Devouring Time is a diverse study of Shakespearean films and how nostalgia plays a part in their inception, execution and reception. Additionally, Sheppard shows how nostalgia in Shakespeare films reflects contemporary cultural fantasies and anxieties. With such a large and diverse collection of theoretical approaches and topics, fastidious organization ensured this monograph's success. The book's thirteen chapters, which could all work quite well as stand-alone articles, are united by a cultural–materialist mission to locate and theorize nostalgia in Shakespeare, in Shakespearean films and in the contemporary world. The chapters are further organized into four sections and the longer chapters include helpful subheadings.

Chapter 1 sets the ground rules and theoretical foundations for the book, a typical and vital move in the philosophically turbulent waters of adaptation studies. Sheppard goes on to account for the relative spike in Shakespearean films since 1989. Chapter 2 uses an expansive set of criteria, broken up into subheadings, to discuss how realism in Shakespearean films reveals directorial intention either to make Shakespeare accessible for movie-goers or to offer their own commentary on the play by experimentally adding their own touches. Chapter 3 focuses on how Shakespearean films’ opening moments, when the director effectively announces how their adaptation will variously stick to or depart from any number of audience expectations, generally take four specific forms that all have nostalgic implications. Chapter 4 looks at depictions of theatre inserted into Shakespearean films; and Chapter 5, following the premise that death rituals in Shakespeare's plays reflect his culture's nostalgic anxieties over the religious upheavals of his time, finds that death rituals depicted in Shakespearean adaptations demonstrate our own cultural anxieties.

Chapters 6 and 7 masterfully examine the application of Gothic and grotesque motifs in Shakespearean films. Chapter 8 reveals a cultural tug of war regarding how cinematic versions of As You Like It and Twelfth Night apply cross-dressing to variously uphold or challenge gender norms. Chapter 9 explores political nostalgia in Kenneth Branagh's Henry V and Ralph Fiennes's Coriolanus, while Chapter 10 examines how Branagh and Joss Whedon handle Shakespeare's Act III scene ii song, ‘Sigh No More Ladies’, in Much Ado about Nothing. It increasingly seems the consensus that Shakespeare's songs, which tend to suspend rather than further dramatic action, are highly resistant to cinematic adaptation; thus what filmmakers do with the songs helps us to understand the possibilities and limitations of cinematic adaptation of Shakespeare. Sheppard assesses the various levels of what Robert Stam calls ‘aesthetic mainstreaming’ that is affected through cinematic adaptation of ‘Sigh No More Ladies’ in the two films, effectively demonstrating how adaptation choices are influenced by, and in turn contribute to, contemporary culture. Chapter 11 discusses Trevor Nunn's use of intercutting and other cinematic techniques to enhance Shakespeare's interplay of plot and subplot in Twelfth Night. Chapter 12 is a study of nostalgic use of inserted music in Hoffman's William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream and Branagh's Love's Labour's Lost. Chapter 13 looks at cinematic adaptations of The Tempest, focusing on Taymor's 2010 Tempest and Greenaway's 1991 Prospero's Books, drawing similar conclusions to those in Chapter 10 regarding ‘aesthetic mainstreaming’, here focusing on the postcolonial implications of adaptation instead of gender.

Devouring Time’s attention to detail, breadth of films and plays covered, and attentiveness to cinematic methods in addition to literary ones add important perspective to the field. Fuelled by debates in the field, both old and new, Sheppard's forward-thinking and productive book will be useful to undergraduate English, drama and film majors, but its mostly likely readership is graduate and postgraduate scholars of Shakespeare, film and cultural studies. For students and scholars of theatre and performance studies, it is important to mention that, strictly speaking, this book is about Shakespeare on film, but Chapter 4 offers some fascinating commentary on how Shakespeare films frequently insert depictions of the theatrical, as in the opening to Olivier's Henry V. By offering such an impressive variety of approaches to the book's unifying topic, Devouring Time demonstrates how fundamental nostalgia is to cultural creation and re-creation.