Shakespeare and laughter: A cultural history 9781847791696

Citation preview

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Shakespeare and laughter

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

This page intentionally left blank

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Shakespeare and laughter A cultural history Indira Ghose

Manchester University Press Manchester and New York distributed exclusively in the USA by Palgrave

Copyright © Indira Ghose 2008

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

The right of Indira Ghose to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Published by Manchester University Press Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9NR, UK and Room 400, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010, USA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk Distributed exclusively in the USA by Palgrave, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010, USA Distributed exclusively in Canada by UBC Press, University of British Columbia, 2029 West Mall, Vancouver, BC, Canada V6T 1Z2 British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for ISBN 978 0 7190 7692 3 hardback EISBN 978 1 8477 9169 6 First published 2008 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Typeset by Palimpsest Book Production Ltd, Grangemouth, Stirlingshire Printed in Great Britain by The Cromwell Press Ltd, Trowbridge

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

To Sunita

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

This page intentionally left blank

1

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Contents

Acknowledgements Introduction

viii 1

1 Courtliness and laughter

15

2 Laughter and recreation in the Shakespearean theatre

52

3 Early modern humour

93

4 The Puritans and laughter

128

5 Lear’s Fool

169

Select bibliography

209

Index

224

1

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Acknowledgements

I

owe a debt of gratitude to a large number of scholars who have provided me with intellectual sustenance during the years of research on this topic. Manfred Pfister has been an inexhaustible mine of erudition and help. Stephen Greenblatt and Catherine Belsey have provided encouragement from the very beginning; Quentin Skinner has been deeply inspiring during the latter phase of my research. Paul Yachnin’s path-breaking work has provided stimulation for my own ideas; Kiernan Ryan has been a source of inspiration and support. I am grateful to my first readers, Andreas Hoefele and Russ West, for their perceptive comments, to Gary Taylor for his incisive criticism, and to John Drakakis for triggering a line of inquiry. Richard Wilson has been consistently generous in his advice; Susan Cerasano and Helen Wilcox firmly retained their belief in the project when I had abandoned mine. Without the staunch support of friends and well-wishers this project would have fizzled out like a damp quip. My thanks go to Richard Burt, Dympna Callaghan, Celia Daileader, Michael Dobson, Martin Elsky, Michael Gorra, David Hawkes, Peter Holbrook, Andrew Johnston, Alexander Leggatt, Ania Loomba, and Jyotsna Singh. I wish to thank my family, both in India and in Germany. As ever, I am indebted to Walter, whose indestructible sense of humour prevented me from quite losing my own.

1

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Introduction

A

recent D A I LY M I R RO R poll set out to find the funniest Brit of all time. The winner was – Eric Morecambe. Not William Shakespeare. He only ranked somewhere among the also-rans.1 Indeed, a common response to the topic of this book was the query, ‘Do you really think Shakespeare was funny?’ Clearly, nothing has a shorter shelf-life than humour. This book will not set out the case for the defence, attempting to prove Shakespeare was funny. This is not a book about comedy. It is a book about laughter, not the comic. It will not be particularly amusing. There are few things less entertaining than academics pontificating about laughter. Discussing laughter is a serious business. This study examines laughter in the Shakespearean theatre in the context of a cultural history of early modern laughter. Few cultural phenomena have undergone as radical a change in meaning as laughter. Today, laughter automatically triggers positive associations: pleasure, relaxation, and a response to humour. In the medieval period, by contrast, laughter was frowned upon as a sign of folly. It was associated with the fallen state of humanity – angels never laugh. In Measure for Measure Isabella attributes this to their lack of a spleen, the organ seen as the seat of laughter. Angelo’s behaviour is so repugnant, she remarks bitterly, that it would make even angels weep, ‘who, with our spleens, / Would all themselves laugh mortal’ (2.2.122–3).2 Laughter was linked with at least three of the seven mortal sins: lust, sloth, and pride. Laughter was a marker of lasciviousness, and in countless conduct books women in particular were enjoined to restrain their laughter. Women’s mouths were conflated with sexuality, so laughing signalled their frivolity and sexual voraciousness.3 Similarly, boisterous laughter was an index of idleness and an excessive indulgence in material pleasures. In medieval representations of laughter, laughing is confined to devils or dedicated followers of folly. Even in the Renaissance when portrait painting came into fashion, those portrayed are never shown laughing. This would be read as a sign of their lack of gravity. Sir Thomas More was famous for his

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

2

Shakespeare and laughter

love of jesting, but in Holbein’s sketch of the More family no one, not even the household jester Henry Pattensen, is laughing, Paradoxically, however, laughter was seen as precisely the right response to the folly of others. It was a social corrective that mocked those who transgressed societal norms. Laughter was a symbol of our double nature – both of our fallen state, and our capacity for reason and judgement. As Aristotle had pointed out, humankind was the only animal capable of laughter. Montaigne summed up the paradox of laughter with the words: ‘Our specific property is to be equally laughable and able to laugh.’4 When Shakespeare refers to laughter, he evokes the conventional associations of frivolity, immorality and folly. Two brief passages might serve as examples. One is the description of the court at Troy in Troilus and Cressida. Pandarus relates the goings-on at court to Cressida, and draws attention to the court as resounding with laughter: Pandarus: But there was such laughing! Queen Hecuba laughed that her eyes ran o’er. Cressida: With millstones. Pandarus: And Cassandra laughed. Cressida: But there was a more temperate fire under the pot of her eyes – or did her eyes run o’er too? Pandarus: And Hector laughed. Cressida: At what was all this laughing? Pandarus: Marry, at the white hair that Helen spied on Troilus’ chin. Cressida: An’t had been a green hair I should have laughed too. (1.2.132–42)

In this highly patterned prose passage the insistent repetition of the word ‘laugh’ does not, as might be expected, create an atmosphere of gaiety and conviviality. Instead, the effect is disturbing. We catch a glimpse of a world where the ruling class is engaged in frivolous games, whose laughter is triggered by a trifle, as Cressida makes clear with her dry comment. While in this example the object of mockery is Troilus, he triumphantly turns the tables in his riposte: he declares a forked hair of his to stand for Paris, thus implying that Helen cuckolds her husband. Provoking laughter is a contest of oneupmanship, where one sneering remark gives way to the next. The play is threaded with laughter – as in the famous episode where Patroclus struts like an actor mimicking the Greek heroes for Achilles’ delectation – but the association is never benign, always one of vanity and vacuity. A more positive view of laughter is presented in The Merchant of Venice. At the beginning of the play when Antonio refers to his melancholy frame of mind, Graziano urges him to follow his own example and enjoy life:

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Introduction

3

Let me play the fool. With mirth and laughter let old wrinkles come, And let my liver rather heat with wine Than my heart cool with mortifying groans. Why should a man whose blood is warm within Sit like his grandsire cut in alabaster, Sleep when he wakes, and creep into the jaundice By being peevish? . . . (1.1.79–86)

This rather attractive paean to a carpe diem philosophy is, however, disqualified in the very same scene. Bassanio remarks casually, ‘Graziano speaks an infinite deal of nothing, more than any man in all Venice. His reasons are as two grains of wheat hid in two bushels of chaff: you shall seek all day ere you find them, and when you have them they are not worth the search’ (1.1.114–18). The advocate for laughter is the embodiment of frivolity in a play that is thronged with playboys and golden girls. Graziano proves the truth of Bassiano’s words throughout, but most pointedly in the trial scene. His mocking laughter at Shylock exceeds all bounds of moderation and decorum, and it is he who has the last word, flaying an enemy who has been vanquished and broken: ‘In christ’ning shalt thou have two godfathers. / Had I been judge thou shouldst have had ten more, / To bring thee to the gallows, not the font’ (4.1.394–6). Christian charity is not his strong point. When Shakespeare dramatizes situations where characters laugh on stage, the effect is similarly ambivalent. On the one hand scenes related to the gulling of Malvolio in Twelfth Night are brilliant set pieces of comedy, in particular the eavesdropping scene where the plotters pass comments on the hoodwinked steward. But the gulling device turns sour, and excessive laughter is rejected within the play. An analogous effect is created in play-within-the-play situations such as the Masque of the Nine Worthies in Love’s Labour’s Lost. The Masque is so hopelessly bungled a performance that it serves as a farcical episode for the amusement of the audience. But the courtiers who are so busy jeering at the inept actors are themselves put into place: ‘This is not generous, not gentle, not humble’ Holofernes protests (5.2.623), and the ladies, too, register their disapproval. When Shakespeare sets out to evoke laughter in the theatre, however, he comes up with a set of superb comic creations (Lance, Falstaff, Bottom, Dogberry, the fools) and some hilarious comic plots. Laughter in real life and laughter in the theatre are two different things, it seems. His comic sequences were partly written to order for star comedians in his theatre company, and

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

4

Shakespeare and laughter

partly inspired by developments in early modern humour. One of these was an increasing store set by wit and verbal humour. Another was the idea of the wise fool articulated by Erasmus. In general one might sum up his humour as inclusionary and playful, not vindictive. The idea of laughter as a disciplinary tool is overlaid by the function of laughter to create a sense of community. Furthermore, in the early modern stage, and in particular in Shakespeare’s comedies, entertainment takes precedence over didacticism. Pleasure, not instruction, is the brief of the Shakespearean theatre. The early modern age saw a number of important developments in the history of laughter. I will look at a number of them in separate chapters. The most crucial of these was the evolving culture of courtly manners. Throughout Europe the power of the aristocracy was being reined in by absolute rulers. The elite found a new sense of legitimacy and self-definition in an elaborate cult of civility. The cornerstone of this idea was laid in Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier. It spawned a flood of courtesy manuals that provided guidelines for aspiring courtiers and upwardly mobile citizens. In Chapter 1 I look at the courtly precepts on laughter. At court hostile jesting was now derided as vulgar. Taste and decorum were the key values. Wit was a technique of self-promotion, a means of displaying one’s skill at entertaining one’s peers. Laughter was above all a form of pleasant diversion or a lubricant deployed to defuse social tension. Shakespeare adapted these norms for the public theatre and stages them in Love’s Labour’s Lost. What he also imports into the theatre is the aristocratic notion of play as gratuitous pleasure, serving no other purpose than to entertain. In Chapter 2 I discuss ideas about laughter that circulated in early modern discourse. Renaissance scientists and scholars were fascinated by the phenomenon of laughter, and a number of theories were put forward to explain what triggered laughter. While most philosophers continued to draw on the classical idea of laughter as an expression of ridicule, increasingly the idea was mooted that laughter might be bound up with pleasure, not derision. Humanist scholars such as Erasmus and Sir Thomas More were enthusiastic collectors of jests and witty apophthegms and lauded the effects of pleasurable recreation. Interestingly, it was Erasmus who spearheaded a campaign to reform manners that gained particular momentum in the age of religious reform. Popular festivity was disapproved of as a site of unbridled licence and denounced for encouraging pagan customs. Religious drama was forbidden as an expression of idolatry, and alleged remnants of paganism came under rigorous attack. The eradication of the tradition of mystery plays led to the birth of a professional theatre based in London. Recreation became a commodity purveyed in a fledgling entertainment industry. The main function of laughter in the Shakespearean theatre was to create social cohesion within an audience drawn from all ranks of society.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Introduction

