A wide-ranging collection of essays on Shakespeare and his contemporaries.

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.