Idea of the City in the Age of Shakespeare

GAIL KERN PASTER is the director of the Folger Shakespeare Library and editor of the Shakespeare Quarterly. She is the author of Humoring the Body: Emotions and the Shakespearean Stage and The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern England.

Her book is original, imaginative, and illuminating. The dialectic approach provides Paster with the tools she needs to break down several boundaries of genre of comedies, tragedies, masques, and entertainments. She explores paradoxes, antithesis, and contradictions inherent in the idea of the city. In the process, she sheds light on the works of three major Renaissance playwrights. This is indeed a superb book.