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 recentmethodological 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 scholarshipand 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 materialconditions 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 connectionsbetween 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 approachesagainst the long history of criticism and provides a valuable overview of the most up-to-date work in the field. | The Oxford Handbook Of Shakespearean Comedy by Heather Hirschfeld, Paperback | Indigo Chapters