Poor Naked Wretches: Shakespeare’s Working People
STEPHEN UNWIN
(REAKTION BOOKS, 352 PP, £20)
Tablet bookshop price £18 • tel 020 7799 4064

Stephen Unwin has been directing Shakespeare’s plays, along with many other plays and operas, for 40 years, beginning, with notable undergraduate distinction, at Cambridge. His Shakespeare productions for English Touring Theatre, which he ran for 15 years from 1993, were straightforward, economical – they had to be, moving to a new provincial theatre every week though several reached London – and gripping, clearly delivered and uncluttered by “concepts” imposed on the texts. It is good to remember that they will have been thousands of children’s first encounters with Shakespeare in the theatre.