As She Likes It is the first attempt to tackle the enduring question of how to perform those unruly women at the centre of Shakespeare's comedies. Unique among both Shakespearan and feminist studies, As She Likes It asks how gender politics affects the production of the comedies, and how gender is represented, both in the text and on the stage.

Jane Austen was fascinated by theater from her childhood, but the myth remains that she was anti-theatrical. Contemporary film and television have shown how naturally dramatic her stories are. Penny Gay's book describes for the first time the rich theatrical context of Austen's writing, and the intersections between her novels and contemporary drama. Gay relates Austen's mature novels to the various genres of eighteenth-century drama--laughing comedy, sentimental comedy and tragedy, Gothic theatre, early melodrama. She demonstrates the complexity of Austen's analysis of the pervasive...

Jane Austen was fascinated by theater from her childhood, but the myth remains that she was anti-theatrical. Contemporary film and television have shown how naturally dramatic her stories are. Penny Gay's book describes for the first time the rich theatrical context of Austen's writing, and the intersections between her novels and contemporary drama. Gay relates Austen's mature novels to the various genres of eighteenth-century drama--laughing comedy, sentimental comedy and tragedy, Gothic theatre, early melodrama. She demonstrates the complexity of Austen's analysis of the pervasive...

Why did theatre audiences laugh in Shakespeare's day? Why do they still laugh now? What did Shakespeare do with the conventions of comedy that he inherited, so that his plays continue to amuse and move audiences? What do his comedies have to say about love, sex, gender, power, family, community, and class? What place have pain, cruelty, and even death in a comedy? Why all those puns? In a survey that travels from Shakespeare's earliest experiments in farce and courtly love-stories to the great romantic comedies of his middle years and the mould-breaking experiments of his last decade's work,...

With a strong emphasis on the conscious theatricality of the play, Shakespeare's As You Like It focuses on its significance for its first audiences, and its performance potential today in the light of modern critical readings.

This edition preserves the play text of Twelfth Night as it was edited and annotated by Elizabeth Story Donno for the first Cambridge edition of 1985. The second edition featured a completely new introduction by Penny Gay. For the third edition, Professor Gay further updates the introduction, taking into account recent substantial performance history, and providing a refreshed reading list for the contemporary student reader. Gay stresses the play's theatricality, its elaborate linguistic games and its complex use of Ovidian myths. She analyses the play's delicate balance between romance and...