A Companion to Shakespeare's Works, Volume III

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 vii

Introduction 1

1 Shakespeare and the Traditions of English Stage Comedy 4
Janette Dillon

2 Shakespeare’s Festive Comedies 23
Francois Laroque

3 The Humour of It: Bodies, Fluids and Social Discipline in Shakespearean Comedy 47
Gail Kern Paster

4 Class X: Shakespeare, Class, and the Comedies 67
Peter Holbrook

5 The Social Relations of Shakespeare’s Comic Households 90
Mario DiGangi

6 Shakespear’s Crossdressing Comedies 114
Phyllis Rackin

7 The Homoerotics of Shakespear’s Elizabethan Comedies 137
Julie Crawford

8 Shakespearean Comedy and Material Life 159
Lena Cowen Orlin

9 Shakespeare’s Comic Geographies 182
Garett A. Sullivan, Jr.

10 Rhetoric and Comic Personation in Shakespeare’s Comedies 200
Lloyd Davis

11 Fat Knight, or What You Will: Unimitable Falstaff 223
Ian Fredrick Moulton

12 Wooing and Winning (Or Not): Film/Shakespeare/Comedy and the Syntax of Genre 243
Barbare Hodgdon

13 The Two Gentlemen of Verona 266
Jeffery Masten

14 “Fie, what a foolish duty call you this?” The Taming of the Shrew, Women’s Jest, and the Divided Audience 289
Pamela Allen Brown

15 The Comedy of Errors and The Calumny of Apelles: An Exercise in Source Study 307
Richard Dutton

16 Love’s Labour’s Lost 320
John Michael Archer

17 A Midsummer Night’s Dream 338
Helen Hackett

18 Rubbing at Whitewash: Intolerance in The Merchant of Venice 358
Merion Wynne-Davis

19 The Merry Wives of Windsor: Unhusbanding Desires in Windsor 376
Wendy Wall

20 Much Ado About Nothing 393
Alison Findlay

21 As You Like It 411
Juliet Dusinberre

22 Twelfth Night: “The Babbling Gossip of the Air” 429
Penny Gay

Index 44

"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 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.

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.