The Oxford Handbook of Shakespearean Comedy

The Oxford Handbook of Shakespearean Comedy 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. All the chapters offer contemporary perspectives on the plays even as they gesture to critical traditions, and they illuminate as well as challenge some of our most cherished expectations about the ways in which Shakespearean comedy affects its audiences. The Handbook situates these approaches against the long history of criticism and provides a valuable overview of the most up-to-date work in the field.

Heather Hirschfeld is Professor of English at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. She is the author of Joint Enterprises: Collaborative Drama and the Institutionalization of the English Renaissance Theater (U Mass P, 2004) and The End of Satisfaction: Drama and Repentance in the Age of Shakespeare (Cornell UP, 2014). She has been the recipient of NEH and Folger Shakespeare Library fellowships.

- Introduction: Encountering Shakespearean Comedy - Part I: Settings, Sources, Influences - 1: James Bednarz: Encountering the Elizabethan Stage - 2: Robert Miola: Encountering the Past I: Shakespeare's Reception of Classical Comedy - 3: Helen Cooper: Encountering the Past II: Shakespearean Comedy, Chaucer, and Medievalism - 4: Kirk Melnikoff: Encountering the Present I: Shakespeare's Early Urban Comedies and the Lure of True Crime and Satire - 5: Andy Kesson: Encountering the Present II: Shakespearean Comedy and Elizabethan Drama - Part II: Themes and Conventions - 6: Kenneth Graham: Shakespearean Comedy and Early Modern Religious Culture - 7: Amanda Bailey: Shakespearean Comedy and the Early Modern Marketplace: Sympathetic Economies - 8: Catherine Richardson: Shakespearean Comedy and the Early Modern Domestic Sphere - 9: Kent Cartwright: Place and Being in Shakespearean Comedy - 10: Geraldo U. de Sousa: Shakespearean Comedy and the Question of Race - 11: Simon Barker: Farce and Force: Shakespearean Comedy, Militarism, and Violence - 12: Julie Sanders: Water Memory and the Art of Preserving: Shakespearean Comedy and Early Modern Cultures of Remembrance - 13: Matthew Steggle: The Humors in Humor: Shakespeare and Early Modern Psychology - 14: Kevin Curran: Shakespearean Comedy and the Senses - 15: Steve Mentz: Green Comedy: Shakespeare and Ecology - 16: Carolyn Sale: The Laws of Comedy: Shakespeare and Early Modern Legal Culture - 17: Judith Haber: Comedy and Eros: Sexualities on Shakespeare's Stage - 18: David L. Orvis: Queer Comedy - 19: Erin Minear: The Music of Shakespearean Comedy - 20: Michelle M. Dowd: Gender and Genre: Shakespeare's Comic Women - 21: Anne M. Myers: The Architecture of Shakespearean Comedy: Domesticity, Performance, and the Empty Room - 22: Laurie Shannon: Poor Things, Vile Things: Shakespeare's Comedy of Kinds - Part III: Conditions and Performance - 23: Lina Perkins Wilder: Stage Props and Shakespeare's Comedies: Keeping Safe Nerissa's Ring - 24: Frederick Kiefer: Shakespearean Comedy and the Discourses of Print - 25: Jeremy Lopez: Imagining Shakespeare's Audience - 26: Erika T. Lin: Comedy on the Boards: Shakespeare's Use of Playhouse Space - 27: Katherine Scheil: Adapting Shakespeare's Comedies - 28: Bridget Escolme: Brexit Dreams: Comedy, Nostalgia, and Critique in Much Ado About Nothing and A Midsummer Night's Dream - 29: Doug Lanier: Shakespearean Comedy on Screen - Part IV: Plays - 30: John Parker: Holy Adultery: Marriage in The Comedy of Errors, The Merchant of Venice, and The Merry Wives of Windsor - 31: Joanne Diaz: Comedies of Tough Love: Two Gentlemen of Verona, Love's Labour's Lost, The Taming of the Shrew, and Much Ado About Nothing - 32: Lisa Hopkins: Comedies of the Green World: A Midsummer Night's Dream, As You Like It, and Twelfth Night - 33: Oliver Arnold: Problem Comedies: Troilus and Cressida, Measure for Measure, and All's Well That Ends Well