This collection of four essays, by one of the most distinguished critics writing in English, is concerned with principles of criticism and with the enjoyment of Shakespeare's comedies. It is the author's thesis that Shakespeare's comedy is widely misunderstood and underestimated, and that the four romances are the inevitable and genuine culmination of the poet's achievement. Taking a perspective that retreats from the usual commentary on individual plays, Professor Frye considers the comedies as a group unified by recurring images and structural devices. "From this point of view," he writes, "they seem more like a number of simultaneous chess games played by a master who wins them all by devices familiar to him, and gradually, with patient study, to us, but which remain mysteries of an unfathomable skill. More important, the reader is led from the characteristics of the individual play, the vividness of characterization, the texture of imagery, and the like, to consider what kind of a form comedy is, and what its place is in literature."