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. 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.
Author(s): Heather Hirschfeld
Series: Oxford Handbooks
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Year: 2018
Language: English
Pages: 592
City: Oxford
Cover
Half title
The Oxford Handbook of Shakespearean Comedy
Copyright
Contents
List of Figures
List of Contributors
Introduction: Encountering Shakespearean Comedy
Part I Settings, Sources, Influences
1. Encountering the Elizabethan Stage
2. Encountering the Past I: Shakespeare’s Reception of Classical Comedy
3. Encountering the Past II: Shakespearean Comedy, Chaucer, and Medievalism
4. Encountering the Present I: Shakespeare’s Early Urban Comedies and the Lure of True Crime and Satire
5. Encountering the Present II: Shakespearean Comedy and Elizabethan Drama
Part II Themes and Conventions
6. Shakespearean Comedy and Early Modern Religious Culture
7. Shakespearean Comedy and the Early Modern Marketplace: Sympathetic Economies
8. Shakespearean Comedy and the Early Modern Domestic Sphere
9. Place and Being in Shakespearean Comedy
10. Shakespearean Comedy and the Question of Race
11. Farce and Force: Shakespearean Comedy, Militarism, and Violence
12. Water Memory and the Art of Preserving: Shakespearean Comedy and Early Modern Cultures of Remembrance
13. The Humours in Humour: Shakespeare and Early Modern Psychology
14. Shakespearean Comedy and the Senses
15. Green Comedy: Shakespeare and Ecology
16. The Laws of Comedy: Shakespeare and Early Modern Legal Culture
17. Comedy and Eros: Sexualities on Shakespeare’s Stage
18. Queer Comedy
19. The Music of Shakespearean Comedy
20. Gender and Genre: Shakespeare’s Comic Women
21. The Architecture of Shakespearean Comedy: Domesticity, Performance, and the Empty Room
22. Poor Things, Vile Things: Shakespeare’s Comedy of Kinds
Part III Conditions and Performance
23. Stage Props and Shakespeare’s Comedies: Keeping Safe Nerissa’s Ring
24. Shakespearean Comedy and the Discourses of Print
25. Imagining Shakespeare’s Audience
26. Comedy on the Boards: Shakespeare’s Use of Playhouse Space
27. Adapting Shakespeare’s Comedies
28. Brexit Dreams: Comedy, Nostalgia, and Critique in Much Ado About Nothing and A Midsummer Night’s Dream
29. Shakespearean Comedy on Screen
Part IV Plays
30. Holy Adultery: Marriage in The Comedy of Errors, The Merchant of Venice, and The Merry Wives of Windsor
31. Comedies of Tough Love: Two Gentlemen of Verona, Love’s Labour’s Lost, The Taming of the Shrew, and Much Ado About Nothing
32. Comedies of the Green World: A Midsummer Night’s Dream, As You Like It, and Twelfth Night
33. Problem Comedies: Troilus and Cressida, Measure for Measure, and All’s Well That Ends Well
Index