5

Chapter 3 focuses on changes in early modern humour. The first few decades of the professional theatre had been dominated by star comedians such as Dick Tarlton and Will Kemp. In the 1590s tragedians took over. A shift in taste is discernible, away from the pratfalls and improvisational repartee of the early generation of comedians. Shakespearean clowns are largely replaced by wise fools, quibbles and puns take the place of malapropisms and scurrilous humour. A similar development might be traced in the burgeoning genre of jestbook literature. A closer look at Twelfth Night reveals that in Shakespeare’s last romantic comedy he incorporates many of the trends in laughter outlined so far. Chapter 4 considers attacks on laughter by Puritans and religious reformers. I argue that it is not laughter per se that troubles them. It is gratuitous laughter that serves no other purpose than to please. Their strictures on laughter are focused in antitheatrical invective. Interestingly, Puritan censure of the theatre was inextricably bound up with a critique of the market economy. This chapter also looks at Falstaff, Shakespeare’s greatest comic creation. Falstaff embodies many of the elements of the caricature of Puritans that gained such popularity in the early modern stage. Puritans were parodied as hypocritical windbags who secretly indulged in the excesses they publicly deplored, lechery and gluttony. But Falstaff is more than the travesty of a Puritan. He also stands for the idea of obsessive play and pleasure as an end in itself. And it was precisely this notion that antitheatrical critics identified in the commercial theatre. In the final chaper I take a closer look at the book that launched the idea of the wise fool, Erasmus’ Praise of Folly. Erasmus is indebted to the ancient concept of learned ignorance that Renaissance thinkers such as Nicolas Cusa had revived. They believed that the goal of knowledge was to show us our ignorance. In Praise of Folly Folly holds up a mirror to humanity and poses the question: who is the real fool? Erasmus uses laughter to defamiliarize the world and expose the absurdity of human pretensions. What does not become clear, however, is to what extent laughter serves as a political tool. The ambiguity inherent in humour undercuts any didactic point it purports to make. The most Erasmian wise fool in Shakespeare’s plays is Lear’s Fool. His office is to mockingly reveal Lear’s own folly. The question I further explore is the function of laughter in Shakespearean tragedy. I suggest that laughter articulates the strain of scepticism about a stable worldview that traversed the early modern age and undercut its sense of optimism. Throughout this book I have attempted to take the many overlapping meanings of the term laughter into account. Laughter refers to a response to humour, but it is also used as a synonym for mirth or pleasure. Finally, laughter refers to a signal in social interaction. The most recent scientific attempt to get to grips with the vexed issue of laughter has produced some startling insights.

6

Shakespeare and laughter

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Laughter, the leading neuroscientist Robert Provine finds, has little to do with the comic. It is above all a form of communication. Laughter is a social gesture that regulates human interaction. In fieldwork in which Provine canvassed the main sources of humour in social contexts, he came up with a list of the funniest comments, judging by the levels of hilarity that they provoked. Among these were: Poor boy looks just like his father. He tried to blow his nose but he missed. That’s because you’re a male. You don’t have to drink, just buy us drinks. Are you working here or just trying to look busy?5

Not, one might think, the world’s greatest jokes. The point is that laughter is a social signal that retroactively or proleptically defines a situation as funny. Provine establishes that most laughter in a community takes place before a joke is made, as a sign that all members of the group are willing to enter into the play frame. Laughter after a humorous remark was more frequently initiated by the person responsible for the utterance than by the other participants. Further research shows that bosses instigate laughter while junior staff laugh more frequently.6 Laughter can function as a tool of power by demonstrating who controls laughter. Conversely, it can work as a social lubricant serving to ease social relations. It can be deployed as a instrument of aggression or to defuse tension in a social situation. What makes laughter such an endlessly slippery topic for a researcher is the ambiguity of laughter. Laughter can bear diametrically opposed significations. The meanings conveyed can only be deduced from the specific constellation. Worse: laughter can actually send opposing messages in the very same context. There is an inbuilt disclaimer in a laughing situation that immediately defuses the impact of what instigated laughter in the first place. This disclaimer consists in declaring, in effect, ‘this is just a game’. Laughter is an articulation both of pleasure and of power relations. Anthropologists are still undecided whether laughter is primarily an expression of hostility or of playfulness. It is unclear whether the evolutionary roots of laughter lie in aggressive teeth-baring or in a signal indicating non-hostility and inviting play.7 Laughter has consistently been described as involving an awareness of straddling two worlds simultaneously. It emerges from an act of the imagination. Arthur Koestler has coined the term bisociation for the sense of disjunction between reality and a humorous frame that laughter evokes. Laughing implies perceiving a situation ‘in two self-consistent but incompatible frames of refer-

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Introduction

7

ence at the same time’.8 The perception of what strikes us as ludicrous depends on a temporary sense of distance to whatever excites laughter – a sense of estrangement from norms that usually hold. Laughter is the result of a shift in perception that creates a sense of pleasure.9 This is why I wish to propose an analogy between laughter and the world of play. As Johan Huizinga defines it, ‘play is a voluntary activity or occupation executed within certain fixed limits of time and place, according to rules freely accepted but absolutely binding, having its aim in itself and accompanied by a feeling of tension, joy and the consciousness that it is “different” from “ordinary life”’.10 The main affinities between laughter and play lie in the momentary creation of a separate world. While laughing we briefly enter a game that, as Wittgenstein demonstated, makes sense only according to its own rules. Above all, it is the awareness of the situation being just a game that marks both play and laughter. Finally, play is a disinterested activity, ‘connected with no material interest, and no profit’.11 What spurs both play and laughter is pleasure. Huizinga himself sees laughter as affiliated with play ‘without being absolutely bound up with play’.12 But this stems from his idea of laughter as being the opposite of seriousness. Play, however, encompasses both the serious and nonserious. I suggest that one of the most insidious fallacies is the belief that laughter is trivial. The function of laughter is to make things trivial – and thus gain mastery over whatever threatens to overwhelm us. Laughter is a serious matter. A case in point is gallows humour, humour in the throat of death or disaster. Laughter is a strategy of self-defence that enables us to face sources of fear or pain. A further analogy that this book explores is that between laughter and the aesthetic. Both have affinities to the notion of play. It was Sir Philip Sidney in The Defence of Poesy who mooted the idea of art as a realm distinct from everyday life. He famously defended poetry against the accusation of being a tissue of lies by claiming that the poet ‘nothing affirms’.13 It was an error to judge art by the yardstick of verisimilitude to real life. Instead, the artist was in the business of producing golden worlds, ideal spheres that bore only a passing resemblance to reality. To be sure, the depiction of these ideal worlds served a higher purpose. They were meant to hold up an image of a more perfect world for humanity to emulate. I suggest that the theatre adopted Sidney’s ideas – but largely jettisoned his didactic impulse. Instead, the theatre celebrated the human capacity to refashion the world through art. As in play, it demonstrated its power to take control of reality in the realm of the imagination.

8

Shakespeare and laughter

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Roads not taken In the face of such a vast subject my approach has been thematic, focusing on selected topics with no pretensions to a comprehensive overview of the field. Aspects I have not dealt with are early modern rituals of shaming such as the charivari, aimed at marital couples who transgressed social norms (cuckolds or hen-pecked husbands, for instance). Nor have I looked at cross-dressing, a comic device that undermined gender norms both in society and on the stage, in the light of the recent spate of literature on this subject. Neither is this a book about laughter in Shakespearean performance. While admittedly a topic well worth researching, it would merit a second book. Laughter is probably one of the most contingent elements in performance, and might result from a host of factors other than the humour on stage. A brief example relates to a performance of Henry V at the Barbican Theatre during the summer season of the Royal Shakespeare Company in 2001. In a scene depicting the arrogant French aristocracy mocking the English before the battle, one of the nobles, Constable, remarks that the English are remarkably dim-witted, ‘leaving their wits with their wives’. He continues, ‘And then, give them great meals of beef, and iron and steel, they will eat like wolves and fight like devils’. To which Orléan retorts, ‘Ay, but these English are shrewdly out of beef ’ (Henry V 3.7.134–7). These not particularly comic lines had the audience in stiches. The context was simply the unintentional topicality of these trivial remarks in the play, alluding to the issue that dominated the news that summer: the BSE crisis or mad cow disease. The laughter in the audience was aroused by the discrepancy of having the headlines of the day echoed by the Bard, usually in the business of delivering universal truths. It tells us nothing at all about the play or about Shakespeare’s sense of humour. Furthermore, what this book will not do is elaborate the various theories of laughter that have evolved over time. Three main schools of thought predominate, none of which can claim precedence over the other. The superiority school was given its decisive impulse by Thomas Hobbes, who explained laughter as follows: ‘laughter is nothing else but sudden glory arising from some sudden conception of some eminency in ourselves, by comparison with the infirmity of others’.14 Laughter stems from malice and is an articulation of aggression. This idea was rooted in Platonic–Aristotelian thought, but Hobbes was decisive in shifting the focus away from what provokes laughter (the ugly or ridiculous, according to Aristotle) to the laughers themselves. The incongruity theory, originally aired by the philosopher Francis Hutcheson,

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Introduction

9

emphatically rejected Hobbes’s misanthropic view of the sources of laughter. Laughter, claimed Hutcheson, was a cognitive response triggered by the perception of incongruity: ‘the cause of laughter is the bringing together of images which have contrary additional ideas, as well as some resemblance in the principal idea’. Laughter was purged of its hostile content and presented as a reaction to ‘the pleasure of surprise’.15 The third most influential strand of thought was initiated by Freud in his book Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious. For Freud jokes express repressed aggressive or sexual wishes. Humour is a means to circumvent social taboos against both aggression and sexuality.16 Freud traces an analogy between the workings of dreams and wit, both of which covertly reveal hidden impulses. The energy that is usually invested in repressing these desires is expended in laughter. This idea has become known by the term relief theory. Laughter serves as a hydraulic safety-valve for the unconscious. None of these theories is universally applicable to all examples of laughter. Indeed, they seem to shed less light on laughter than mirror the obsessions of their period of origin. A case in point is another influential theory, Henri Bergson’s concept of laughter. His ideas are regarded as an offshoot of the superiority school, but Bergson adds a new dimension to the discussion of laughter. For Bergson laughter fulfils the function of a social corrective, but it is not linked to an affective impulse like malice. On the contrary, laughter is stimulated by ‘a momentary anaesthesia of the heart’ and appeals purely to the intelligence.17 The fault that laughter serves to rectify is alienation from the vital impulses of life – which is revealed when people act like automatons or marionettes. Laughter is evoked by ‘something mechanical encrusted on the living’ – people provoke laughter when they remind us of machines.18 What is clear is that Bergson’s much-cited ideas on laughter reflect his interest in vitalism and intuition. It is of a piece with his critique of the soulless mechanization of life in industrial civilization. A host of other philosophers such as Kant and Schopenhauer have formulated their own theories of laughter. However, none of them is wholly satisfactory when applied to specific examples. As Bergson puts it, laughter is like foam on the waves of the ocean. It evaporates immediately whenever we try to get hold of a handful.19 A potted history of laughter Laughter increasingly became a marker of taste and style. How you laughed and what you laughed about defined who you were. This development finds its culmination in the famous remarks by Lord Chesterfield, who rejects laughter

