A Companion to Shakespeare's Works: The Poems, Problem Comedies, Late Plays Hardcover - 2003

Complementing David Scott Kastan's A Companion to Shakespeare (1999), which focused on Shakespeare as an author in his historical context, these volumes examine each of his plays and major poems using all the resources of contemporary criticism from performance studies to feminist, historicist, and textual analyses.

Scholars from all over the world - Australia, Canada, France, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and United States - have joined in the writing of new essays addressing virtually the whole of Shakespeare's canon from a rich variety of critical perspectives. A mixture of younger and more established scholars, their work reflects some of the most interesting research currently being conducted in Shakespeare studies.

Arguing for the persistence and utility of genre as a rubric for teaching and writing about Shakespeare's works, the editors have organized the four volumes in relation to generic categories: namely, the tragedies, the histories, the comedies, and the poems, problem comedies and late plays. Each volume thus contains individual essays on all texts in the relevant category as well as more general essays looking at critical issues and approaches more widely relevant to the genre.

This ambitious project offers a provocative roadmap to Shakespeare studies at the dawning of the twentieth-first century.This companion to Shakespeare's poems, problem comedies and late playscontains original essays on Troilus and Cressida, Measure for Measure, All's Well That Ends Well, Venus and Adonis, The Rape of Lucrece, and The Sonnets, as well as Pericles, The Winter's Tale, Cymbeline, The Tempest, Henry VIII and The Two Noble Kinsmen. In addition, it includes eleven essays on such topics as the reception history of the sonnets, collaboration in Shakespeare's middle and late plays, the generic classification of Shakespeare's late plays, The Tempest in performance, and the relation of Shakespeare's "problem plays" to the work of contemporary dramatists.