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of lust, love, and desire, especially inHamlet, Coriolanus, and the late romances. The introduction claims that the book “emphasizes differences, as well as commonalities, between Shakespeare’s treatment of sexual desire and romantic love that builds toward marriage, and our own assumptions about these matters” (1). It accomplishes this goal only implicitly; while the book clearly and thoroughly analyzes Neoplatonic discourses and the love/lust binary in Shakespeare’s work, it focuses narrowly on this one discourse and does not engage in depth with modern cultural productions that might illustrate our own culture’s attitudes (one exception is brief readings of recent stage and film productions of Shakespeare’s plays in chapters 7 and 8). This book also does not take into account queer theory’s contributions to a fuller picture of attitudes toward love, sex, and desire in early modern England and in Shakespeare’s work, and it does not add to scholarship in queer theory or sexuality studies. Its methods are instead anchored in close reading and traditional historicism. It is not likely to contain new information for Shakespeare scholars or scholars of queer and sexuality studies. Even if this book does not accomplish what it claims in its introduction, it has a number of strengths, including the immense depth and scope with which it analyzes Shakespeare’s language of love and lust. It is written in a straightforward style and is free of jargon, making it approachable and accessible for non-experts and students. For example, chapter 7, which analyzes same-sex relationships and how they influence cross-sex relationships in the plays, articulates the complexities of these dynamics through easy-to-follow close readings. Hall argues in this chapter that some same-sex relationships challenge hetero-marital closure or are sacrificed for this closure, yet others, such as Antonio and Bassanio’s homoerotic bond in The Merchant of Venice, remain compatible with marriage. Here, Hall offers a clear, accessible explanation for a concept that is often difficult for a twenty-first-century undergraduate audience to grasp: that same-sex and cross-sex relations are not always mutually exclusive in Shakespeare. This clarity of style and argument remains a positive central feature of the monograph.