Examines each of Shakespeare's plays and major poems, using various resources of contemporary criticism, from performance studies to feminist, historicist, and textual analysis. This book contains original essays on comedy from "The Two Gentlemen of Verona" to "Twelfth Night" as well as articles on such topics as Shakespeare's comedies on film.

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

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.

"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