In the subtlety of its critical argument and the richness and scope of the learning that informs it, Shakespeare’s Living Art is by any standards a distinguished work of literary scholarship; sadly, those qualities are also the measure of our loss in Rosalie Colie’s death shortly after she had completed this book. Its concern is with Shakespeare’s treatment of genres and literary conventions, with the ways in which he ‘used, misused, criticized, recreated, and sometimes revolutionized the received topics and devices, large and small, of his artful craft’. Far from reducing the complexity of Shakespeare’s work by merely identifying the conventional, this approach finds that Shakespeare’s ‘interest in the traditional aspects of his art lay precisely in their problematical nature, not in their stereotypical force’, and that what is ‘problematical’ in matters of form and style has to do also with the problems of living that are dramatised.

From this point of view we are invited to consider, for instance, the competing stylistic roles that are assumed and discarded in Love's Labour's Lost, the new dramatic reality that is given to conventional metaphors from the sonnet tradition in Romeo and Juliet and Othello, and the reassessments of pastoralism that underlie As You Like It, King Lear and the last plays.