10

Shakespeare and laughter

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

altogether. Written in a letter dated 1748, Chesterfield exhorts his son to abstain from laughing: Having mentioned laughing, I must particularly warn you against it: and I could heartily wish that you may often be seen to smile, but never heard to laugh while you live. Frequent and loud laughter is the characteristic of folly and ill manners: it is the manner in which the mob express their silly joy at silly things; and they call it being merry. In my mind there is nothing so illiberal, and so ill bred, as audible laughter. True wit, or sense, never yet made anybody laugh; they are above it: they please the mind and give a cheerfulness to the countenance. But it is low buffoonery, or silly accidents, that always excite laughter . . . a plain proof, in my mind, how low and unbecoming a thing laughter is. Not to mention the disagreeable noise that it makes and the shocking distortion of the face that it occasions. Laughter is easily restrained by a very little reflection; but, as it is generally connected with the idea of gaiety, people do not enough attend to its absurdity.20

This statement has been endlessly satirised as the notorious manifesto of an effete aristocracy. However, there is nothing very original about the sentiments expressed by Chesterfield. The association of laughter with folly and excess, the call for restraint and propriety, and a distaste for facial distortion are all familiar classical ideas. To be sure, Chesterfield takes the question of refinement to an extreme, rejecting any form of laughter as a sign of vulgarity. Chesterfield’s remarks are the apotheosis of the movement to judge laughter in terms of taste. By the time Chesterfield’s Letters were published in 1774 the tide of history had turned. In the course of the eighteenth century laughter was reinvented. The cult of sensibility saw humankind as consisting of essentially benign creatures who, as Shaftesbury claimed, possessed a natural moral sense of what was good. Sympathy and benevolence were the new keywords. The stage was set for a new theory of laughter. In 1725 the philosopher Francis Hutcheson published three essays on laughter in the Dublin Journal, aiming to refute once and for all the ideas of that bête noire of eighteenth-century thought, Thomas Hobbes. Hutcheson picked off Hobbes’s ideas of laughter point by point: if laughter is inextricably intertwined with a sense of superiority, would Hobbes kindly explain (a) why we laugh in admiration of wit; (b) why we often feel superior without the urge to laugh? Instead of superiority, Hutcheson posited that what really activated laughter was incongruity. The influence of his somewhat facile reasoning was enormous. Now the pleasures of laughter could be wholeheartedly endorsed. It was contemptuous laughter that was labelled an aberration – pure laughter was innocent, natural, benign. Laughter had its roots in sympathy, not malice.21 By the time of the Victorians this had become a truism. The floodgates were opened for a cult of humour. Jonson had appropriated the term

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Introduction

11

humour (originally bodily fluid) to define characters marked by obsessive singularity. Now quaint and whimsical ‘humorists’ (humorous characters) populated the scene of English literature. Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy was probably the most famous exponent of this type. Shakespeare, too, was adopted into the fold. For Carlyle, Shakespeare, the hero as poet, has an ‘overflowing love of laughter’. As he explains: ‘Laughter means sympathy.’ Shakespeare’s laughter ‘seems to flow from him in floods . . . his whole heart laughs’.22 In 1690 Sir William Temple had laid the foundation for the idea of a unique English sense of humour. He claimed that England was the land of individuality, peopled by whimsical eccentrics.23 The myth that Shakespeare reflected a distinctly English sense of humour took root and remained in force until the beginning of the twentieth century. As late as 1935 the influential Shakespearean critic Caroline Spurgeon in her book Shakespeare’s Imagery and What It Tells Us names humour as a part of Shakespeare’s essence. His sense of humour is shaped by his other characteristics: ‘his passion for health, for soundness, cleanliness and wholesomeness’.24 Like his delight in outdoor life, his love of animals, his decency and humanity, his sense of humour marks him as the epitome of Englishness. The stock of laughter has been implacably on the rise ever since. Those restrained in laughter are accused of lacking a sense of humour. In today’s entertainment culture, laughter is one of the most highly valorized goods. The realms that were closed down to laughter in the early modern period – the political, the social, the religious – have all been reconquered, one after another. The entertainment factor in politics has become a commonplace. If only a couple of decades ago manuals on advertising warned, ‘Spending money is serious business . . . People do not buy from clowns’,25 today the obverse is true – only sex rivals humour as the most effective means to sell a commodity. Companies engage clowns on a regular basis to improve managerial morale. There is a proliferation of greasy gurus running laughter therapy clubs. Even the sphere of religion has not remained immune. Evangelicals have long rediscovered the attractions of laughter. Key in the word laughter in Amazon.com and the vast majority of the books listed deal with Christian laughter. Robert Provine describes the phenomenon of ‘holy laughter’, a movement whose main proponent is the Pentecostal revivalist Rodney Howard-Brown. At their meetings laughing for the Lord is practised, with Howard-Brown urging, ‘Let it bubble out of your belly like a river of living water.’26 We have moved from a culture in which laughter was proscribed to a world where laughter is prescribed. Not that this development might be traced back directly to Shakespeare. Instead, it might be attributed partly to the commercialization of entertainment that was given its initial impulse in the early modern age, and partly to our obsession with happiness and the pursuit of pleasure. Far more interesting is a key

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

12

Shakespeare and laughter

insight that Shakespeare provides in connection with laughter: laughter on stage is not the same as laughter in real life. Art is different from what we call real life. In Wittgensteinian terms, laughter on stage and laughter in real life are two separate games that are governed by different sets of laws. Real life is not more ‘real’ than the world of play – it simply follows its own code of rules. By privileging entertainment over didacticism, the Shakespearean theatre implements the radical idea that Sidney puts forward but whose name he dare not speak – the notion that the aesthetic is a world that obeys its own laws. Dr Johnson instinctively put his finger on it when he groused, ‘Shakespeare sacrifices virtue to convenience and is so much more careful to please than to instruct that he seems to write without any moral purpose.’27 This does not mean that art is created in some transcendental sphere, untouched by historical discourses. The real world provides raw material that is shaped into a theatrical artefact. Furthermore, the aesthetic and the social are inextricably bound up with each other – there is no realm of pure play. Nor does it mean that laughter may not, within specific constellations, bear a political impulse. But Shakespeare’s comedies continually remind us that they are performances, not a slice of reality. The comedies are cross-hatched with metatheatrical moments which foreground the fact that it is all a game staged for our entertainment. They draw attention to the fact that the audience is juggling two worlds simultaneously, the play world and the world outside. By making us laugh, they flaunt their power to elicit delight and wonder. Notes 1 www.mirror.co.uk/news/allnews/content_objectid=13420600_method=full_ siteid=5 0143_headline=-WHO-S-THE-FUNNIEST-BRIT-OF-ALL-TIME – name_page.html. 2 All citations from the plays are from The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt et al. (New York: Norton, 1997), except where specified. 3 See Juan Luis Vives, The Education of a Christian Woman: A Sixteenth-Century Manual, ed. Charles Fantazzi (1523; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), pp. 125, 129. 4 Montaigne, ‘On Democritus and Heraclitus’, in The Complete Essays, trans. M. A. Screech (London: Penguin, 1987), 1:50, p. 340. 5 Robert Provine, Laughter: A Scientific Investigation (London: Faber and Faber, 2000), pp. 41–2. 6 See Michael Mulkay, On Humour: Its Nature and Its Place in Modern Society (Cambridge: Polity, 1988), pp. 152–77. 7 Mahadev L. Apte, Humour and Laughter: An Anthropological Approach (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), p. 245.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Introduction

13

8 Arthur Koestler, ‘Humour and Wit’, Encyclopaedia Britannica, fifteenth edition (Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1977), p. 5. 9 See John Morreall, ‘A New Theory of Laughter’, in The Philosophy of Laughter and Humor, ed. John Morreall (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1987), pp. 128–38. 10 Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955), p. 28. 11 Ibid., p. 13. 12 Ibid., p. 6. 13 Sir Philip Sidney, An Apology for Poetry, or The Defence of Poesy, ed. R. W. Maslen (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), p. 103. 14 Quoted in Morreall, The Philosophy of Laughter, p. 20. 15 Quoted in ibid., p. 32. Notions about the importance of surprise as a factor in generating laughter have been mooted since Aristotle, but Hutcheson was the first to develop a new theory based wholly on the perception of incongruity. 16 Sigmund Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, trans. James Strachey (New York: Norton: 1960). 17 Henri Bergson, ‘Laughter’, in Wylie Sypher (ed.), Comedy (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1956), p. 64. 18 Ibid., p. 84. 19 Ibid., p. 190. 20 Quoted in E. Sprague Allen, ‘Chesterfield’s Objection to Laughter’, Modern Language Notes, 38 (1923), 279–80. 21 For an overview of this development I am indebted to Stuart M. Tave, The Amiable Humorist: A Study in the Comic Theory and Criticism of the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960). 22 Thomas Carlyle, From ‘On Heroes and Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History’, in A Carlyle Reader: Selections from the Writings of Thomas Carlyle, ed. G. B. Tennyson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), p. 401. 23 William Temple, ‘Of Poetry’, in J. E. Spingarn (ed.), Critical Essays of the Seventeenth Century, Vol. 3 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1908), pp. 73–109. 24 Caroline F. E. Spurgeon, Shakespeare’s Imagery and What It Tells Us (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1952), p. 206. 25 Claude C. Hopkins, one of the founders of modern American advertising, in My Life in Advertising/Scientific Advertising (Chicago: Advertising Publications, 1966), quoted in Daniel Wickberg, The Senses of Humor: Self and Laughter in Modern America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998), pp. 220–1. 26 Provine, Laughter, p. 136. 27 Samuel Johnson, Preface to The Plays of William Shakespeare (1765), in Selected Poetry and Prose, ed. Frank Brody and W. K. Wimsatt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), p. 307.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

