Since its appearance in 1990, The Spenser Encyclopedia has become the reference book for scholarship on Edmund Spenser (1552-99), offering a detailed, literary guide to his life, works, and influence. Comprehensive in scope and international in outlook, the encyclopedia contains some 700 entries by 422 contributors in 20 countries. An index provides access to material not obvious at first glance through the main body of the book, and all works cited more than once in the encyclopedia are included in an extensive bibliography. A brief historical preface and a guide to using the...

In these essays Northrop Frye addresses a question which preoccupied him throughout his long and distinguished career - the conception of comedy, particularly Shakespearean comedy, and its relation to human experience.

In most forms of comedy, and certainly in the New Comedy with which Shakespeare was concerned, the emphasis is on moving towards a climax in which the end incorporates the beginning. Such a climax is a vision of deliverance or expanded energy and freedom. Frye draws on the Aristotelian notion of reversal, or peripeteia, to analyse the three plays commonly...