Four Great Comedies

"Comedies," as one of William Shakespeare’s contemporaries wrote, "begin in trouble and end in peace." This is certainely true of the four masterworks selected for this collection, each of which represents a significant stage in the development of the world’s greatest dramatist. Reading these plays, we sample the whole comic spectrum of the Elizabethan world — from the satiric comedy that portrays a world of people whose unreasonable behavior is ludicrous and in need of reform to the romantic comedy that takes us into a dreamlike holiday world whose inhabitants, for all their folly, are still endearing characters.