In Shakespearean Narrative, Rawdon Wilson explores the variety and purposes of narrative in Shakespeare's plays. He does this by placing Shakespeare's use of narrative within a context of Renaissance narrative theory and practice, often citing analogous strategies from such other writers as Spenser and Cervantes, and exploring in depth the fruitfulness of contemporary narrative theory to an understanding of Shakespeare's practice.

Thus Shakespearean Narrative undertakes a double task: it tries to understand Shakespeare's narrative strategies, which has never been done before in any comparable depth, and it also attempts to test the usefulness of contemporary narrative theory.

The book also relates Shakespeare's understanding of the narrative in the plays to the brilliant narrative poems that he wrote in the early 1590s. It also examines the narrative conventions that are used in the embedded, or inset, narratives in the plays. Particular attention is paid to the way Shakespeare creates fictional entities, such as worlds and characters, in the plays. A great deal of emphasis is placed on Shakespeare's innovative transformations of traditional narrative conventions.