This four-volume Companion to Shakespeare's Works, compiled as a single entity, offers a uniquely comprehensive snapshot of current Shakespeare criticism. Brings together new essays from a mixture of younger and more established scholars from around the world - Australia, Canada, France, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Examines each of Shakespeare's plays and major poems, using all the resources of contemporary criticism, from performance studies to feminist, historicist, and textual analysis. Volumes are organized in relation to generic categories: namely the histories, the tragedies, the romantic comedies, and the late plays, problem plays and poems. Each volume contains individual essays on all texts in the relevant category, as well as more general essays looking at critical issues and approaches more widely relevant to the genre. Offers a provocative roadmap to Shakespeare studies at the dawning of the twenty-first century. This companion to Shakespeare's comedies contains original essays on every comedy from The Two Gentlemen of Verona to Twelfth Night as well as twelve additional articles on such topics as the humoral body in Shakespearean comedy, Shakespeare's comedies on film, Shakespeare's relation to other comic writers of his time, Shakespeare's cross-dressing comedies, and the geographies of Shakespearean comedy.

This four-volume Companion to Shakespeare's Works, compiled as a single entity, offers a uniquely comprehensive snapshot of current Shakespeare criticism.* Brings together new essays from a mixture of younger and more established scholars from around the world - Australia, Canada, France, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States.* Examines each of Shakespeare's plays and major poems, using all the resources of contemporary criticism, from performance studies to feminist, historicist, and textual analysis.* Volumes are organized in relation to generic categories: namely the histories, the tragedies, the romantic comedies, and the late plays, problem plays and poems.* Each volume contains individual essays on all texts in the relevant category, as well as more general essays looking at critical issues and approaches more widely relevant to the genre.* Offers a provocative roadmap to Shakespeare studies at the dawning of the twenty-first century.This companion to Shakespeare's comedies contains original essays on every comedy from The Two Gentlemen of Verona to Twelfth Night as well as twelve additional articles on such topics as the humoral body in Shakespearean comedy, Shakespeare's comedies on film, Shakespeare's relation to other comic writers of his time, Shakespeare's cross-dressing comedies, and the geographies of Shakespearean comedy.

Notes on Contributors viiIntroduction 11 Shakespeare and the Traditions of English Stage Comedy 4Janette Dillon2 Shakespeare's Festive Comedies 23Francois Laroque3 The Humour of It: Bodies, Fluids and Social Discipline in Shakespearean Comedy 47Gail Kern Paster4 Class X: Shakespeare, Class, and the Comedies 67Peter Holbrook5 The Social Relations of Shakespeare's Comic Households 90Mario DiGangi6 Shakespear's Crossdressing Comedies 114Phyllis Rackin7 The Homoerotics of Shakespear's Elizabethan Comedies 137Julie Crawford8 Shakespearean Comedy and Material Life 159Lena Cowen Orlin9 Shakespeare's Comic Geographies 182Garett A. Sullivan, Jr.10 Rhetoric and Comic Personation in Shakespeare's Comedies 200Lloyd Davis11 Fat Knight, or What You Will: Unimitable Falstaff 223Ian Fredrick Moulton12 Wooing and Winning (Or Not): Film/Shakespeare/Comedy and the Syntax of Genre 243Barbare Hodgdon13 The Two Gentlemen of Verona 266Jeffery Masten14 "Fie, what a foolish duty call you this?" The Taming of the Shrew, Women's Jest, and the Divided Audience 289Pamela Allen Brown15 The Comedy of Errors and The Calumny of Apelles: An Exercise in Source Study 307Richard Dutton16 Love's Labour's Lost 320John Michael Archer17 A Midsummer Night's Dream 338Helen Hackett18 Rubbing at Whitewash: Intolerance in The Merchant of Venice 358Merion Wynne-Davis19 The Merry Wives of Windsor: Unhusbanding Desires in Windsor 376Wendy Wall20 Much Ado About Nothing 393Alison Findlay21 As You Like It 411Juliet Dusinberre22 Twelfth Night: "The Babbling Gossip of the Air" 429Penny GayIndex 44