Bettina Boecker is Senior Lecturer at the University of Munich, Germany. She is also executive officer and research librarian at the Munich Shakespeare Library. She has published on a variety of early modern topics, but is particularly interested in the popular culture of the period and Shakespeare's afterlives.

Acknowledgements
Introduction
1. Shakespeare's Elizabethan Audience in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Shakespeare Criticism
2. 'No man of genius ever wrote for the mob': Shakespeare's Elizabethan Audience and Romantic Shakespeare Criticism
3. Enter the Groundlings
4. Childish and Primitive: Shakespeare's Elizabethan
5. The Rediscovery of the Judicious Few
6. Neo-Elizabethanism
7. Shakespeare's Elizabethan Audience in the Second Half of the Twentieth Century
Appendix: The Grocer's Wife
Bibliography
Index

Comparatively little is known about Shakespeare's first audiences. This study argues that the Elizabethan audience is an essential part of Shakespeare as a site of cultural meaning, and that the way criticism thinks of early modern theatregoers is directly related to the way it thinks of, and uses, the Bard himself.