This page intentionally left blank

1

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Courtliness and laughter

A

handful of courtiers gather at the court of their prince and amuse themselves devising games to fleet the time carelessly and beguile the ladies. Charming, gracious, and urbane, the courtiers engage in a series of witty skirmishes with the ladies, bandying jests and playing merry pranks. In the mockserious tone that characterizes their interaction, their conversation turns to the theme of jesting itself and to the norms that define the wit of the ideal courtier. The court in question is not that of Navarre but the court of Urbino. The world of Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier (1528) displays a striking affinity with Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost, not only with regard to the courtly arena that both texts present but also because of their shared concern with ideals of courtly behaviour. Castiglione’s treatise was the most famous in a series of Italian and French courtesy books that were translated and adapted to the situation of English society. The implications of this wave of cultural imports for a developing sense of courtly norms and the way Shakespeare recruits these norms for the world of the popular theatre bear further investigation. In Book 2 of The Courtier, the courtiers discuss the prescriptions that govern the proper art of jesting. Aristotelian moderation is the key word: the ideal courtier should take care ‘not to appear malicious and spiteful’ and not to make remarks ‘solely to annoy and hurt’.1 Derision should be constrained by rules: jeering at ‘some poor unfortunate soul’ or jokes about the vicious (2.46; p. 106) are frowned upon, as are those that impugn the reputation of a lady (2.83; pp. 131–2). Blasphemous jests and indecency should be avoided, particularly in the presence of ladies (2.68; p. 122). In the inimitable blend of prudence and ethics that marks their dialogue, the courtiers admonish each other to take care neither to offend the powerful nor to mock the weak. Both discretion and compassion are held up as ideals which shape the conduct of the exemplary courtier. What Castiglione calls for is a change in the quality of jesting. He advocates a shift from using taunts mainly as a weapon to humiliate rivals to displaying

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

16

Shakespeare and laughter

wit in a brilliant duel of repartee and wordplay. It is the recreational aspect of laughter that is stressed: ‘whatever moves to laughter restores the spirit, gives pleasure, and for the moment keeps one from remembering those vexing troubles of which our life is full’ (2.45; pp. 105–6). Indeed, the art of correct jesting is an essential skill to acquire and hone in courtly society. By no means, however, must the courtier descend to the level of a professional buffoon who knows no bounds of decorum but attempts to move his audience to laughter irrespective of time and place (2.50; p. 109). These injunctions were not exactly new – Castiglione lifted them wholesale from Cicero’s De oratore (throwing in a handful of Cicero’s witty tales as examplars for good measure). A key term that Castiglione introduces is the notion of sprezzatura – studied negligence or ‘recklessness’, as it was translated by Sir Thomas Hoby in the edition which appeared in 1561. Later translations use the term nonchalance or insouciance.2 Castiglione himself points out that he is using a hitherto derogatory expression in a new sense for the one ‘universal rule’ that he wishes to posit: ‘that is to avoid affectation in every way possible as though it were some very rough and dangerous reef; and (to pronounce a new word perhaps) to practice in all things a certain sprezzatura [nonchalance], so as to conceal all art and make whatever is done or said appear to be without effort and almost without any thought about it’ (1.26; p. 32). The ideal courtier must cultivate an air of effortlessness and project a (hard-earned) sense of natural superiority and grace (grazia). The ability to conceal one’s art with ease is defined by Harry Berger as ‘the ability to show that one is not showing all the effort one obviously put into learning how to show that one is not showing effort’.3 This concept became enormously influential in moulding the ideal of the courtier and later that of the gentleman in English culture. It epitomizes all that was associated with courtliness, for both emulators and critics. The decisive source for this idea was Cicero’s De officiis, where he discusses corporeal propriety as closely bound up with virtue. ‘This concept of the fitting is to be observed in every act and every word, and also in every movement and posture of the body . . . Our stance and walk, our sitting and reclining, our facial expression and our eyes, and the movement of our hands should all preserve that element of propriety.’4 Castiglione turned Cicero on his head by shaping decorum into a concern less with the ethics than with the aesthetics of behaviour. The Renaissance was fascinated by the idea that the individual self could be constructed as a work of art.5 However, any trace of strenuosity was to be eschewed as a sign of excess and a lack of discipline: ‘we may call that art true art which does not seem to be art,’ Castiglione remarks. He explicitly includes bodily demeanour in the scope of this idea, calling for ‘the grace of that cool disinvoltura [ease] (for when it is a matter of bodily movements

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Courtliness and laughter

17

many call it that) in many of the men and women here present, who seem in words, in laughter, in posture not to care; or seem to be thinking more of everything than of that’ (1.26; pp. 32–3). The idea of art concealing art is borrowed from Ovid’s injunctions on seduction in The Art of Love – Castiglione melds Ciceronian and Ovidian precepts to apply them to all forms of behaviour.6 The influence of conduct literature on changing norms of behaviour have generally been discussed in connection with Norbert Elias’s magisterial work, The Civilizing Process (1939).7 Elias discusses changes in codes of manners from medieval to early modern society in the context of the changing role of the aristocracy. In the evolving nation state the court was deeply vested in minimising the influence of local power bases. This was achieved partly through the development of a state bureaucracy with lucrative openings for the nobility and gentry, and partly through the emergence of the court as the centre of political life and a magnet for social life. He traces an analogy between the increasingly restrictive norms regulating social interaction and the emergence of an absolute state centred on the sovereign and court, a state that arrogated to itself the monopoly of power in the regulation of law and order. The centralization of power was reflected in the emerging threshold of shame that emerged within aristocratic society, from which these norms were later diffused to other strata of society. New attitudes towards the body arose which itemized a roster of corporeal practices that were now deemed improper and were no longer permissible in public. Repressive bodily norms were increasingly internalized and a culture of self-surveillance became part of the psychological constitution of future generations. Although he does not look specifically at norms regulating laughter, the implications are clear: derisive, scornful laughter and jeering, hitherto one of the weapons deployed in aristocratic society to humiliate one’s opponent, are increasingly constrained by rules of decorum and consideration for others. Sympathy takes the place of mockery, and laughing at others is transmuted into laughing with others. Elias’s enormously influential theory of the progress of Western civilization has been called into question by a number of critics.8 The Civilizing Process was published only a few years after Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents, which first appeared in 1930 and to which Elias pays tribute. Despite the fact that Elias’s theory is grounded in historical evidence, a common emphasis on the repression of ‘natural’ instincts and the internalization of social discipline marks both approaches. It is remarkable that a belief in the decline from a golden age of greater spontaneity, an age of a breed of men and women closer to nature, has threaded Western culture ever since antiquity. Indeed, the lament for the lost age of freedom and the castigation of the disciplinary regime that shapes modern society might be regarded as an inversion of the Enlightenment belief in the

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

18

Shakespeare and laughter

grand onward march of civilization.9 Contemporary cultural historians are more sceptical of teleological narratives, preferring to read history in terms of an interplay of shifts and continuities, change and repetition. What Elias posits as a new development is indeed a time-honoured strategy of elite self-definition.10 Instead of locating a psychic development in terms of increasing self-discipline and a heightened sense of shame, it might be more fruitful to see codes of manners as forms of social practice that are evolved and strategically turned to account by certain groups. In other words, what is at issue may be less a case of people at different periods being subjected to disciplinary pressures than the development of codes of shame and disgust by certain groups of society to serve specific purposes. In this connection the work of Pierre Bourdieu has been particularly helpful. As he points out, if societies ‘set such store on the seemingly most insignificant details of dress, bearing, physical and verbal manners, the reason is that, treating the body as a memory, they entrust to it in abbreviated and practical, i.e. mnemonic form the fundamental principles of the arbitrary content of the culture’.11 Bourdieu uses the term habitus to describe the forms of behaviour, the dress codes and body postures that become inscribed on the individual member of a social group and that bear the imprint of the social field within which the individual is embedded. Through their association with social elites, certain types of behaviour bear the cachet of prestige, status and authority. At around the same time as The Courtier appeared in print, Erasmus’ De civilitate morum puerilium (On Good Manners for Boys) circulated among the educated classes of the entire continent.12 It was published in 1526, translated into English in 1530 and soon became a school textbook. Erasmus launched the term civility (civilitas) in popular usage, drawing on the medieval concept of courtesy and the classical ideal of urbanity but giving them a distinctly humanist turn with his emphasis on the link between the personal and the public.13 Humanist educators such as Erasmus, Vives, and Elyot defined the new role of the aristocracy as that of service to the nation state. No longer was birth a sufficient criterion for membership in the elite – the new yardsticks were virtue and education. They called for a renewed emphasis on corporeal control, a notion they demanded be inculcated in the young generation at a early stage. Self-restraint was now hailed as cultural legitimation for the control of others. One’s inner qualifications were demonstrated through one’s demeanour. Accordingly, displaying proper behaviour was an index of one’s moral superiority. It became of increasing importance to display one’s membership of the ruling class through one’s external conduct. Manners were a marker of social identity – and, concomitantly, a way of drawing boundary lines between the elite and other ranks of society.

Courtliness and laughter

19

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Erasmus addressed his remarks on manners to children in general, not just the well-born – virtue and manners could be acquired by all. His comments on correct laughter bear citing at length: To laugh at every word or deed is the sign of a fool; to laugh at none the sign of a blockhead. It is quite wrong to laugh at improper words or actions. Loud laughter and the immoderate mirth that shakes the whole body and is for that reason called ‘discord’ by the Greeks, are unbecoming to any age but much more so to youth. The neighing sound that some people make when they laugh is also unseemly. And the person who opens his mouth wide in a rictus, with wrinkled cheeks and exposed teeth, is also impolite . . . The face should express mirth in such a way that it neither distorts the appearance of the mouth nor evinces a dissolute mind . . . If something so funny should occur that it produces uncontrolled laughter of this sort, the face should be covered with a napkin or with the hand.14

None of the ideas adumbrated by Erasmus is original – they echo ideas put forward in earlier eras, from the Aristotelian concept of a golden mean, urging a median path between the extremes of boorishness or buffoonery, to the classical distaste for distortion of the face through grimaces. Like spitting and sneezing, laughter called for self-control. Laughter defined who you were. As Henry Peacham puts it in a seventeeth-century courtesy manual, citing Ecclesiasticus: ‘by gait, laughter, and apparel, a man is known what he is’.15 Boisterous laughter was a sign of a lack of control over involuntary bodily reactions. It bore the stigma of vulgarity. Furthermore, laughter was a sign of frivolity or foolishness. By moulding one’s demeanour in accordance with norms of virtue one could attain the qualifications that, in conjunction with learning, legitimized one’s inclusion in the ruling elite. Medieval culture had attached an immense importance to courtesy, as the flood of manuals testifies. What gave the cultivation of manners a new urgency in early modern Europe was the wide-ranging transformation of the aristocracy. Earlier codifications had often been addressed to young pages within noble households, with the stress lying on household rituals of service. In early modern conduct literature the focus on the meal and the household disappears. It shifts to proper conduct in society at large. No longer is the relationship of deference within a network of allegiance of paramount importance. Instead, urbanity is foregrounded as a central concept, with social relations among peers seen as of crucial importance.16 In is in this context that Anna Bryson identifies two main impulses in the codification of manners. These might be subsumed under two headings: selfpresentation and accommodation.17 At a time of transition from a society defined by hierarchical bonds of service in medieval households to a mode of urbanity

