This four-volume Companion to Shakespeare's Works, compiled as a single entity, offers a uniquely comprehensive snapshot of current Shakespeare criticism.

Complementing David Scott Kastan's A Companion to Shakespeare (1999), which focused on Shakespeare as an author in his historical context, these volumes examine each of his plays and major poems using all the resources of contemporary criticism from performance studies to feminist, historicist, and textual analyses.
Scholars from all over the world - Australia, Canada, France, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and United States - have joined in the writing of new essays addressing virtually the whole of Shakespeare's canon from a rich variety of critical perspectives. A mixture of younger and more established scholars, their work reflects some of the most interesting research currently being conducted in Shakespeare studies.
Arguing for the persistence and utility of genre as a rubric for teaching and writing about Shakespeare's works, the editors have organized the four volumes in relation to generic categories: namely, the tragedies, the histories, the comedies, and the poems, problem comedies and late plays. Each volume thus contains individual essays on all texts in the relevant category as well as more general essays looking at critical issues and approaches more widely relevant to the genre.
This ambitious project offers a provocative roadmap to Shakespeare studies at the dawning of the twentieth-first century.
This companion to Shakespeare's histories contains original essays on every history play from Henry VI to Henry V as well as fourteen additional articles on such topics as censorship in Shakespeare's histories, the relation of Shakespeare's plays to other dramatic histories of the period, Shakespeare's histories on film, the homoerotics of Shakespeare's history plays, and nation formation in Shakespeare's histories.

Jean E. Howard is William E. Ransford Professor of English at Columbia University and a past president of the Shakespeare Association of America. She is an editor of The Norton Shakespeare, and author of, among other works The Stage and Social Struggle in Early Modern England (1994) and, with Phyllis Rackin, of Engendering a Nation: A Feminist Account of Shakespeare's English Histories (1997).

Richard Dutton is currently Professor of English at Ohio State University. He is author of Mastering the Revels: the Regulation and Censorship of Renaissance Drama(1991) and Licensing, Censorship and Authorship in Early Modern England:Buggeswords(2000), and editor of the Palgrave Literary Lives series.

Notes on Contributors.

Introduction.

1. The Writing of History in Shakespeare's England (Ivo Kamps).

2. Shakespeare and Contemporary Dramatists of History (Richard Helgerson).

3. Censorship and the Problems with History in Shakespeare's England (Cyndia Susan Clegg).

4. Nation Formation and the English History Plays (Patricia A. Cahill).

5. The Irish Text and Subtext of Shakespeare's English Histories (Willy Maley).

6. Theories of Kingship in Shakespeare's England (William C. Carroll).

7. "To beguile the time, look like the time": Contemporary Film Versions of Shakespeare's Histories (Peter J. Smith).

8. The Elizabethan History Play: A True Genre (Paulina Kewes).

9. Damned Commotion: Riot and Rebellion in Shakespeare's Histories (James Holstun).

10. Manliness Before Individualism: Masculinity, Effeminacy, and Homoerotics in Shakespeare's History Plays (Rebecca Ann Bach).

11. French Marriages and the Protestant Nation in Shakespeare's History Plays (Linda Gregerson).

12. The First Tetralogy in Performance (Ric Knowles).

13. The Second Tetralogy: Performance as Interpretation (Lois Potter).

14. 1 Henry VI (David Bevington).

15. Suffolk and the Pirates: Disordered Relations in Shakespeare's 2 Henry VI (Thomas Cartelli).

16. Vexed Relations: Family, State, and the Uses of Women in 3 Henry VI (Kathryn Schwarz).

17. "The power of hope?" An Early Modern Reader of Richard III (James Siemon).

18. King John (Virginia Mason Vaughan).

19. The King's Melting Body: Richard II (Lisa Hopkins).

20. 1 Henry IV (James Knowles).

21. Henry IV, Part 2: A Critical History (Jonathan Crewe).

22. Henry V (Andrew Hadfield).

Index.