This volume contains original essays on every comedy from "The Two Gentlemen of Verona" to "Twelfth Night" as well as 12 additional articles on such topics as the humoral body in Shakespearean comedy, Shakespeare's comedies on film, and Shakespeare's relation to other comic writers of his time.

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.

This four-volume Companion to Shakespeare's Works, compiled as a single entity, offers a uniquely comprehensive snapshot of current Shakespeare criticism. Complementing David Scott Kastan's A Companion to Shakespeare (1999), which focused on Shakespeare as an author in his historical context, these volumes examine each of his plays and major poems using all the resources of contemporary criticism from performance studies to feminist, historicist, and textual analyses.Scholars from all over the world - Australia, Canada, France, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and United States - have joined in the writing of new essays addressing virtually the whole of Shakespeare's canon from a rich variety of critical perspectives. A mixture of younger and more established scholars, their work reflects some of the most interesting research currently being conducted in Shakespeare studies.Arguing for the persistence and utility of genre as a rubric for teaching and writing about Shakespeare's works, the editors have organized the four volumes in relation to generic categories: namely, the tragedies, the histories, the comedies, and the poems, problem comedies and late plays. Each volume thus 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.This ambitious project offers a provocative roadmap to Shakespeare studies at the dawning of the twentieth-first century.This companion to Shakespeare's comediescontains original essays on every comedy from The Two Gentlemen of Verona to Twelfth Night. In addition, the volume features twelve 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.