This 1984 book is an original attempt to combine social history and anthropology with literary criticism. Professor Berry relates Shakespeare's romantic comedies to Elizabethan social customs and to rites of initiation, courtship and marriage. He offers an alternative interpretation of a major Shakespearean genre, examining a wide range of Elizabethan conventional attitudes, all of which converge upon the progression from adolescence to adulthood and from courtship to marriage, which many details have become available. By relating Shakespeare's comedies to these traditions and to the broader context of anthropological 'rites of passage' Professor Berry helps to explain how the plays can be at once uniquely Shakespearean, Elizabethan and universal.