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

20

Shakespeare and laughter

centred on the city and the court, manners gained new meaning as a technique of self-display. In this period ‘there is an marked additional preoccupation with the full-scale dramatization of social identity – a systematic attempt to relate rules of behaviour to questions of individual personality and a stress on what may be termed self-presentation or “self-fashioning”’.18 The Ciceronian notion that the body was a text from which character could be read was bound up with the idea that identity could actually be moulded through the modes of behaviour that were inculcated with education. The need to make a good impression became a major social imperative. As far as laughter was concerned, how one laughed and what one laughed about were now indicators of taste and style. The deployment of polished wit as opposed to horseplay and what was increasingly seen as ‘vulgar’ humour was an instrument in the arsenal of selfdramatization. The second function that codes of conduct fulfilled in this period was that of easing social relations among large groups of members of the elite, as were to be found in the environs of the court or the city. The imperative not to cause offence became a major preoccupation. The threshold of shame that Elias identifies has less to do with a growing sense of disgust or increasing repression than with the need to adapt to a large circle of peers within a circumscribed space. Social relations within peer groups became of greater importance than relations with inferiors. In the world of fluid social status, it was crucial to show a modicum of deference to all members of the society. As regards laughter, it was not sympathy with others but strategic necessity that dictated the constraints on jeering and mockery. Laughter took on the function of a social lubricant, defusing tension and smoothing over potentially belligerent situations. Significantly, the most frequent reference to laughter in The Book of the Courtier is in a tag attached to the speaker prefacing his or her remark. As such it confirms the findings of the neuroscientist Robert Provine, who asserts that in social interaction laughter occurs more frequently before a joke than after.19 Laughter is a device that marks the adoption of a playful mode of discourse. In effect, it serves as a conversational cue to signal: this is a just a game.20 For not only are the courtiers ceaselessly absorbed in playing a variety of society games. The setting of Urbino evokes a fantasy world which operates according to different principles than the real world. It is a space of pure play, a golden realm of grace and refinement. To be sure, the text is suffused with the glow of nostalgia: set in 1507, it depicts a world that no longer existed by the time the manuscript was circulated a decade later, before seeing publication in 1528. The Book of the Courtier is a work of art that conceals its art under the guise of playful insouciance. The Renaissance set a high premium on play, but for

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Courtliness and laughter

21

humanists play was a means to serve a serious purpose (serio ludere). In Book 4 of The Courtier, the poet Pietro Bembo reveals the true vision behind the selfcultivation of the courtier – he was to turn himself into a work of art in order to win the confidence of his prince and thus exert political leverage, all in the name of the common good. This is precisely how humanist thinkers defined the role of the courtier – as wise counsellor to the ruler. The problem was that despotic rulers displayed a marked lack of enthusiasm for wholesome advice. Under the conditions of increasingly absolute rule in the courts of Europe, exhortations to princes were usually unheeded and sometimes positively heedless. Throughout Europe it appeared that the humanist project to educate and reform princes had largely failed, their ideals betrayed to the exigencies of power. In the Elizabethan court, it was the courtier and poet George Puttenham who mooted the notion of purely gratuitous art – as the expression of a truly aristocratic notion of play. In his treatise on the Arte of English Poesie (1589) Puttenham described poetic language as serving no function other than creating pleasure.21 Puttenham’s defence of poetic style needs to be set against the backdrop of a virulent Protestant attack on all forms of ornament, in particular figures of speech that exploited ambiguity for their effects. Poetic language was different from the discourse used in law courts or in other serious spheres of life, where ambiguity was an instrument for deception, Puttenham argued. By contrast, the figures of speech a poet used ‘tend but to dispose the hearers to mirth and solace by pleasant conveyance and efficacy of speech, they are not in truth to be accompted vices but for virtues in the poetical science very commendable’.22 What might be regarded as a flaw in serious discourse was an attractive embellishment to literary writing, which had no aim other than to please. Poetry was not a political tool; it did not make things happen. Imputing a didactic motive to art would demean one to the level of the ‘industrious sort’, the social climbers who increasingly encroached on the privileges of the nobility. In a similar spirit Sir John Harington touted the idea of purposeless play in a treatise where he defines play as ‘a spending of the time either in speech or action, whose only end is a delight of the mind or spirit’.23 The gratuitous nature of play is, of course, precisely what theorists of play would later ascertain: ‘play is an end in itself ’, as Roger Caillois put it.24 For Daniel Javitch, one of the most striking innovations about Castiglione’s ideal courtier was the fact that he served no purpose other than that of fashioning himself into a work of art. In contrast to Cicero’s ideal orator, whose wit was always bound up with the tripartite aim of rhetoric, namely to instruct or prove (probare), to delight (delectare), and to persuade to virtuous action (movere), the wit of the courtier fulfilled no objective other than to please. As Javitch points out, a critical controversy surrounds the fourth book of The Courtier; it

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

22

Shakespeare and laughter

remains a moot point to what extent it was an afterthought tacked on to the other three books. ‘The prime function of the courtier is to delight, and a large part of the book . . . suggests that the pleasure produced remains an end in itself.’25 As a corollary, in The Book of the Courtier laughter was evoked overwhelmingly to create pleasure and diversion. It was a resource for the maintenance of pleasurable social interaction. When jests were deployed as a weapon against one’s opponent at court, the hostile implications were simultaneously defused by the ambiguity cultivated in witty remarks and by the general frame of a play situation. As such, laughter served the function of reducing rather than exacerbating social tension. In addition, laughter was pressed in the service of differentiating the elite from all other classes. What it no longer did was serve a didactic purpose. Delight, not social correction, was its aim. This is not the whole story, of course. Castiglione himself might be seen as a product of the ‘generation of 1494’ who were traumatized by the French invasion of Italy, which precipitated an entire generation of the Italian nobility into awareness of their military and political impotence. His book might be regarded as part of an attempt to redefine the identity of the Italian aristocracy.26 The increasing codification of manners was fuelled by the need to find a new model of legitimation and self-definition for the elite. Furthermore, jesting in courtly environs was a game of oneupmanship for the courtier in continual competition with other performers. What appeared to be a game of leisurely recreation was in fact as serious a form of labour as the work of a professional entertainer. There is in fact no realm of pure play, uncontaminated by the world of politics: play and power are inextricably bound up with each other. As Frank Whigham points out, ‘They played because play was in fact work, play would take them to the top or keep them there; they knew that because their play would be taken seriously, they too must take it so.’27 Wit and jesting Characteristically, Castiglione lays stress on the entertainment factor in jesting. The power to delight is in itself a valuable skill that can facilitate self-promotion at court. It is imperative for the ideal courtier ‘that he should know how to sweeten and refresh the minds of his hearers, and move them discreetly to gaiety and laughter with amusing witticisms and pleasantries, so that, without ever producing tedium or satiety, he may continually give pleasure’ (2.41; p. 102). To be sure, he must steer clear of the extremes of either pedantry or affectation. In his section on jesting, Castiglione distinguishes between three types of humour: urbane narration, witty remarks, including puns, irony, and double entendre, and practical jokes (2.41–100).28 Above all, courtly jesting

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Courtliness and laughter

23

should bear the imprint of sprezzatura, and be clearly marked off from the strenous acts of professional comedians: ‘For in truth it would be unseemly for a gentleman to make faces, weep and laugh, mimic voices, wrestle with himself, as Berto does, or put on peasant’s clothes in front of everyone, like Strascino – and things of that sort, which suit them very well since it is their profession’ (2.50; p. 109). Castiglione mentions famous buffoons and comedians of the time not to disparage their art but to distinguish the skill of the dilettante gentleman from that of the professional. For what the courtier shares with the professional entertainer is an insight into the peformative nature of laughter. Both were aware of the importance of the audience in defining a performance as entertaining. The audience reserved the power to ratify a display of wit through laughter. At the same time, the accomplished performer had the power to manipulate an audience at will and for his own ends. The difference between the amateur entertainer at court and the professional comedian was that at court ‘all audience members are also performers, judgements are performances’.29 The concept of sprezzatura did not only carry the valency of ease and grace, however. The darker side of the term, inherent in the notion of art that conceals art, bears the implications of deception and dissimulation. The courtier was continually involved in a game of bluff. Under consistent pressure to promote himself, he was vested in projecting an image of studied ease that could not in fact tally with reality. If grace was a hard-earned attribute and not a natural gift, the appearance of casual ease that the courtier sustained had to be based on dissembling. But there was a more profound doubt that shadowed the notion of sprezzatura. Implicit in the idea of the performance of self was the suspicion that there was no convergence between outer appearance and inward reality at all – that the illusion was all there was. Castiglione himself spells out the link between jesting and dissembling quite clearly: ‘if a pleasantry is to be nicely turned, it must be flavoured with deceit, or dissimulation’ (2.83; p. 131). On one level this refers to an essential structural element in humorous speech – creating a surprise effect. Wordplay, for instance, evokes delight precisely by revealing an affinity between things that on the surface have nothing in common.30 But Castiglione is also alluding to humour as a weapon, to rhetorical ploys like understatement or irony, when we ‘use a word in which there is a hidden meaning quite different from the one we seem to intend’ (2.81; p. 130). Through the built-in device of a disclaimer (I’m only joking), wordplay serves as an instrument to humiliate and score off a rival at court – but without dropping the mask of mirth. Indeed, what is expressly praised is a sally that is ‘so veiled that it can be understood on the face of it, so that he could have dissimulated and claimed that he did not mean it in that

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

24

Shakespeare and laughter

way’ (2.93; p. 140). Aggression is dissimulated in such a manner as to make it palatable for the entire company, and save the face of the target of the jest. At the same time, humour is clearly deployed as an insidious weapon to injure an enemy. In point of fact, wit emerges as a far more deadly and artful tool than straightforward insult or a challenge to the opponent’s sense of honour. What appears at first sight as a set of rules regulating jesting and laughter in the interests of a more ethical, compassionate and restrained practice emerges at a second glance as an instruction manual for a more sophisticated art of warfare. In the competitive world of the court, jesting served a number of contradictory functions. It worked as a social lubricant, easing social relations among a large group of peers all in pursuit of prestige and privilege. It served to manage levels of tension among an elite caught up in a battle for advancement and helped to evade open conflict. Wit was also a technique of self-promotion, a means of displaying one’s skill at entertaining one’s peers or one’s superiors. The more subtle the verbal games, the greater the cachet that accrued to the courtier as a cultivated and sophisticated member of the peer group. Wit was an excellent method of enhancing one’s reputation and attracting attention among the large numbers of court attendants – attention that might well be translated into prestige and status. At the same time, the time-honoured use of humour as a punitive tool continued to be of importance. Indeed, wit was an excellent way of simultaneously attacking one’s opponent and dissimulating open antagonism. It remained a powerful weapon, both of attack and defence, albeit under the guise of a game. It appears that the civilizing process might not have reduced aggression, but merely diverted it into more subtle channels. Although in contemporary criticism the section on jesting in The Book of the Courtier is the least discussed aspect of the text, peers showed considerable interest in the jokes, as is apparent from Gabriel Harvey’s notes in his copy of the book.31 They were still being recycled a century later in courtesy treatises such as Richard Brathwait’s The English Gentleman (1631). The socially ambitious, from aspiring gallants to those with a professional interest in eloquence such as lawyers at the Inns of Court, evinced a keen interest in building up a stock of jests to which they could have recourse to add polish to their conversation.32 However, there was a strain of hostility to court culture which had its roots in the Protestant cult of sincerity and inwardness. The Puritan preacher William Gouge attacked the courtesy tradition in his domestic manual, Domesticall Duties (1622) with the words: ‘Religion and Grace consisteth not in Good Manners . . . Good manners are a hindrance to Grace.’33 The ambivalence towards elegant demeanour and conversation mirrored the contradictory attitudes toward rhetoric in general – in an age that saw a linguistic revolution in the use of English. The rise of literacy and the spread of cheap

