This book comprises ten essays on Shakespearean drama the majority of which focus on the problem of language and more particularly on issues pertaining to names and their meanings. Four of these essays deal specifically with Romeo and Juliet and examine the work in different sets of terms as a reply to the aspersions against Shakespeare contained in Greenes Groatsworth of Wit as a representative site for a kind of archaeology of meaning as an experiment in the poetics of identity and as a meditation on the interrelation between rival conceptions of time. Other works subjected to extended analyses in independent essays are Richard II Julius Caesar and Macbeth all of which are interpreted as tragedies of language in which the paradoxes inherent in names and naming are enacted in the personal dilemmas of the protagonists.