Kent Cartwright, Professor Emeritus, University of Maryland

Kent Cartwright is Professor Emeritus and former Chair of the Department of English of the University of Maryland. His teaching and scholarship have focused on sixteenth-century British literature, especially drama, and on late medieval British literature. He has also written on the status of the undergraduate English major. He has edited The Comedy of Errors, for The Arden Shakespeare, Third Series (Bloomsbury, 2017). His other books include Theatre and Humanism: English Drama in the Sixteenth Century (Cambridge University Press, 1999) and Shakespearean Tragedy and Its Double: The Rhythms of Audience Response (Penn State University Press, 1991). He is editor of A Companion to Tudor Literature (Blackwell, 2010) and the author of numerous articles on Shakespeare and Renaissance drama. He has served as president of the Association of Departments of English (USA) and as a trustee of the Shakespeare Association of America.

"The achievement of this erudite, persuasive and compelling book makes comedy into a meaningful critical language that can be exported to other areas of Shakespeare's career, and also to comedies by other early modern writers. Scholars and teachers of Shakespeare, comedy and all forms of drama will find much of value here." -- Steve Mentz, Emotions: History, Culture, Society

"Like all Kent Cartwright's work, this is a deeply researched, beautifully written, and thoughtful — as well as thought-provoking — book. Its solid research ranges widely in areas of early modern thought and culture too often now regarded with a certain, default, impatience...Cartwright's detailed reading of the comedies recovers what is so often lost in the solemn ideological and materialist discussions to which they are often subjected: they are funny...This book calls us to rethink our reductiveness and acknowledge that we may all be enchanted, and in the enchantment of art, by which we discuss the more removed mysteries, find ourselves when no man was his own. But howsoever, strange and admirable." -- Charles Moseley