This study of Shakespeare's comedies examines their curious, often teasing, treatment of those moral, philosophical, and even religious issues which criticism has consistently isolated as representing Shakespeare's comic themes. Throughout, the emphasis falls on the essential artifice of these remarkable plays that stand apart from the traditions of comic drama and defy the conventional categories of literary criticism. The patterns of evasion discussed in the various chapters reveal a world intent on stressing its remoteness from the world of everyday experience, even though it affords an opportunity for the dramatist to display with solemn levity all manner of profound themes and significances. In order to illuminate this facet of Shakespeare's comic art, 'Antic Fables' consists of a series of chapters each dealing with a characteristic aspect of the comedies: their extravagance, Shakespeare's lifelong love of experimenting with comic form and effect, his creation of an ideal landscape to contain the comic world, the philosophical optimism that some commentators have detected, the concern with nature and function of art as represented in these comic fables, and the continual presence of those irreverent clown-figures that consistently mock the apparently misty-eyed 'assertions' to be found in many of these plays.

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