Weaving coherent archetypal scripts rather than ornamental appoggiaturas in an attempt at essentialization, Shakespeare did not, however, launch metanarratives which impoverish the perspective on the world. His coded mythopoetic figures do not function as transcendental agency as they do in sacred history, but rather as batteries of condensed and codified meaning or as indices of a certain culture.

Intended for academic and general readers alike, this book finds in archetypes as operators or functions of discourse the explanation why Shakespeare has seemed to respond through time to as different approaches as psychological, phenomenological, deconstructionist, postcolonial, New Historicist or feminist perspectives.