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)

These two handsome volumes are part of the four-volume Companion to Shakespeare's Works. They are, in turn, part of a larger series, the Blackwell Companions to Literature and Culture. The essays are essentially new, and they command the talent and energies of an impressive array of scholars. Volume 3, on the comedies, has twenty-two essays, of which the last ten discuss individual plays in a best guess at chronological order: 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.

Juliet Dusinberre is, I suppose, the veteran among this group. Noting that As You Like It has recently been looked at anew in terms of gender as performance and also as a play in its historical moment, Dusinberre focuses here on the troubled career of the earl of Essex. Essex was much given to fashioning himself as a chivalric aristocrat addressing the queen in the flowery language of courtly romance, in a guise like that adopted by Orlando. Gender ambiguities may also have struck courtly audiences as applicable to the wayward Essex, in Dusinberre's view.

Since I don't have time to review each essay, let me touch on a few I found especially useful. Richard Dutton does a major service, I think, in showing how T.

W. Baldwin's attempt to derive "Antipholus" from the Greek feminine antiphila, or "worthy of devotion," is a product of Baldwin's wishful thinking about The Comedy of Errors as romantic comedy. Dutton shows that "Antiphilos" or "Antiphilus" is the name of a rival of Apelles in Lucian's essay "Calumnia." The theme of calumny, depicted in a painting by Apelles, emerges as a central motif of Shakespeare's play. Apelles spent part of his working life in Ephesus, and he is located there by Lucian. Hence, perhaps, the shift from Plautus's Epidamnus to Shakespeare's Ephesus.

Alison Findlay comes adroitly at Much Ado about Nothing by asking what we are to make of Margaret's detailed description of the duchess of Milan's gown on the morning of Hero's wedding to Claudio. The details bring to mind Beatrice d'Este, duchess from 1491 to 1497, and her daughter-in-law Christina of Denmark. The circumstances also suggest a link to Mary Tudor, who became duchess of Milan, a city that was a hotbed of Counter-Reformation zeal, when she married Philip II of Spain. The passage shows Margaret to be a young woman who longs passionately for fine clothes but lacks the social rank needed to entertain expectations of advancement. More broadly, as Findlay gracefully states her case, "The play's topos of fashionable clothing is 'underborne' by a profound exploration of identity in which gender and religious politics create a mingled yarn of meanings about inwardness" (394). The essay is an elegant glimpse at how theater can offer "the most explicit recycling of clothes and identities, the seductive dream of material self-transformation" (395).

I also like Wendy Wall's subversive analysis of The Merry Wives of Windsor, demonstrating how unruly desire can prove to be an attractive and dramatically exciting way to unsettle traditional patterns of behavior...