Revealing the interplay between social custom and dramatic form, this book shows how the Elizabethan antithesis between everyday and holiday comes to life in the comedies' combination of seriousness and levity.

Foreword stephen greenblatt xi Preface xvii Chapter One: Introduction: The Saturnalian Pattern 1 Through Release to Clarification 5 Shakespeare's Route to Festive Comedy 10 Chapter Two: holiday custom and entertainment 16 The May Game 19 The Lord of Misrule 25 Aristocratic Entertainments 32 Chapter Three: Misrule as Comedy; Comedy as Misrule 39 License and Lese Majesty in Lincolnshire 40 The May Game of Martin Marprelate 56 Chapter Four: Prototypes of Festive Comedy in a Pageant Entertainment: Summer's Last Will and Testament 64 "What can be made of Summer's last will and testament?" 64 Presenting the Mirth of the Occasion 68 Praise of Folly: Bacchus and Falstaff 75 Festive Abuse 82 "Go not yet away, bright soul of the sad year" 90 Chapter Five: The Folly of Wit and Masquerade in Love's Labour's Lost 98 "lose our oaths to find ourselves" 100 "sport by sport o'erthrown" 105 "a great feast of languages" 107 Wit 112 Putting Witty Folly in Its Place 116 "When ... Then ..."--The Seasonal Songs 128 Chapter Six: May Games and Metamorphoses on a Midsummer Night 135 The Fond Pageant 141 Bringing in Summer to the Bridal 149 Magic as Imagination: The Ironic Wit 159 Moonlight and Moonshine: The Ironic Burlesque 168 The Sense of Reality 179 Chapter Seven: The Merchants and the Jew of Venice: Wealth's Communion and an Intruder 185 Making Distinctions about the Use of Riches 188 Transcending Reckoning at Belmont 197 Comical/Menacing Mechanism in Shylock 201 The Community Setting Aside Its Machinery 209 Sharing in the Grace of Life 212 Chapter Eight: Rule and Misrule in henry iv 219 Mingling Kings and Clowns 223 Getting Rid of Bad Luck by Comedy 234 The Trial of Carnival in Part Two 243 Chapter Nine: The Alliance of Seriousness and Levity in A You Like It 252 The Liberty of Arden 254 Counterstatements 257 "all nature in love mortal in folly" 260 Chapter Ten: Testing Courtesy and Humanity in Twelfth Night 272 "A most extracting frenzy" 275 "You are betroth'd both to a maid and man" 277 Liberty Testing Courtesy 281 Outside the Garden Gate 292 Index 297

Winner of the 1961 George Jean Nathan Award for Drama Criticism "Well-considered, subtly thought-out commentaries that move easily between structural analysis of the larger actions and sensitive dissection of local textures ... a first-rate work of impressive imagination."--Modern Philology

"Shakespeare's Festive Comedy is the best book on the subject that I know. The book is well and clearly written, and I should think would fascinate the general readers. I think it is indispensable for students of Shakespeare's comedy."—Francis Fergusson"I can think of no other book that has had such a powerful influence on the ways in which Shakespeare has been taught over the past thirty years. Shakespeare's Festive Comedy was a book ahead of its time. Barber revolutionized the ways that Shakespeareans thought of comedy in relation to its social setting—especially festive comedy. Others have built on his argument but nobody has really improved on his keen, central insight."—James Shapiro, Columbia University"C. L. Barber is the most compelling of the anthropological critics and his book, Shakespeare's Festive Comedy, is to my mind far and away the most illuminating yet to appear on its subject. He is compelling for many reasons—a mind both intricate and deft, a sensitivity quick to the accommodation of esthetic form to the intricacies of psychological function, a humanity benignly tolerant and inclusive. . . . The especial merit of Barber's criticism lies in its sensitive exploration of the individual working out of the release-clarification formula in five separate plays. Each, he discovers, 'tends to focus on a particular kind of folly that is released along with love—witty masquerade in Love's Labour's Lost, delusive fantasy in A Midsummer Night's Dream, romance in As You Like It, and in The Merchant of Venice, prodigality balanced against usuary.' Twelfth Night, to complete the list, focuses on misrule and its complementary folly of time-serving."—Arthur M. Eastman, in A Short History of Shakespearean Criticism