SOURCE: “Crowning the End: The Aggrandizement of Closure in the Reading of Shakespeare's Comedies,” in Shakespeare and the Ends of Comedy, pp. 1-21, Indiana University Press, 1991.

In the following essay, Jensen contends that late twentieth-century commentators have placed too much emphasis on closure in Shakespeare's comedies. He believes they have evaluated Shakespeare's comic endings more rigorously than those of his predecessors and contemporaries, tied the plays' meanings too closely to their endings, and disregarded complexities in the final scenes that run counter to a unified interpretation. In the course of his argument, Jensen provides a detailed review of orthodox positions regarding the “festive” endings of Shakespeare's romantic comedies, and recent critical emphasis on the dark or problematic conclusions of these plays.

Over thirty years ago, John Russell Brown reviewed the course of “The Interpretation of Shakespeare's Comedies: 1900-1953.” In doing so, he located the central critical tendency of...