Focusing on the clown Will Kemp, this book shows how Shakespeare and other dramatists wrote specific roles as vehicles for him.

A new account of medieval and Renaissance clown traditions reveals the true extent of their cultural influence.

The majority of Shakespeare's plays have at least one clown figure making an appearance. These characters range from rogues who say only a line or two, to important figures like Touchstone and Falstaff. Videbaek examines even the smallest clown roles, showing how the clown's freedom of speech allows him to become a mediator between the audience and the action of the play, helping audience interpretation. This illuminating celebration of the stage clown's contribution to the understanding and enjoyment of Shakespeare's plays will be a valuable resource for both students and scholars alike.

Introduction -- Clowns, fools, and folly -- Structural doubleness and repetition -- Place, being, and agency -- The manifestation of desire -- The return from the dead -- Ending and wondering.

This is an informative and interesting guide to the comedies of love - The Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Taming of the Shrew, Love's Labour's Lost, A Midsummer Nights Dream, Much Ado About Nothing, As You Like it and Twelfth Night - which were written in the early part of Shakespeare's career. As well as supplying dramatic and critical analysis, this study sets the plays within their wider social and artistic context. Michael Mangan begins by considering the social function of laughter, the use of humour in drama for handling social tensions in Elizabethan and Jacobean society and the resulting expectations the audience would have had about comedy in the theatre. In the second section he discusses the individual plays in the light of recent critical and theoretical research. The useful reference section at the end gives the reader a short bibliographic guide to key historical figures relevant to a study of Shakespeare's comedies and a detailed critical bibliography.

The first fifty volumes of this yearbook of Shakespeare studies are being reissued in paperback.

Here Mary Thomas Crane considers the brain as a site where body and culture meet to form the subject and its expression in language. Taking Shakespeare as her case study, she boldly demonstrates the explanatory power of cognitive theory--a theory which argues that language is produced by a reciprocal interaction of body and environment, brain and culture, and which refocuses attention on the role of the author in the making of meaning. Crane reveals in Shakespeare's texts a web of structures and categories through which meaning is created. The approach yields fresh insights into a wide range of his plays, including The Comedy of Errors, As You Like It, Twelfth Night, Hamlet, Measure for Measure, and The Tempest. ? Crane's cognitive reading traces the complex interactions of cultural and cognitive determinants of meaning as they play themselves out in Shakespeare's texts. She shows how each play centers on a word or words conveying multiple meanings (such as "act," "pinch," "pregnant," "villain and clown"), and how each cluster has been shaped by early modern ideological formations. The book also chronicles the playwright's developing response to the material conditions of subject formation in early modern England. Crane reveals that Shakespeare in his comedies first explored the social spaces within which the subject is formed, such as the home, class hierarchy, and romantic courtship. His later plays reveal a greater preoccupation with how the self is formed within the body, as the embodied mind seeks to make sense of and negotiate its physical and social environment.