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Courtliness and laughter

25

print had led to an intense interest in the English language, reflected in lively debates about the vernacular as compared to either Latin or foreign languages. The landmark achievement of the Reformation, the Tyndale Bible in English, reinforced a sense of pride and respectability in English which was fuelled by the spirit of nationalism that infused the age.34 The status of the language itself was at stake – as is visible in the debates that resonate in Love’s Labour’s Lost. The literati were fired by enthusiasm for the vernacular and passionately debated the advantages and disadvantages of enrichening the vocabulary of English with neologisms (known disparagingly as inkhorn terms). Denigration of English was equated with unpatriotic conduct. Ambivalence toward rhetoric was not merely a symptom of patriotism. It was inextricably bound up with the crisis of language in an age that insisted on the literalism of the Word and yet rejected the belief in the connection between words and things. The pre-Reformation world had been characterized by an intrinsic relation between the sacred and the mundane. The sacred inhered in everyday objects, in images, rituals, incantations, and, above all, in the practice of the Eucharist, where the divine was actually transmuted into material substances, bread and wine. With Luther’s insistence on the Word and nothing but the Word (sola scriptura), the links between the sacred and the mundane were abruptly severed – as the practice of idol-smashing set out to demonstrate. Protestant divines ceaselessly called attention to the Biblical Fall and humanity’s estrangement from the Book of Nature. In Eden Adam had had the power to name, a power that was reflected in the capacity to conjure up things though words. For words corresponded to the essence of things, as Plato seemed to confirm in Cratylus.35 But with the focus on the Word paradoxically a sense of forlornness and a fall ‘into the desert of arbitrary signs’36 was discernible – although it was not until Francis Bacon that a new concept of speech as a transparent scientific tool would be articulated. Foucault describes this sense of loss eloquently: ‘resemblances and signs have dissolved their former alliance; similitudes have become deceptive . . . words wander off on their own, without content, without resemblance to fill their emptiness’.37 Not that linguistic scepticism was in itself a new phenomenon – the medieval school of nominalism had taken particularly strong roots in English thought. Nevertheless, it might be argued that the interminable circling around the topics of illusion and deception in the theatre of the age is bound up with an awareness of the arbitrariness of language, a Pandora’s box that injunctions against equivocation attempted to keep shut. However, for a culture endlessly fascinated by language itself, which believed in the humanist precept that eloquence contributed to the discovery of truth, wordplay was both a source of uncertainty and a source of pleasure. As Russ

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

26

Shakespeare and laughter

Macdonald argues, playing with words is a kind of game where a sense of pleasure is derived from creating verbal patterns from the disorder of language.38 Wit and wordplay were, of course, the epitome of equivocation. Love’s Labour’s Lost is perhaps the play that shows off Shakespeare’s rhetorical skill at its most audacious. None the less, as a number of critics have pointed out, the play is shot through with unease about the abuse of rhetoric.39 The gamut of linguistic abuse ranges from affectation (also known as Italianism) and inkhornism (the introduction of foreign scraps into the vernacular) to an equivocal use of language – in other words, dissembling. Here, too, Shakespeare’s play reflects the cross-currents at a specific moment in the linguistic revolution of the sixteenth century. Women and wit Before turning to the play, I wish to briefly touch upon the vexed issue of women and wit. As Ruth Kelso points out, in the Renaissance there was no conduct literature specifically directed at women.40 The domestic manuals produced by Puritan divines concentrated on moral edification and household management. It was not until Richard Braithwait’s The English Gentlewoman was published in 1631 that the first manual of manners aimed specially at a female audience appeared on the market. This is all the more surprising because the Renaissance saw an unprecedented growth in the education of women. It is certainly true that instruction on manners included women without specifically mentioning them. The precepts of Erasmus’ De civiliate were instilled into girls, too. Even though girls did not attend grammar schools, families of the middling sort sent both boys and girls to elementary petty schools to learn to read. The nobility had tutors to educate their daughters. Thomas More, one of the chief proponents of women’s education in England, had his daughters taught Latin, Greek, Hebrew, mathematics, and astronomy.41 In 1533 he estimated that at least half of all adults could read – writing was taught as a separate skill.42 In his defence of women’s education in Positions (1581) the educationalist Richard Mulcaster implies it was customary to teach girls to read and even to write, as well as to introduce them to foreign languages: ‘We see young maidens be taught to read and write, and can do both passing well; we know that they learn the best, and finest of our learned languages, to the admiration of all men.’ Indeed, ‘To learn to read is very common, where convenientness doth serve, and writing is not refused, where opportunity will yield it.’43 This meant that a new class of readers emerged: women. After 1570 there was clearly a market for literature directed at women44 Women readers represented a broad range of the female population. There was

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Courtliness and laughter

27

sophisticated literature for court ladies, household manuals and practical guides on medicine for citizens’ wives and simple devotional works and almanacs for the literate chambermaid. Increasingly books were targeted at women readers – Lyly explicitly addressed women in court circles in his flattering dedications – and certain books were known to be particularly popular with women, among them Sidney’s Arcadia and Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier. However, it would be a fallacy to draw the conclusion that the increasing stress on education for women spelt a greater liberation for Renaissance women. Feminist scholars such as Lisa Jardine, Joan Kelly-Gadol, and Karen Newman have pointed to the double-bind that education entailed for women: humanist learning was seen as an ornament for women that increased their value in the marriage market, but signs of women’s independence were rigorously repressed.45 Joan Kelly-Gadol in her article with the programmatic title, ‘Did Women Have a Renaissance?’ argues that the Renaissance brought about a loss of status for the court lady. Kelly-Gadol’s answer to the question posed in her title is unequivocally negative. In feudal times the aristocratic lady had held a measure of power within the kinship structure as well as within the courtly love tradition. In the Renaissance she was reduced to a cultivated adornment at court. While conceding that there were cultured and influential aristocratic women, such as the Countess of Bedford and the Countess of Pembroke, Jardine sums up, ‘in spite of the wider range of opportunities which become available to (some) women during the Renaissance and Reformation, attitudes towards women did not perceptibly change – may in fact have become somewhat hardened as individual women challenged traditional roles’.46 Indeed, these critics note that anxiety about the massive social upheavals in the Renaissance was often displaced on to women. The rules set out for women were above all obedience, chastity, and silence. The leading humanist educationalist Juan Luis Vives, preceptor to Katherine of Aragon, who was known for her wit and learning, stresses the cardinal virtue of restraint in speech in his writings on women’s education. Women’s conversation should be marked by modesty and sobriety. This idea is elaborated upon in discussions of laughter. Laughter had always been an aesthetic problem, of course. Even Ovid, not overly concerned with moral precepts, deplored the lack of seemliness in laughing women and advised: ‘Let the mouth be but moderately opened, let the dimples on either side be small, and let the bottom of the lip cover the top of the teeth’47 The greater worry was the link between laughter and levity. Since women’s mouths were conflated with sexuality, excessive speech and full-throated laughter were a signal revealing assertiveness and, by extension, sexual voraciousness.48 Laughing boisterously was a sign of frivolity and sexual availability. It is remarkable how Vives modifies his thoughts about laughter in connection with women. In the third book of his De anima et vita (1538),

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

28

Shakespeare and laughter

which deals with the passions, Vives discusses laughter in positive terms, focusing on laughter as the articulation of pleasure rather than of scorn and contempt. He describes how ‘people burst out in laughter if their ears are blandished by pleasures, wine, games, sex, jokes, song, and licentiousness; if their thoughts are light and relaxed; if they have received a sense of security and their minds have been liberated from fear and trouble; if they are enjoying exquisite, or exceptionally new and unusual pleasure’.49 Laughter is primarily bound up with recreation and relaxation. To be sure, the prudent and the wise are more subdued in their laughter. Vives also warns against immoderate laughter – mainly as a sign of a lack of corporeal control: ‘Such are the convulsions of the ignorant, the peasants, children, and women, when they lose their self-control as they are overcome by laughter of this kind.’50 Women as inferior beings, as both Aristotelian and Christian precepts had emphasized, were more prone to laughter and more in need of a training in self-discipline. But in his writings on the upbringing of girls Vives is far more severe: ‘speaking of laughter, which is the surest index of a light and frivolous mind, let her take care that she does not laugh too freely so that her whole body seems so convulsed with boisterous laughter that she cannot regain her breath’. In particular he warns against a young girl responding to a young man’s laughter. This was a sure sign of a dissolute mind and inevitably ruined the girl’s reputation.51 Women’s laughter was inextricably bound up with lasciviousness. With the increasing focus on external behaviour as a sign of inner virtue, silence was adduced as the best proof of chastity. As Vives points out approvingly, in the Old Testament Susannah defended herself against the accusation of adultery by her resolute silence, not in a speech of defence. Vives is even driven to indulge in a vicious diatribe against the courtly art of conversation: The custom to give praise to a woman for her ability to converse wittily and eloquently with men for hours on end is something that is welcomed by the ordinances of hell, in my opinion. I ask you, what will an inexperienced girl talk about with a young man who is ignorant of good things, but expert in evil? What is fire doing with flax? I suppose they will be talking about Christ or the Blessed Virgin . . . Courtly dames are, indeed, judging from the courts of our day, begetters of every vice, the abode of Satan, which not only the Christian will avoid but even the pagan who has a modicum of good sense.52

In somewhat more restrained manner, Richard Braithwait in his courtesy manual for women, The English Gentlewoman, makes a similar point about the virtues of silence. Bashful silence, he admonishes his readers, is an ornament to young women:

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Courtliness and laughter

29

Volubility of tongue in these, argues either rudeness of breeding, or boldness of expression . . . It will beseem you, Gentlewomen, whose generous education hath estranged you from the first, and whose modest disposition hath weaned you from the last; in public consorts to observe rather than discourse. It suits not with her honour, for a young woman to be prolocutor. But especially, when either men are in presence, or ancient matrons, to whom she owes a civil reverence, it will become her to tip her tongue with silence.53

