This study of Shakespeare's comedies received the University of Delaware Press Award for best manuscript in the field of Shakspearean Literature and was selected by Choice as an Outstanding Academic Book. Unusual in scope, it is not limited to the plays of a particular period. Instead it traces Shakespeare's achievement in comedy from such early plays as The Comedy of Errors and Two Gentlemen of Verona to the plays of Shakespeare's ripest maturity, The Winter's Tale and The Tempest.

Author Robert Ornstein makes clear the inadequacy of critical attempts to reduce the comedies to a single formula or dramatic template. While the early comedies may be festive in nature, they are the work of a playwright who introduced into them a note of sadness not present in his source materials.

Ornstein reminds his readers that Shakespeare wrote his most lighthearted comedies at a time when he was imaginatively absorbed in the tragic love story of Romeo and Juliet, plot devices of which do indeed appear in Two Gentlemen, A Midsummer Night's Dream, and Much Ado About Nothing.