A Companion to Shakespeares Works, Volume III: The Comedies

This Companion to Shakespeare’s comedies contains original essays on every comedy from The Two Gentlemen of Verona to Twelfth Night . In addition, the volume features twelve essays 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. Introduction. 1. Shakespeare and the Traditions of English Stage Comedy: Janette Dillon (University of Nottingham). 2. Shakespeare’s Festive Comedies: François Laroque (University of Sorbonne Nouvelle–Paris III). 3. The Humor of It: Bodies, Fluids, and Social Discipline in Shakespearean Comedy: Gail Kern Paster (Director of the Folger Shakespeare Library). 4. Class X: Shakespeare, Class, and the Comedies: Peter Holbrook (University of Queensland). 5. The Social Relations of Shakespeare’s Comic Households: Mario DiGangi (Lehman College). 6. Shakespeare’s Crossdressing Comedies: Phyllis Rackin (Shakespeare Association of America). 7. The Homoerotics of Shakespeare’s Elizabethan Comedies: Julie Crawford (Columbia University). 8. Shakespearean Comedy and Material Life: Lena Cowen Orlin (University of Maryland). 9. Shakespeare’s Comic Geographies: Garrett A. Sullivan, Jr. (Pennsylvania State University). 10. Rhetoric and Comic Personation in Shakespeare’s Comedies: Lloyd Davis (University of Queensland). 11. Fat Knight, or What You Will: Unimitable Falstaff: Ian Frederick Moulton (Arizona State University. West). 12. Wooing and Winning (Or Not): Film/Shakespeare/Comedy and the Syntax of Genre: Barbara Hodgdon (Drake University). 13. The Two Gentlemen of Verona : Jeffrey Masten (Northwestern University). 14. “Fie, what a foolish duty call you this?” The Taming of the Shrew , Women’s Jest, and the Divided Audience: Pamela Allen Brown (University of Connecticut). 15. The Comedy of Errors and The Calumny of Apelles : An Exercise in Source Study: Richard Dutton (Lancaster University). 16. Love’s Labour’s Lost : John Michael Archer (University of New Hampshire). 17. A Midsummer Night’s Dream : Helen Hackett (University College London). 18. Rubbing at Whitewash: Intolerance in The Merchant of Venice : Marion Wynne–Davies (University of Dundee). 19. The Merry Wives of Windsor : Unhusbanding Desires in Windsor: Wendy Wall (Northwestern University). 20. Much Ado About Nothing : Alison Findlay (Lancaster University). 21. As You Like It :Juliet Dusinberre (Girton College, Cambridge). 22. Twelfth Night : “The Babbling Gossip of the Air”: Penny Gay (University of Sydney). Index

Jean E. Howard is William E. Ransford Professor of English at Columbia University and a past president of the Shakespeare Association of America. She is an editor of The Norton Shakespeare, and author of, among other works The Stage and Social Struggle in Early Modern England (1994) and, with Phyllis Rackin, of Engendering a Nation: A Feminist Account of Shakespeare′s English Histories (1997) . Richard Dutton is currently Professor of English at Ohio State University. He is author of Mastering the Revels: the Regulation and Censorship of Renaissance Drama (1991) and Licensing, Censorship and Authorship in Early Modern England:Buggeswords (2000), and editor of the Palgrave Literary Lives series.

"Whether for the student wishing for an overview of critical approaches or anxious to fill in the gaps in his Shakespearean culture, for those wishing to catch up on the diversity of literary theories, or for the inquisitive browser, this set of volumes assuredly charts the map of current criticism." Cahiers Elisabethains