Problem comedies : Troilus and Cressida, Measure for measure, and All's well that ends well / Oliver Arnold. Encountering the past I : Shakespeare's reception of classical comedy / Robert S. Miola -- Encountering the past II : Shakespearean comedy, Chaucer, and medievalism / Helen Cooper -- Encountering the present I : Shakespeare's early urban comedies and the lure of true crime and satire / Kirk Melnikoff -- Encountering the present II : Shakespearean comedy and Elizabethan drama / Andy Kesson -- Shakespearean comedy and early modern religious culture / Kenneth J.E. Graham -- Shakespearean comedy and the early modern marketplace : sympathetic economies / Amanda Bailey -- Shakespearean comedy and the early modern domestic sphere / Catherine Richardson -- Place and being in Shakespearean comedy / Kent Cartwright -- Shakespearean comedy and the question of race / Geraldo U. de Sousa -- Farce and force : Shakespearean comedy, militarism, and violence / Simon Barker -- Water memory and the art of preserving : Shakespearean comedy and early modern cultures of remembrance / Julie Sanders -- The humours in humour : Shakespeare and early modern psychology / Matthew Steggle -- Shakespearean comedy and the senses / Kevin Curran -- Green comedy : Shakespeare and ecology / Steve Mentz -- The laws of comedy : Shakespeare and early modern legal culture / Carolyn Sale -- Comedy and eros : sexualities on Shakespeare's stage / Judith Haber -- Queer comedy / David L. Orvis -- The music of Shakespearean comedy / Erin Minear -- Gender and genre : Shakespeare's comic women / Michelle M. Dowd -- The architecture of Shakespearean comedy : domesticity, performance, and the empty room / Anne M. Myers -- Poor things, vile things : Shakespeare's comedy of kinds / Laurie Shannon -- Stage props and Shakespeare's comedies : keeping safe Nerissa's ring / Lina Perkins Wilder -- Shakespearean comedy and the discourses of print / Frederick Kiefer -- Imagining Shakespeare's audience / Jeremy Lopez -- Comedy on the boards : Shakespeare's use of playhouse space / Erika T. Lin -- Adapting Shakespeare's comedies / Katherine Scheil -- Brexit dreams : comedy, nostalgia, and critique in Much ado about nothing and A midsummer night's dream / Bridget Escolme -- Shakespearean comedy on screen / Douglas M. Lanier -- Holy adultery : marriage in The comedy of errors, The merchant of Venice, and The merry wives of Windsor / John Parker -- Comedies of tough love : Two gentlemen of Verona, Love's labour's Lost, The taming of the shrew, and Much ado about nothing / Joanne Diaz -- Comedies of the green world : A midsummer night's dream, As you like it, and Twelfth night / Lisa Hopkins -- Problem comedies : Troilus and Cressida, Measure for measure, and All's well that ends well / Oliver Arnold.
Summary:
This book offers critical and contemporary resources for studying Shakespeare's comic enterprises. It engages with perennial, yet still urgent questions raised by the comedies and looks at them from a range of new perspectives that represent the most recent methodological approaches to Shakespeare, genre, and early modern drama. Several chapters take up firmly established topics of inquiry such Shakespeare's source materials, gender and sexuality, hetero- and homoerotic desire, race, and religion, and they reformulate these topics in the materialist, formalist, phenomenological, or revisionist terms of current scholarship and critical debate. Others explore subjects that have only relatively recently become pressing concerns for sustained scholarly interrogation, such as ecology, cross-species interaction, and humoral theory. Some contributions, informed by increasingly sophisticated approaches to the material conditions and embodied experience of theatrical practice, speak to a resurgence of interest in performance, from Shakespeare's period through the first decades of the twenty-first century. Others still investigate distinct sets of plays from unexpected and often polemical angles, noting connections between the comedies under inventive, unpredicted banners such as the theology of adultery, early modern pedagogy, global exploration, or monarchical rule. The book situates these approaches against the long history of criticism and provides an overview of the most up-to-date work in the field.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.