‘Get over it,’ grumbles the reader who is about to abandon this review. ‘Research exists as a dialogue among scholars, pushing back the boundaries of knowledge. No one expects cutting edge work in genetics or astrophysics to be intelligible to anyone below postdoctoral level. Why should literary studies be any different? Let your undergraduates eat textbooks!’

The now departed reader had a point, but not an entirely conclusive one. For a physical science is a cumulative activity, dwarves standing on the shoulders of giants, refinement leading to paradigm-shift leading to further refinement, etc. Literary criticism isn’t like that. I do not start my understanding of The Tempest, for example, from where Stephen Greenblatt leaves off. And if I reach Greenblatt, then I am as likely to go back to the text, or to productions of the play, as to go on past Orgel, Loomba, Goldberg et al. into virgin critical territory. Unlike biology or even history, literary interpretation does not function as a body of knowledge. It only does its work in individual heads and in communities of interpreters. It exists as dialogue, and yet, as professional critics aspiring to be research-only academics, we are taught to channel our best efforts into the most obscure, reader-unfriendly work. Too many of us, in accepting a contract to write for a student or general audience, do not try hard enough to be clear and comprehensive, or even slip into passages of professional obscurity to show that we know we are slumming it. Such vanity is something Gay steers well clear of.

It is very good to see the quality of writing and redaction in Shakespeare’s Comedies, because the intellectual firepower of the discipline seems too often obsessed with saying something new about classic literature rather than something important. Gay takes her readers through a discussion of how these endlessly pleasure-generating cultural artefacts work. She does theory with a light and relevant touch, distinguishing between comedy, a genre that licenses disorder with the promise of reconciliation, and laughter, a human reaction to many circumstances, only some of them comic. She then takes us through a series of readings of the plays that is both formalist – discussing farce, courtly love, punning language, romantic comedy and dark clowning – and scandalously progressive, even biographical, marking a movement in technical and intellectual development from the Comedy of Errors through to The Tempest.

Gay tells us much that is relevant and illuminating about the plays’ historical context, but her most persistent reality check is a lively sense of how the plays work on stage, for actual readers and audiences. Throughout she reads as a modern woman, conscious of the complexities in being a feminist reading plays from such a distant and patriarchal culture; as the bulk of my students are intelligent young women, this is a central issue they need to address, and Gay is an excellent guide. She is at her best with the Fools, and knows the difficult trick of writing about comedy, which is neither to compete with the texts for laughs, nor to spread-eagle them relentlessly on the specimen-slide.

This is a book anyone from a novice to an experienced scholar should be able to read with pleasure and instruction. While there are few strictly original perceptions in Shakespeare’s Comedies, the integration of them in elegantly unobtrusive prose engaged me at a serious intellectual level. For example, perhaps I should already have known, but I was struck by the exact rightness of: ‘Rosalind talks mainly in prose, not blank verse (so, largely, does Beatrice). Prose allows for fluid, complex, unpredictable verbal play, because it is not constrained by the traditions of rhetoric that accompany blank verse.’ Though the history plays lie outside Gay’s remit, this statement explains something fundamental about Falstaff as well. The prose and verse of Shakespearean comedy do respond to different shaping forces, and the formal rhetoric at the base of the Petrarchan romantic tradition is the crucial thread.

Gay’s aim is to inform and provoke intelligent readers, to take them through the central issues and then send them afresh to the original texts. This is what literary criticism needs to be about if it is to have an audience at all. It is the sort of level that historians seem to manage better, with substantial narrative accounts that sell in the thousands of copies rather than the dozens for academic criticism. Only a handful of critics write for this wider audience, and, apart from a couple of books on Shakespeare, nearly all of them are literary biographers.

Perhaps that is all the literary criticism non-academics want to read, but there was a time, before the theory wars, when more literary analysis escaped the academy. As an experiment in relevance, we could seek to emulate those narrative historians and try harder to write things that make people think afresh about literature, to maintain a discussion about the things that matter to those of us who attend deeply to books. Gay’s book is this sort of thing: more than a primer, and less constitutionally eccentric than ‘original research’. Yet its livery – ‘Ideal for students, teachers, and lecturers’, as the cover blurb has it – suggests that it will find only those within the education ‘industry’. That is a shame, for a living literary culture is not just people looking for resources for essays, class plans and lectures. It needs a community of readers turning over the old as well as the new, and that is what good literary criticism like this is for.