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 Leonard Whiting. That vignette encapsulates the universality of Shakespeare and her approach –...