This volume traces the modern critical and performance history of this play, one of Shakespeare's most-loved and most-performed comedies. The essay focus on such modern concerns as feminism, deconstruction, textual theory, and queer theory.

This volume of essays traces the modern critical and performance history of this play, one of Shakespeare's most-loved and most-performed comedies.

Shakespeare's Widows moves thirty-one characters appearing in twenty plays to center stage. Through nuanced analyses, grounded in the widows' material circumstances, Kehler uncovers the plays' negotiations between the opposed poles of residual Catholic precept and Protestant practice-between celibacy and remarriage. Reading from a feminist materialist perspective, this book argues that Shakespeare's insights into the political and economic pressures the widows face allow them to elude mechanistic ideology. Kehler's book provides extensive historical background into the various religious and...