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treatises on love melancholy; melancholy associated with the mercantile lifestyle and loneliness of the sea; and melancholy associated with environment and ethnology all demonstrate how Shakespeare's comedies engage with various early modern discourses on melancholy only to find fault with them. The questioning is energized by Shakespeare's search for the transformative melancomic genre.As for the structure, the book follows a chronological order, with discussions of early comedies foregrounding a developmental trajectory of Shakespeare's craft, his broodings on melancholy and mirth that ripen to a philosophy of melancholic nostalgia and trauma. Discussions of Freud, as well as the insufficiency of classical psychoanalysis to decode the Shakespearean melancomic, provide contextual depth to the exegeses, as do references to Foucault's sociological reflections on early modern madness. In conclusion, this successful and ambitious study of genre and affect as they are impacted by Shakespeare's comic art provokes an important question: Why does the author refrain from explicit reference to modern theories of trauma, while he nods to Sianne Ngai's Ugly Feelings (2005), which is not as relevant to his specific inquiry?

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