A new book on Shakespeare and material culture – specifically textile culture – by Hester Lees-Jeffries (University Associate Professor) will be published by Oxford University Press on 11 November.  Textile Shakespeare takes as its starting point the centrality of cloth to the culture and economy of early modern England, as it explores what it terms Shakespeare’s textile imagination. It discusses all of Shakespeare’s works, as well as plays and poems by many of his contemporaries (especially Thomas Middleton, Thomas Dekker, and Ben Jonson). It also draws on the collections and archives of the Royal Shakespeare Company, the National Theatre, Shakespeare’s Globe, and the Victoria and Albert Museum; it includes close encounters with sixteenth-century shoes in Cambridge’s Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, and with the last known surviving dress of Queen Elizabeth I, at Hampton Court. Its nine chapters (from ‘Stuff’ to ‘Ruff’, via ‘Linen’, ‘Leather/Wool’, ‘Silk’, ‘Inky Cloak’, ‘Sew’, ‘Cut’, and ‘Fold’) are extensively illustrated with colour plates as well as black and white images. Textile Shakespeare is about theatrical costume, on Shakespeare’s stage and in the modern theatre, but it is also about cloth and clothing as forms of knowledge, status, and wealth for early modern people, and how these things are manifested in rich, compelling detail in the works of Shakespeare and his contemporaries.