sense of Shakespeare as a classic of the present?' (2). To this end, the volume comprises 20 contributions, split across four sections, and made up of traditional interpretive analyses and arguments, and what the editors term 'thought-pieces on the use of "the classical" as a historical and pedagogical category' (2), as well as an enlivening series of short pieces on how Shakespeare and the classics might be taught in the modern classroom. Chapter 1, by Michael Ursell and Melissa Yinger, traces the books Shakespeare was likely to have known, and his methods of reading, recollecting and reworking these sources. The authors posit Shakespeare as a 'conflicted reader of the classics' (9), simultaneously wanting to make use of, and move beyond, ancient sources and early modern intertexts (e.g. Ovid's Metamorphoses and Arthur Golding's translation). This is followed by a chapter on Shakespeare's schooling and the 'emphatically time-bound' (14) nature of education as it is represented in his works (William P. Weaver). Chapter 3 (Liz Oakley-Brown) focuses on some early modern translations with which Shakespeare might have been most familiar, and how these translations of Ovid, Homer and Apuleius could have crucially influenced works such as Venus and Adonis, A Midsummer Night's Dream and Troilus and Cressida. In Chapter 4, 'Comedy and Tragedy', Tanya Pollard