Writing a century after Vives, Braithwait lays more stress on decorous comportment than on moral precepts. Nevertheless, it remains significant that the recommendation of silence for women in company holds. It is only in the case of the lady at court that at times radically different values are asserted. After all, one of the chief assets of the lady courtier is her skill at the art of conversation, as Castiglione was the first to note. In Steeven Guazzo’s comments on women, ambivalence in the face of the ideology of women’s silence and the premium set on their cultivation of charm in court is apparent. Guazzo’s The Civile Conversation, first published in 1574 and translated into English between 1581 and 1586, was one of the leading texts to propagate the value of civility in society. At first he exhorts, ‘silence in a woman is greatly commended: for it setteth her forth much, and maketh her thought to be very wise. Yea, she must not only have regard to keep her tongue, but besides to accompany her words, her laughter, her looks and behaviour, with such a grave and stately majesty, as beseemeth a matron.’ Gravity and modesty are prime adornments of a lady. But in a description of courtly society he admits that women’s conversation can be a source of delight: ‘her talk and discourses are so delightful, that you will only then begin to be sorry, when she endeth to speak: and wish that she would be no more weary to speak, then you are to hear’.54 It is to Castiglione that we owe a whole-hearted endorsement of witty conversation in the lady courtier. Significantly, it is the section on jesting in The Book of the Courtier that leads straight to a discussion of the querelles des femmes, the woman controversy. At the end of Bernardo’s exposition of the various types of jokes, he once again repeats his warning about the limits of humour – jokes about women should not call their honour into question (2.89; p. 138). Gasparo, who has been cast in the role of the stock misogynist, objects that women often cast slurs on men’s reputations, too. Bernardo replies by pointing to the double standard in society, by which aspersions cast on a woman’s honour carry the risk of entailing far more serious repercussions, and calls for a gentlemanly sense of restraint: ‘to deal too hard a thrust with our pleasantries and practical jokes is to exceed the bounds that we have already held to be proper to a gentleman’

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

30

Shakespeare and laughter

(2.90; p. 138). At the same time he admits that the inbuilt disclaimer in humour makes it possible to attack and retreat at the same time: a remark may be ‘so veiled that it can be understood on the face of it, so that he could have dissimulated and claimed that he did not mean it in that way’ (2.93; p. 140). The section on jesting ends with the lady Emilia Pia selecting the Magnifico Guiliano as the champion for women’s honour in the following debate about the ideal court lady. Guiliano sums up the attributes of the ideal lady as follows: I wish this Lady to have knowledge of letters, of music, of painting, and to know how to dance and be festive, adding a discreet modesty and the giving of a good impression of herself to those other things that have been required of the Courtier. And so, in her talk, her laughter, her play, her jesting, in short in everything, she will be most graceful and will converse appropriately with every person in whose company she may happen to be, using witticisms and pleasantries that are becoming to her. (3.9; pp. 154–5)

In wit and jesting the lady courtier is fully equated with her male counterpart. Both use witty conversation as a means of recreation for their peers and their prince and as a mode of self-display. For both the same norms regarding refined forms of humour apply, since laughter is an important component in the behavioural presentation of the inner self. However, at a closer look notable differences appear. Despite the qualities that men and women at court share, Giuliano distinguishes characteristics that are specifically associated with women: I think that in her ways, manners, words, gestures, and bearing, a woman ought to be very unlike a man; for just as he must show a certain solid and sturdy manliness, so it is seemly for a woman to have a soft and delicate tenderness, with an air of womanly sweetness in her every movement . . . And I do think that beauty is more necessary to her than to the Courtier, for truly that woman lacks much who lacks beauty. Also she must be more circumspect, and more careful not to give occasion for evil being said of her . . . (3.4; pp. 150–1)

Guiliano sums up the differences between the sexes with the words: ‘a certain pleasing affability is becoming above all else, whereby she will be able to entertain graciously every kind of man with agreeable and comely conversation’. Indeed, she is to display ‘a kind manner as to cause her to be thought no less chaste, prudent, and gentle than she is agreeable, witty, and discreet’ (3.5; p. 151). Quite how this paragon of virtue is to achieve the feat of balancing these antithetical attributes remains Guiliano’s secret. As regards wit, it emerges that the court lady is not only to eschew risqué humour, so as to maintain the appearance of chaste thoughts, but also to abstain from using savage wit as an instrument to score points against opponents. Her use of wit is circumscribed

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Courtliness and laughter

31

by her role as a woman. It is useful only to display her urbanity and ‘quick vivacity of spirit’ (3.5; p. 151), and above all serves as a conversational lubricant to set all members of the company at ease. Her vocation is to put wit to use as a source of entertainment and as a means to smoothe over social conflict. To be sure, wit in the hands of a lady courtier remains a tool of power, albeit a more subtle instrument to negotiate tensions and deflect hostility. But the other characteristics listed above all serve to make the court lady more of an ornament than a political agent at court. In his nuanced reading of The Book of the Courtier, Harry Berger points to a sense of anxiety that shadows the text with regard to issues of gender.55 The court at Urbino is haunted by awareness of the emasculated role of the Italian nobility in the wake of the devastation of the political landscape by the French. Berger makes a convincing case for the author staging this awareness in his text. This is revealed in flashes of insight within the dialogue. Thus Count Ludovico pours scorn on the philistinism of the French, only to admit: for all their knowledge of letters the Italians have shown little worth in arms for some time now – which, alas, is only too true. But it must be said that the fault of a few men has brought not only serious harm but eternal blame upon all the rest, and that they have been the true cause of our ruin and of the prostrate (if not dead) virtue of our spirits. Yet it would be a greater shame if we made this fact public than it is to the French to be ignorant of letters. Hence, it is better to pass over in silence what cannot be remembered without pain . . . (1.43; pp. 51–2)

Castiglione’s project might be seen as the attempt to find a new role for the nobility in the face of their growing political impotence. The emphasis on manners and social accomplishments gave courtiers a sense of importance and control that they had lost in a real political and economic sense. Lisa Jardine points out that dependency was a characteristic of both male and female courtiership of the period. She reads the elaborate concern with appearance and behaviour as a symptom of the loss of a significant political role.56 In other words: ornamentation was a mark of both the courtier and the lady courtier. This might explain why the characters in the dialogue – be they defenders or detractors of women – are so anxious draw a distinction between the court lady and the courtier. They set store by innate distinguishing characteristics precisely to avoid the shared connotations that might well reflect back on their own position. Other critics agree that the discourse on women in The Courtier is actually a mystification of the relationship between the courtier and the prince.57 The aestheticization of courtly life is depicted as the only strategy open to the courtier under the constraints of despotic rule. It is to Castiglione’s credit that

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

32

Shakespeare and laughter

the analogy to women demonstrates that the relation between the sexes is one of political domination and not of innate superiority or inferiority. A look at how laughter is actually staged within the text, as contrasted to the discourse about jesting, furnishes further interesting insights. Quite literally, the ladies dominate the court – as deputy for her ailing husband, it is the Duchess under whose aegis the series of social games described in the text take place. It is the ladies who decide that the debate about the woman controversy be carried out by the courtiers – with themselves as arbiters. The trusted companion of the Duchess, Emilia Pia, engages in a spirited battle of wits with the leading misogynist at the court, Count Gasparo and his ally Frisio. She counters Guiliano’s assertion that ‘women have quite as much virtue as men’ with a witty play on words: ‘Nay, . . . far more; and to bear this out, you see that virtue (la virtù) is feminine, and vice (il vizio) is masculine’ (2.98; p. 143). When discussing the right champion for the women’s cause among the courtiers, Emilia remarks, ‘God forbid that we should chance to entrust this task to any fellow conspirator of signor Gasparo, who should fashion us a Court Lady unable to do anything except cook and spin!’ To which Frisio retorts mischievously, ‘But that is her proper business’ (2.99; p. 144). In this merry war of words, there are few traces of ‘delicate tenderness’, but unmistakable resonances of witty Shakespearean heroines. To what extent Love’s Labour’s Lost consciously mimics the situation at the court at Urbino might remain open to debate, but the battle of the sexes Shakespeare stages certainly echoes the game of mocking repartee between Castiglione’s protagonists. What appears at first sight as a game might, however, conceal a more serious sense of competition for power among men and women at court in this period – including the power over laughter. It is this struggle for power, I would assert, that lies at the heart of the distribution of qualities among the courtiers along gender lines. Women are vested with inborn virtues (beauty, sweetness of character, prudence, affability, chastity) while sprezzatura, the art of achieving an appearance of grace while dissimulating the effort it costs, is a skill reserved for men. The latter was an art that could be learned through diligent application, while the former were a set of intrinsic attributes that defied acquisition through study. However, if the courtier was able to fashion a role for himself, might not the same apply in the case of the lady courtier? Harry Berger sees the emasculated role of the courtiers allegorized in the situation of the Duke of Urbino, crippled and impotent.58 The true role model for the ideal ruler is not Duke Guidobaldo, but his father, Duke Federico, whose legacy the son is unable to sustain, both militarily and as a patron of the arts. In the light of his powerlessness, all that remains for him is the aesthetization of his world. The Duke stages a set of games for the courtiers, ranging from

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Courtliness and laughter

33

jousts, tournaments, riding, games of military prowess, to musical performances and verbal games of wit. Unable to participate himself, he presides over the games of others, creating an Arcadian world of play that denies the presence of the hostile world outside the court. This sense of play is reinforced by the frequency of the term laughter within the text. Irrespective of the issue under debate, the repartee and retorts amongst the courtiers are continually marked by the repetition of the tag ‘laughing’. The court of Urbino rings with laughter. The idea of play that permeates the text is what it shares with Love’s Labour’s Lost, which explores both the notion of play and the question of laughter. Laughter in Love’s Labour’s Lost The plot of Love’s Labour’s Lost consists of a series of games in which characters of all social ranks indulge. Navarre appears to be a playing field, an artificial realm of play fenced off from the world of harsh reality. As one critic points out, no one ever works in Navarre, everyone seems to be on holiday.59 Most of the games the characters are engaged in are games with words. Not only do most of the incidents strung along the plot turn on the self-conscious use of language – vows, contracts, letters, speeches, sonnets, and songs.60 The play itself displays a fireworks of scintillating wit and wordplay. Witticisms are bandied as in a fashionable ball game, both among the courtiers and in a game of wits with the ladies.61 All the characters in the play are defined by the language they use. Simultaneously, they are continually engaged in observing and commenting on each other’s linguistic style.62 Wit and language games are the main source of humour in the play. A case in point is the banter between the clown Costard and the King about the clown’s transgression of the royal decree to abstain from relations with a member of the opposite sex: King: It was proclaimed a year’s imprisonment to be taken with a wench. Costard: I was taken with none, sir; I was taken with a damsel. King: Well, it was proclaimed damsel. Costard: This was no damsel neither, sir; she was a virgin. King: It is so varied, too, for it was proclaimed virgin. Costard: If it were, I deny her virginity: I was taken with a maid. King: This maid will not serve your turn, sir. Costard: This maid will serve my turn, sir.63

