"Comedies," as one of William Shakespeare’s contemporaries wrote, "begin in trouble and end in peace." This is certainely true of the four masterworks selected for this collection, each of which represents a significant stage in the development of the world’s greatest dramatist. Reading these plays, we sample the whole comic spectrum of the Elizabethan world — from the satiric comedy that portrays a world of people whose unreasonable behavior is ludicrous and in need of reform to the romantic comedy that takes us into a dreamlike holiday world whose inhabitants, for all their folly, are still endearing characters.