Barnaby, Andrew. "The Political Consciousness of Shakespeare's As You Like It." Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 36, No. 2 (Spring 1996): 373-95.

Examines "the related issues of social standing and displacement, aristocratic conduct, and the moral bounds connecting high and low" in As You Like It.

Burckhardt, Sigurd. "The King's Language: Shakespeare's Drama as Social Discovery." The Antioch Review XXI, No. 3 (Fall 1961): 369-87.

Studies several of Shakespeare's plays as they dramatize the interaction of poetic and social order.

Carroll, William C. '"The Base Shall Top Th'Legitimate': The Bedlam Beggar and the Role of Edgar in King Lear." Shakespeare Quarterly 38, No. 4 (Winter 1987): 426-41.

Notes the implications of Edgar's suffering as a noble son and heir who becomes an outcast beggar in King Lear.

Cook, Ann Jennalie. "Shakespeare's Gentlemen." Deutsche Shakespeare-Gesellschaft West Jahrbuch (1985): 9-27.

Explores Shakespeare's presentation of "the privileged man" in his dramas.

Erickson, Peter. "The Order of the Garter, the Cult of Elizabeth, and Class-Gender Tension in The Merry Wives of Windsor." In Shakespeare Reproduced: The Text in History and Ideology, edited by Jean E. Howard and Marion F. O'Connor, pp. 116-40. New York: Methuen, 1987.

Argues that in The Merry Wives of Windsor Shakespeare both "reinforces class hierarchy" and "reverses traditional gender hierarchy by affirming female authority."

Howard, Skiles. "Hands, Feet, and Bottoms: Decentering the Cosmic Dance in A Midsummer Night's Dream." Shakespeare Quarterly 44, No. 3 (Fall 1993): 325-42.

Views the juxtaposition of popular and courtly dancing in A Midsummer Night's Dream as a reflection of the provisional—rather than harmonious—nature of the social order.

Howard-Hill, T. H. "U and Non-U: Class and Discourse Level in Othello." In Shakespeare's Universe: Renaissance Ideas and Conventions: Essays in Honour of W. R. Elton, edited by John M. Mucciolo, pp. 175-86. Brookfield, VT.: Ashgate Publishing Company, 1996.

Observes the hostility of class antagonism in the verbal exchanges of Iago and Cassio in Othello.

Hunt, Maurice. Shakespeare's Labored Art: Stir, Work, and the Late Plays. New York: Peter Lang, 1995, 311 p.

Probes varying portrayals of work in Shakespeare's later dramas.

Hunter, George K. "Bourgeois Comedy: Shakespeare and Dekker." In Shakespeare and His Contemporaries: Essays in Comparison, edited by E. A. J. Honigmann, pp. 1-15. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986.

Focuses on the pattern of a nobleman who falls in love with a woman of lower social status in The Merry Wives of Windsor and Thomas Dekker's The Shoemaker's Holiday.

Kegl, Rosemary. '"The Adoption of Abominable Terms': The Insults That Shape Windsor's Middle Class," in ELH 61, No. 2 (Summer 1994): 253-78.

Interprets the position of the middle class in Shakespearean drama, focusing on the language of insults as a form of social disorder in The Merry Wives of Windsor.

Lane, Robert. '"When Blood is Their Argument': Class, Character, and Historymaking in Shakespeare's and Branagh's Henry V." ELH 61, No. 1 (Spring 1994): 27-52.

Examines the rhetoric of solidarity and the realities of class distinction with regard to Henry and his soldiers in Henry V. Lane continues his analysis by studying the ways in which Shakespeare's dialogic effects on this subject are obscured in Kenneth Branagh's film adaptation of the play.

Parker, Patricia. "Preposterous Reversals: Love's Labor's Lost." Modern Language Quarterly 54, No. 4 (December 1993): 435-82.

Discusses a multitude of verbal and social inversions, including those between high and low classes, in Love's Labor's Lost.

——. "Rude Mechanicals." In Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture, edited by Margreta de Grazia, Maureen Quilligan, and Peter Stallybrass, pp. 43-82. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

Considers the nature of the artisans—Bottom, Snug, and the other craftsmen—in A Midsummer Night's Dream and their relation to the play's theme of "joining."

Suzuki, Mihoko. "Gender, Class, and the Social Order in Late Elizabethan Drama." Theatre Journal 44, No. 1 (March 1992): 31-45.

Includes a discussion of Twelfth Night's deconstruction of "the coherence of the aristocracy."