Since the seventeenth century, publishers, directors and critics have divided Shakespeare¿s plays into specific genres or types. Plays ending in marriages, for example, are described as comedies, while plays that are filled with fantastic events are often called romances. In this class we will be reading a generous sampling of comedies and the late romances, asking how genre or generic expectations have shaped the composition and reception of these texts. We will also be asking how genres have served (and continue to serve) as the bearers of cultural memory and expressions of ideology, supplying a logic and pathos for the "order of things" which is alternatively dominant and subversive.