The very scope of Ford’s book guarantees that most readers will, at various points, be unfamiliar with the play or novel being analyzed. For many readers who are not Shakespeareans, for instance, Pericles is a distant memory; Henry VIII, the authorship of which is open to debate, may be even more remote. Yet these two plays, along with the more familiar Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Tempest and King Lear, carry the weight of Ford’s examination of the incest theme in Shakespeare’s oeuvre. The breadth of Ford’s representative authors and works suggests the ubiquity of the incest theme in literature, as do the introductory chapters, which provide a useful survey of the history and theory of father/daughter incest.