PART ONE:CONTEXTS OF COMEDY 19
1 Laughter and Elizabethan society 19
Cultural distance and the study of comedy 19
'Replete with mirthful laughter':everyday laughter 24
'My Lord of Misrule':festival,carnival and inversionary laughter 31
'Rough music':the laughter of ridicule 41
2 Fools,clowns and jesters 50
Jester and fool 51
'Invest me in my motley':stage clowns and fool r？les 60
'No more than is set down for them':improvisation,jigs and drolls 64
3 An audience for comedy 74
Stage and audience 74
The audience in the theatre 78
Audience on stage 82
Women in the Elizabethan theatre audience 87
'A Christmas gambol or a tumbling trick?' 93
4 Twentieth-century readings of comedy 105
'Recognizing the ridiculous':neo classical approaches 105
'Turbulenta prima,tranquilla ultima':generic approaches 107
'The triumph of life':rituals of the green world 110
Recent approaches 118
PART TWO:CRITICAL ANALYSIS 127
5 Shakespeare's early comedies 127
The Two Gentlemen of Verona 129
The Taming of the Shrew 134
Love's Labour's Lost 144
6 A Midsummer Night's Dream 152
'A league without the town' 152
'It seems that yet we sleep,we dream' 157
'Man is but an ass if he go about t'expound this dream' 161
'A play there is,my lord...' 164
'Theseus,our renowned Duke' 167
'So good night unto you all' 173
7 Much Ado About Nothing 179
'Huddling jest upon jest' 179
'Deceivers ever' 184
'I cannot woo in festival terms' 193
8 As You Like It 202
'Under the greenwood tree':the pastoral dialectic 203
'A fool i'th'forest':satirical clowning 210
'No clock in the forest' 215
'Suit me all points like a man' 220
9 Twelfth Night 229
'Give me excess of it' 229
'At our feast we had a play' 232
'I smell a device' 236
'Are all the people mad?' 240
'Like Patience on a monument' 247
PART THREE:REFERENCE SECTION 259
Short biographies 259
Further reading 274
Appendix:The theatres of Shakespeare's London 290
Index 294