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<p>Notes on Contributors vii</p> <p><b>Introduction 1</b></p> <p>1 Shakespeare and the Traditions of English Stage Comedy 4<br /> <i>Janette Dillon </i></p> <p>2 Shakespeare’s Festive Comedies 23<br /> <i>Francois Laroque</i></p> <p>3 The Humour of It: Bodies, Fluids and Social Discipline in Shakespearean Comedy 47<br /> <i>Gail Kern Paster </i></p> <p>4 Class X: Shakespeare, Class, and the Comedies 67<br /> <i>Peter Holbrook </i></p> <p>5 The Social Relations of Shakespeare’s Comic Households 90<br /> <i>Mario DiGangi </i></p> <p>6 Shakespear’s Crossdressing Comedies 114<br /> <i>Phyllis Rackin </i></p> <p>7 The Homoerotics of Shakespear’s Elizabethan Comedies 137<br /> <i>Julie Crawford </i></p> <p>8 Shakespearean Comedy and Material Life 159<br /> <i>Lena Cowen Orlin </i></p> <p>9 Shakespeare’s Comic Geographies 182<br /> <i>Garett A. Sullivan, Jr. </i></p> <p>10 Rhetoric and Comic Personation in Shakespeare’s Comedies 200<br /> <i>Lloyd Davis</i></p> <p>11 Fat Knight, or What You Will: Unimitable Falstaff 223<br /> <i>Ian Fredrick Moulton </i></p> <p>12 Wooing and Winning (Or Not): Film/Shakespeare/Comedy and the Syntax of Genre 243<br /> <i>Barbare Hodgdon </i></p> <p>13 The Two Gentlemen of Verona 266<br /> <i>Jeffery Masten </i></p> <p>14 “Fie, what a foolish duty call you this?” The Taming of the Shrew, Women’s Jest, and the Divided Audience 289<br /> <i>Pamela Allen Brown </i></p> <p>15 The Comedy of Errors and The Calumny of Apelles: An Exercise in Source Study 307<br /> <i>Richard Dutton </i></p> <p>16 Love’s Labour’s Lost 320<br /> <i> John Michael Archer </i></p> <p>17 A Midsummer Night’s Dream 338<br /> <i>Helen Hackett </i></p> <p>18 Rubbing at Whitewash: Intolerance in The Merchant of Venice 358<br /> <i>Merion Wynne-Davis </i></p> <p>19 The Merry Wives of Windsor: Unhusbanding Desires in Windsor 376<br /> <i>Wendy Wall </i></p> <p>20 Much Ado About Nothing 393<br /> <i>Alison Findlay </i></p> <p>21 As You Like It 411<br /> <i>Juliet Dusinberre </i></p> <p>22 Twelfth Night: “The Babbling Gossip of the Air” 429<br /> <i>Penny Gay </i></p> <p>Index 44</p>

"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." <i>Cahiers Elisabethains</i>

<b>Jean E. Howard</b> 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 <i>The</i> <i>Norton Shakespeare,</i> and author of, among other works <i>The Stage and Social Struggle in Early Modern England</i> (1994) and, with Phyllis Rackin, of <i>Engendering a Nation: A Feminist Account of Shakespeare's English Histories</i> (1997)<b><i>.</i></b><br /> <p><b>Richard Dutton</b> is currently Professor of English at Ohio State University. He is author of <i>Mastering the Revels: the Regulation and Censorship of Renaissance Drama</i>(1991) and <i>Licensing, Censorship and Authorship in Early Modern England:Buggeswords</i>(2000), and editor of the <i>Palgrave Literary Lives</i> series.</p>

This Companion to Shakespeare’s comedies contains original essays on every comedy from <i>The Two Gentlemen of Verona</i> to <i>Twelfth Night</i>. 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.

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