A Companion to Shakespeare's Works, Volume III: The Comedies (Blackwell Companions to Literature and Culture)

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.

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).