Anne Barton's essays on Shakespeare and his contemporaries are characterized by their combination of intelligence, humanity and elegance. In this linked but wide-ranging collection she addresses such diverse issues as Shakespeare's trust (and mistrust) of language, the puzzle of Falstaff's inability to survive in a genuinely comic world, the unconsummated marriage of Imogen and Posthumus in Cymbeline, Shakespeare's debt to Livy and Machiavelli in Coriolanus, 'hidden' kings in the Tudor and Stuart history play, comedy and the city, and deer-parks as places of liberation and danger in English drama up to and beyond the Restoration. Professor Barton looks at both major and neglected plays of the period and the ongoing dialogue between them. Taken together the essays reveal a remarkable range of reference and depth of insight, together with an increasing emphasis on historical and social contexts.
List of illustrations; Preface; Acknowledgements; Part I: 1. 'Wrying but a little': marriage, law and sexuality in the plays of Shakespeare; 2. Love's Labour's Lost (1953); 3. Shakespeare and the limits of language (1971); 4. Falstaff and the comic community (1985); 5. As You Like It and Twelfth Night: Shakespeare's 'sense of an ending' (1972); 6. 'Nature's piece 'gainst fancy': the divided catastrophe in Antony and Cleopatra (1974/1992); 7. Livy, Machiavelli and Shakespeare's Coriolanus (1985); 8. Leontes and the spider: language and speaker in Shakespeare's last plays (1980); 9. 'Enter Mariners wet': realism in Shakespeare's last plays (1986); Part II: 10. The king disguised: Shakespeare's Henry V and the comical history (1975); 11. 'He that plays the king': Ford's Perkin Warbeck and the Stuart history play (1977); 12. Oxymoron and the structure of Ford's The Broken Heart (1980) 13. Shakespeare and Jonson (1983); 14. London comedy and the ethos of the city (1979); 15. Comic London; 16. Parks and Ardens (1992); Index.
