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