With his emphasis on mono- and multilingual puns and the antithetical meaning of words, Freud invented modern close reading in The Interpretation of Dreams. William Empson’s seventh type of ambiguity followed Freud’s suit in analyzing the English canon. Starting in the 1970s, feminists and Shakespearean feminists challenged many of the masculinist assumptions of male close reading and of classical psychoanalysis (like penis envy and the hegemony of the phallus). In addition to deconstructing misogyny, these critics celebrated tragic heroines like Cleopatra and the women in Shakespeare’s romances who redeem wayward fathers and husbands. The advent of the New Historicism in the 1980s did much to push feminist psychoanalysis aside. But psychoanalytic criticism of Shakespeare is undergoing a renaissance. The last section of the Introduction outlines the structure of the volume. The five chapters in Part I, “Shakespeare and Psychoanalysis,” look at the various ways in which the works of Shakespeare proved foundational to the development of psychoanalytic theory and method, starting with Freud. The five chapters in Part II, “Psychoanalysis and Shakespeare,” undertake psychoanalytic readings of Shakespearean texts. Between them, the ten chapters explore the unique role Shakespeare plays in psychoanalytic reading as both a theory and a practice.