Professor Corrigan's volume is a collection of essays culled for the most part from the many and varied anthologies he has issued during the last fifteen years. CHAMPION North Carolina State University Robert W.

One must also admit, how ever, in the final analysis that Leggatt has written a needed book both because it provides an analytic frame for a large and important body of Elizabethan-Jacobean comedies and also because it offers insightful com mentary on at least a reasonable proportion of them. One may also insist that his occa sional distinguishing of tone and theme between the public and the private stage obliges him to a more extensive consideration of the inffu ences of the audience upon citizen comedies. One may justifiably feel on occasion that Leggatt's study reads more like an annotated version of Harbage's and Schoenbaum's Annals than a discursive essay, more like description than extended analysis. In an age of prolific composition for the stage, Elizabethan and Jacobean drama is predominantly comedy, however much subsequent critical attention to the tragedies may have distorted that fact And, especially outside the corpus of romantic comedy, much remains to be done in effectively analyzing the diversity of subject matter which contributed to this popularity. These examples should be sufficient to suggest the general useful ness of such a study.

Again, Leggatt's concern is the manner in which Middleton accommodates the moral tirade to the comic stage world: 'The play's vision includes Sir Walter's moral revulsion but it also includes a sardonic recognition that no amount of preach ing can change a world as corrupt as this one' (p. Sir Walter Whorehound, who by long ar rangement has enjoyed Alwit's wife while Alwit has enjoyed financial independence, undergoes a moral conversion in the final act which leads him publicly to denounce both the Alwits and himself.

1613) Middleton projects a similar situation. In A Chaste Maid in Cheapside (Lady Elizabeth's, ca. In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Ģ66 Comparative Drama periences a traumatic, if dramatically unconvincing, change of heart and renounces his former life with appropriate moral commentary.

Comedy by Robert W. Corrigan