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 the diversity of literary theories, or for the inquisitive browser, this set of volumes assuredly charts the map of current criticism.

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

2 Shakespeare's Festive Comedies

  Francois I.aroque

  The Humor of It: Bodies, Fluids, and Social Discipline in

  Shakespearean Comedy

  Gail Kern Paster

4 Class X: Shakespeare, Class, and the Comedies

  Peter Holbrook

5 The Social Relations of Shakespeare's Comic Households

  Mario DiGangi

6 Shakespeare's Crossdressing Comedies

  Phyllis Rackin

7 The Homoerotics of Shakespeare's Elizabethan Comedies

  Julie Crawford

8 Shakespearean Comedy and Material Life

  Lena Cowen Orlin

9 Shakespeare's Comic Geographies

  Garrett A. Sullivan, Jr.

10 Rhetoric and Comic Personation in Shakespeare's Comedies

  Lloyd Davis

11 Fat Knight, or What You Will: Unimitable Falstaff

  Ian Frederick Moulton

12 Wooing and Winning (Or Not): Film/Shakespeare/Comedy and

  the Syntax of Genre

  Barbara Hodgdon

13 The Two Gentlemen of Verona

  Jeffrey Masten

14 "Fie, what a foolish duty call you this?" The Taming of the Shrew,

  Women's Jest, and the Divided Audience

  Pamela Allen Brown

15 The Comedy of Errors and The Calumny of Apelles: An Exercise in

  Source Study

  Richard Dutton

16 Love's Labour's Lost

  John Michael Archer

17 A Midsummer Night's Dream

  Helen Hackett

18 Rubbing at Whitewash: Intolerance in The Merchant of Venice

  Marion Wynne-Davies

19 The Merry Wives of Windsor: Unhusbanding Desires in Windsor

  Wendy Wall

20 Much Ado About Nothing

  Alison Findlay

21 As You Like It

  Juliet Dusinberre

22 Twelfth Night: "The Babbling Gossip of the Air"

  Penny Gay

Index