To Analyze Delight: A Hedonist Criticism of Shakespeare

This book is an attempt to analyze why certain moments in Shakespear's play give more pleasure than others. Too often, according to the author, literary criticism filters out pleasure in the pursuit of meaning, reducing poems to their lowest common denominator. He would rather analyze delight by replacing the modern emphasis upon interpretation with a kind of critical hedonism--the study of drama as a "superior amusement."