The Oxford Handbook of Shakespearean Comedy

The Oxford Handbook of Shakespearean Comedy offers critical, contemporary resources for studying Shakespeare’s comic enterprises. It engages with perennial but still urgent questions raised by the comedies, looking at them from a range of new perspectives that represent the most recent methodological approaches to Shakespeare, genre, and early modern drama. Some essays take up firmly established topics of inquiry—Shakespeare’s source materials, gender and sexuality, hetero- and homoerotic desire, race, religion—and reformulate them in the kinds of materialist, formalist, phenomenological, or revisionist terms of current scholarship and critical debate. Others explore subjects—ecology, cross-species interaction, humoral theory—that have only relatively recently become pressing concerns for sustained scholarly interrogation. Still others, 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. And others 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. Since the Handbook situates these approaches against the long history of scholarship on the comedies, it both provides a valuable reference guide and represents some of the most up-to-date work in the field.

Adultery · Aesthetics · Art · Comedy · Comics · Drama · Epistemology · Human sexuality · Literature · Materialism · Political science · Scholarship · Sociology · Theology · Gender Studies · History · Law · Philosophy · Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Literary Criticism

• Discerning Race

  Yunah Kae•Exemplaria•2024

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• Signs and Semblances

  Open Access•James Newlin•Humanities•2025

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