The edition opens with a long general introduction that sets the plays among the conditions which produced them. It begins with the thinness of the biographical record, Greene's sneer at an upstart player and Chettle's handsome retraction, and with the standing of a playwright as artisan rather than man of letters; then with the accidents of transmission, scripts owned outright by the company, half of them reaching print in garbled quartos, the rest gathered by Heminge and Condell in 1623.

From there it follows the reputation, from parity with Jonson and Fletcher through Dryden's praise to Johnson's preface of 1765, which rescued Shakespeare from the charge of untutored genius. Later sections take up the language and the loosening of the blank-verse line from end-stopped speech toward enjambment and feminine endings, the working of the imagery, the playhouse, and the genres, including late romances that verge on tragicomedy.