Usefully – at least for the Australian Bardophile – Professor Karim-Cooper’s latest work is prefaced by a spruik from Adjoa Andoh. She is the English actress we know as heart-stopping Lady Danbury in Bridgerton. “…Dive in and your whole cultural landscape will be refreshed and reframed,” she writes, having first observed that minds will be blown by Karim-Cooper’s scholarly, accessible insight into “our greatest playwright”.

Most recently, Andoh limped across the Liverpool Playhouse stage as Richard III, and her Black presence – plus even a casual viewing of current British theatre, TV and film – speaks loudly of a shifting attitude to race in popular culture. And, by default, why this book is such a potent addition to the Shakespearean bookshelf.

Karim-Cooper – of Pakistani descent – is a passionate devotee of that bookshelf. She explains how a classroom screening of Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet electrified her young imagination, seeing in it Pakistani girls marrying the stranger of their parents’ choice rather than Karachi’s equivalent of...