In this critical evaluation of the classic, the discussion focuses on the nature of the major characters, the morality of their behavior, the conclusion of the play, and the genre of a play that was listed in the First Folio as a comedy. The contents of this volume cover texts by English, American and European scholars and critics including Malone, Stevens, Schlegel, Hazlitt, Coleridge, Hallam, Gervinus, Bagehot, Pater, Dowden, Furnivall, Swinburne, Symons, Boas, Shaw, Bradley, Chambers, Bridges, Masefield and Croce.

Renaissance Papers is a collection of the best scholarly essays submitted each year to the Southeastern Renaissance Conference. Organized and sponsored in the early 1950s by Duke University and the universities of South Carolina and North Carolina, the annual meeting is now hosted by various colleges and universities across the southeastern United States. The conference accepts papers on all subjects relating to the Renaissance -- music, art, history, literature, etc. -- from scholars all over North America and Europe. This is the forty-seventh volume of Renaissance Papers. It includes articles on 15th-c. Florentine wedding chests, called cassoni, on Isabella Whitney, on Spenser's 'April' woodcut, on Cervantes' El Trato del Argel, on Thomas Nashe's Christ's Tears over Jerusalem, on the crone as type in English Renaissance drama, on female speech and disempowerment in Marlowe's Tamberlane I, on Shakespeare's Richard II and Marlowe's Edward II, on Chaucer's contribution to The Tempest, and on echoes of Ovid in Donne's elegies. T. H. HOWARD-HILL and PHILIP ROLLINSON are professors of English at the University of South Carolina.