A Companion to Shakespeare's Works, Volume III: The Comedies / Edition 1

by Richard Dutton, Jean E. Howard

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780631226345
Publisher:	Wiley
Publication date:	06/02/2003
Series:	Blackwell Companions to Literature and Culture , #84
Pages:	476
Product dimensions:	7.13(w) x 10.03(h) x 1.63(d)

About the Author

Richard Dutton is currently Professor of English at Lancaster University, author of Mastering the Revels: the Regulation and Censorship of Renaissance Drama (1991) and Licensing, Censorship and Authorship in Early Modern England:Buggeswords (2000). He is editor of the Palgrave Literary Lives series. From 2003, he will be Professor of English at Ohio State University.

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).

Table of Contents

Notes on Contributors.

Introduction.

1. Shakespeare and the Traditions of English Stage Comedy: Janette Dillon.

2. Shakespeare’s Festive Comedies: François Laroque.

3. 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.

Editorial Reviews

"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

From the Publisher