As the editor of The Oxford Handbook of Shakespearean Comedy, Heather Hirschfeld takes as an organizing concept “the encounter.” This is a topic that is not only historically useful but also politically and hermeneutically important to Shakespearean criticism today. Hirschfeld offers an elegant and urgent rationale for the concept in her introduction, doing much more than preparing readers for the essays that follow. Indeed, she examines past and present criticism of Shakespeare and the various theoretical and historical movements used to read the plays as encounters with the text that also illuminate encounters between genres, playwrights, theaters, cities, nations, peoples, religions, races, ethnicities, sexualities, and genders. The brilliant concept offers a wide array of approaches that are organized into four sections: “Settings, Sources, Influences”; “Themes and Conventions”; “Conditions and Performance”; and “Plays.” The thirty-three essays included in the collection address “the encounter” with varying success; indeed, at times I felt the concept was lost. But among the best are those that actively think through how encounters of different kinds work in the comedies, not only to make them comedies, but to frustrate generic expectations. Former truths, such as all comedy ends in happy marriages, are questioned in fresh, pressing, and theoretically sophisticated readings, many of which I learned from and will teach.

The most exciting essays in the collection are those that work with the organizing concept. These are diverse in topic and come from all the sections. Encounters happen between peoples, religions, ethnicities, locations, beliefs, lands and seas, playhouses, performances, and textual cues to ignite the senses. These articles unlock Shakespearean comedy from generic calcification, explanations of comedy that often serve to limit meaning and understanding of dramatic trajectories, contradictions, displacements, and inconsistencies. Andy Kesson demystifies the concept of genre in a reading of Shakespeare's plays in the context of other playwrights and problems of comedy. Amanda Bailey contends that Measure for Measure resists comedic closure's assumptions of restitution and works through the logic by which encounters are unknowable, diffuse, and productive. Kent Cartwright's study of place and being considers location in the plays as both crucial and opaque in a study of mapmaking, the imaginative potential of Italy, and regulative and protean worlds that make Italy both threatening and productive. Geraldo U. de Sousa begins his chapter with James Baldwin's political struggle with Shakespeare, a frame that forces us to confront the urgency of readings of race in Shakespeare and early modern literature more widely. The essay works out from there to study caricature, language, whiteness, and a presentist consideration of what The Merchant of Venice and A Midsummer Night's Dream mean in a world of walls, borders, and bans.

Steve Mentz's ecocritical reading puts pressure on encounters between green and blue worlds, posthuman and postnatural conditions in As You Like It, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, A Midsummer Night's Dream, and The Two Noble Kinsmen. David Orvis's analysis of Much Ado about Nothing reveals it, and comedy more widely, as queer in its construction and procedure. As I read it, I wished I had this chapter available to me while working on the play. Lina Perkins Wilder and Erika Lin bring us into the playhouse and performance, where props and cognitive encounters with the senses create place and mood. And Joan Diaz argues both that Shakespeare's use of Ovid in The Two Gentlemen of Verona and The Taming of the Shrew critiques early modern education by making boys misreaders of women and shows his own cogent deployment of women's stories.

This is a partial and unfair overview of many excellent essays. If I were to offer a critique, however, I would urge authors, even when space is limited, to think about their sources. What makes an argument dated or timely? Whom are we citing? What kinds of arguments are we citing on a given topic? I was grateful for many citations offered that I did not know. But at least as often I felt citations ignored more current and urgent studies. If we are thinking about encounters as a politically and hermeneutically important concept, then the sources we encounter and deploy are equally political and important to the task of reading Shakespeare.