Penny Gay is Professor of English and Drama at the University of Sydney.

• 1. Introduction: Comedy as idea and practice; 2. Farce: The Comedy of Errors, The Taming of the Shrew, The Merry Wives of Windsor; 3. Courtly lovers and the real world: Two Gentlemen of Verona, A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Merchant of Venice; 4. Comedy and language: Love's Labour's Lost; 5. Romantic comedy: Much Ado About Nothing, As You Like It, Twelfth Night; 6. Problematic plots and endings: clowning post-Hamlet: Measure for Measure, All's Well that Ends Well, The Winter's Tale, Cymbeline, The Tempest; 7. The afterlives of Shakespeare's comedies; Conclusion.

'… new historicism tends to read like a rebarbative coded message to the inmates of other North American graduate schools, whereas Gay's book strikes me as a balanced voice of experience and wisdom. … Gay's is a book you might read without being compelled to, for the pleasure of learning more about plays that continue to work on the stage and on the page. … obscure, reader-unfriendly work. Too many of us, in accepting a contract to write for a student or general audience, do not try hard enough to be clear and comprehensive, or even slip into passages of professional obscurity to show that we know we are slumming it. Such vanity is something Gay steers well clear of. … She does theory with a light and relevant touch … This is what literary criticism needs …' Robert Phiddian, Literary Studies