A Companion to Shakespeare's Works. Volume 3: The Comedies, and: A Companion to Shakespeare's Works. Volume 4: The Poems, Problem Plays, Late Plays (review)

Jeffrey Masten on The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Pamela Allen Brown on The Taming of the Shrew, Richard Dutton on The Comedy of Errors, John Michael Archer on Love's Labor's Lost, Helen Hackett on A Midsummer Night's Dream, Marion Wynne-Davies on The Merchant of Venice, Wendy Wall on The Merry Wives of Windsor, Alison Findlay on Much Ado about Nothing, Juliet Dusinberre on As You Like It, and Penny Gay on Twelfth Night. Janette Dillon writes about traditions of English stage comedy, François Laroque about the festive comedies, Gail Kern Paster about bodily humors, Peter Holbrook about class issues, Mario DiGangi about social relations in households, Phyllis Rackin about cross-dressing, Julie Crawford about homoerotics, Lena Cowen Orlin about comedy and material life, Garrett A. Sullivan Jr. about comic geographies, Lloyd Davis about rhetoric and comic personation, Ian Frederic Moulton about Falstaff, and Barbara Hodgdon about film and the syntax of genre. Falstaff deservedly gets an essay all to himself, including, of course, his role in the Henry IV plays, although Laroque's thought-provoking critique of C. L. Barber's Shakespeare's Festive Comedy emphasizes instead the "farcical, ludicrous knight" (34) of Merry Wives and wonders why Barber chose to include only five of Shakespeare's comedies, thus excluding Much Ado about Nothing.\n In sum, then, the numerous essays in this volume do support the idea of the "romances" as a cohesive group.