ABSTRACT
AMONG writers on Shakespeare, voices have often been raised to lament the unaccountable dearth of good critical works on his comedies. The reason for this lack of critical success lies primarily in the form of comedy that Shakespeare adopted. 'Romantic comedy', by its very nature, defies the critical approaches that have proved so fruitful for the tragedies. The heterogeneous element~ which constitute it, its lack of reputable theatre ancestry in Shakespeare's day, its sensitivity to contemporary circumstances, and the apparently casual forms it assumed-all combine to make Elizabethan romantic comedy so delicate a-balance between the comic and the romantic, that each successful example of it is a small miracle. As Johnson has rightly observed 'They seem to be instinct' rather than skill.
