"Soul of the age!" Ben Jonson eulogized Shakespeare, and in the next breath, "He was not of an age but for all time." That he was both "of the age" and "for all time" is, this book suggests, the key to Shakespeare's comic genius. In this engaging introduction to the First Folio comedies, Paul A. Olson gives a persuasive and thoroughly engrossing account of the playwright's comic transcendence, showing how Shakespeare, by taking on the great themes of his time, elevated comedy from a mere mid-level literary form to its own form of greatness-on par with epic and tragedy. |