Offering essential guidance to students throughout their undergraduate studies, this companion explores the development of a discipline that is still in flux, offers practical advice about how to study it and where this study might lead, and provides a useful reference resource on key practitioners, debates, performances and terms.

Staging Masculinities is a critical history of the ways in which changing concepts of masculinity have been represented, explored, and critiqued on mainstream Western-and particularly English-stages. The study analyzes a wide variety of plays and performances, ranging from medieval liturgical drama to contemporary West-End hits, from Henry V to Oleanna, tracing a complex relationship between theatrical performance and gender performance.

This text sets out the contemporary theories and practices of comedy together with broader theories of comedy and the major themes they contain. An analysis of the major Shakespearan comedies and factual information about the contemporary scene is included here.