This book offers an exciting new perspective on Shakespeare's relation to popular culture. Shakespeare's plays draw extensively on the events and traditions of Elizabethan festivals and holidays, mingling popular and aristocratic or royal forms of entertainment in ways that combine or clash to produce new meaning, offering surprises which anticipate the Stuart masque. This process evolved from the early, romantic comedies into the late plays which recover the celebrations and patterns of renewal initiated in the 'green world': the values of festivity are inverted in the comedy of misrule, and finally perverted in the darker forms of the history plays and tragedies. Francois Laroque reconstructs the principal events, customs and games of the Elizabethan festive tradition, and reconsiders Shakespeare's technique in this context.