This hilarious stichomythic exchange draws its humour from the sly verbal tricks of the clown attempting to wriggle his way out of a punishment (to no avail) by offering a string of synonyms parading as differences. As Berowne himself points out, the comic characters are all stock commedia dell’arte figures – the

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

34

Shakespeare and laughter

clown, the pedant, the braggart, the gull curate (5.2.538–9). Costard displays the irrepressible mixture of cheerfulness and cunning that characterizes a comic rustic. In his parley with the King he continually veers between deference and insolence. At the same time his mode of comic equivocation, refusing to let himself be pinned down to one meaning, is juxtaposed with the previous comic device in the scene, the letter by Armado. Armado, the Spanish braggart, is described by the King as ‘A man in all the world’s new fashion planted, / That hath a mint of phrases in his brain, / One who the music of his own vain tongue / Doth ravish like enchanting harmony’ (1.1.162–5). He is a man who represents the new vogue of overblown rhetoric. Not only is he is love with words, he is above all enraptured by his own grandiloquent style. Armado denounces Costard to the King for having consorted with a woman, going on to explain: ‘With a child of our grandmother Eve, a female, or, for thy more sweet understanding, a woman. Him I, as my ever-esteemed duty pricks me on, have sent to thee, to receive the meed of punishment, by thy sweet grace’s officer, Anthony Dull, a man of good repute, carriage, bearing and estimation’ (1.1.252–7). Armado’s use of periphrasis on the most banal grounds (a child of grandmother Eve, a female, a woman) is a parody of a style of rhetoric characterized by ostentatious euphuism and bombastic ornamentation – popularized by Shakespeare’s competitor Lyly. His elaborate and tautological description of the King’s officer is deflated both by the name of the constable in question – Dull – and the obvious aptness of the name for the character presented on stage. His pretentious use of oxymoronic terms (‘the meed of punishment’) is blatantly absurd in the context of what is clearly male rivalry between two ludicrous figures lusting after the same ‘wench’. An additional source of humour is the innuendo with which both Costard’s and Armado’s words are laced, from Costard’s bawdy jest about the girl ‘serving his turn’ to Armado’s prurient hints at what really lies behind the letter of denunciation, with double entendres on ‘prick’ and ‘understanding’. The play is traversed by two main rhetorical figures: synonymia and puns.64 But the comic play with double meanings serves to throw into relief the more serious issues of the play. The King and his band of brothers are by no means superior to the low characters. They juggle the meaning of vows and legal contracts to suit their immediate ends. As Berowne remarks ironically, ‘Necessity will make us all forsworn . . . If I break faith, this word shall speak for me: / I am forsworn “on mere necessity”’ (1.1.147–52). Berowne is the first to admit that, in swearing to adhere to the rigorous conditions of the academy, he ‘swore in jest’ (1.1.54), but the others are just as quick to break their oaths. To escape the ethical dilemma they find themselves in they turn to Berowne, the sharpest wit amongst the courtiers, for ‘some tricks’, ‘some salve for perjury’

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Courtliness and laughter

35

(4.3.283–4). It is he who devises an eloquent argument in their defence. By verbal legerdemain he turns the conditions of their contract, namely to abjure women for books and learning, into the very grounds for their perjury, announcing triumphantly that it is women who furnish true learning: ‘They are the books, the arts, the academes, / That show, contain and nourish all the world; / Else none at all in aught proves excellent.’ He ends with an elegant chiastic flourish: ‘Let us once lose our oaths to find ourselves, / Or else we lose ourselves to keep our oaths. / It is religion to be thus forsworn’ (4.3.326–37). Indeed, it now emerges that not to have broken their vows would have meant committing a grievous offence. The ladies remain unimpressed by these rhetorical acrobatics. When King tries the same specious line of argument on the Princess: ‘The virtue of your eye must break my oath’, she replies severely: ‘You nickname virtue: “vice” you should have spoke; / For virtue’s office never breaks men’s troth’ (5.2.348–50). And when the King attempts to swear an oath of love, she retorts, ‘No, no, my lord, your grace is perjured much, / Full of dear guiltiness; . . . Your oath I will not trust’ (5.2.784–8). The ladies are not willing to see oath-breaking as merely another game of words. For all its exhilarating linguistic games, the play is pervaded by awareness of the abuse of language. Sparkling wit is displayed alongside affectation, pedantry and dissimulation. One might trace a number of phases in the courtiers’ relationship to language.65 They begin with a self-aggrandizing project grounded on a rigorous contractual agreement to devote themselves wholeheartedly to study. It is not thirst for knowledge that drives them but a hubristic desire for fame: ‘Let fame, that all hunt after in their lives, / Live registered upon our brazen tombs, . . . And make us heirs of all eternity’ (1.1.1–7). The unintended pun on ‘brazen’ reflects the overweening self-importance that spurs this plan. If at first the courtiers demonstrate a pedantic legalism with regard to breaches of the contract, threatening to punish transgressions with draconic sentences, once they waver in their resolve they reveal a disregard for any sense of linguistic integrity, flaunting an inflationary use of language in their Petrarchistic sonnets and vows of love. The meaning of words becomes precisely what they wish them to be: ‘Vows are but breath’ (4.3.65). Oaths have no more binding power. The text is shadowed by the knowledge that the link between words and meaning has been lost – that the intrinsic meaning to words can no longer be pinned down. Playing with language carries the risk of veering off into pure arbitrariness. It is the ladies, however, who offer a solution to this dilemma. They insist on the value of rectitude in human interaction and on the need for linguistic good faith. Language is not a solipsistic tool to be manipulated at will, they seem to say, but a communal practice that draws on shared meanings and a commitment to veracity.

36

Shakespeare and laughter

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Fascination with the glittering surface of language is not limited to the courtly characters at Navarre. Even a buffoon like Costard nurses a secret love-affair with language. He is delighted with new words that sound grand: ‘Remuneration’! O, that’s the Latin word for three farthings. Three farthings – remuneration. ‘What’s the price of this inkle?’ ‘One penny.’ ‘No, I’ll give you a remuneration.’ Why, it carries it! ‘Remuneration’! Why, it is a fairer name than French crown. I will never buy and sell out of this word. (3.1.133–9)

Costard gets it both wrong and right. In his literalist attitude to language he equates the word ‘remuneration’ with the money he has been given as a reward – which in this case is dead on. An added joke is his misuse of the term French crown, which alludes to syphilis but which Costard understands in purely financial terms. Costard’s love of big words burlesques the infatuation with language that characterizes his betters. But he, too, is sent up for his gullibility with regard to courtly pretensions. He voices his admiration for his rival Armado: ‘O, a most dainty man! / To see him walk before a lady and to bear her fan! / To see him kiss his hand and how most sweetly ’a will swear!’ (4.1.142–5) Since Armado is presented as a travesty rather than a paragon of courtly manners, Costard’s words of praise only serve highlight his own ignorance. By contrast, the representatives of the educated middling sort, the schoolmaster Holofernes and his admiring sidekick the curate, Nathaniel, are mocked for their ostentatious display of learning, which is mirrored in their absurdly affected style of speech: Holofernes: The deer was, as you know, sanguis, in blood, ripe as the pomewater, who now hangeth like a jewel in the ear of caelo, the sky, the welkin, the heaven, and anon falleth like a crab on the face of terra, the soil, the land, the earth. Nathaniel: Truly, Master Holofernes, the epithets are sweetly varied, like a scholar at the least . . . (4.2.3–9)

Apart from the tedious string of quite superfluous synonyms, the joke lies in the ludicrous use of highflown rhetoric to describe objects as trivial as a dead deer or an apple. The learning of Holofernes and Nathaniel is exposed as an obsession with the surface of words, not with true wisdom. To round off the variety of word games, the play presents the stock comic device of malapropism. When the obtuse Dull hears Holofernes hold forth, ‘Th’allusion holds in the exchange’ he insists, ‘And I say the pollution holds in the exchange’ (4.2.44–6). As is often the case with this figure, it expresses a hidden truth, which is precisely the source of its pleasure for the audience: for what the pendants do to the English language is little short of pollution. While the comic characters commit a gamut of linguistic misdemeanours, including what Castiglione would count

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Courtliness and laughter

37

among the chief sins of a courtier – affectation and pedantry – they themselves remain blissfully unaware of their shortcomings. Indeed, they are only too ready to criticize the style of the others in the play. Snobbery is not a prerogative of the courtiers. In their preoccupation with social ambition, all characters are busy marking themselves off from other ranks in society. In a remark to the pedant and the hedge-priest Armado puts it in a nutshell: ‘We will be singuled from the barbarous’ (5.1.74–5). The play displays a ‘great feast of languages’ (5.1.35) to satirize an entire range of linguistic excesses. However, as critics have noted, at the same time the play turns a source of unease into a source of pleasure.66 Holofernes and Armado are so fantasically imaginative in their linguistic abuse that ‘instead of being shown up, they turn the tables and show off, converting affectation and pedantry into ingenious games’.67 The play delights in the very follies it mocks. Significantly, even Berowne’s abjuration of linguistic affectation is steeped in the pleasures of rhetoric: Taffeta phrases, silken terms precise, Three-piled hyperboles, spruce affectation, Figures pedantical: these summer flies Have blown me full of maggot ostentation. I do forswear them, and I here protest, By this white glove – how white the hand, God knows! – Henceforth my wooing mind shall be expressed In russet yeas and honest kersey noes. (5.2.406–13)

To be sure, there is a shift in register from sensuous metaphors relating to luxurious textiles to the evocation of revulsion and a sense of decay, reflected in the image of maggots. Nevertheless, Berowne cannot abstain from resorting to imagery to express his change of style – russet yeas and kersey noes might be more modest than silk and taffeta phrases, but they powerfully articulate a fascination with the texture of language. For all its ironic mockery of linguistic artifice, the play uses language as a source of sensuous pleasure, evoking a ‘feel of limitless mental possibility’.68 This pleasure derives from the feeling of power that wordplay evokes – a sense of creating order from the complexity of experience. Within Love’s Labour’s Lost the characters are not only mocked by exposing their linguistic extravagance. They are further deflated by means of the formalized, stylized structure of the plot. Every scene with the courtiers is mirrored by parallel scenes with the subplot characters. The pretentious rhetoric of the academicians is subsequently parodied by the bombast of Armado. Costard’s trangression of the injunction to renounce dealings with women is echoed by precisely the same failing of the courtiers when they fall in love. Even the love

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

38

Shakespeare and laughter

letters are reduplicated – Berowne’s letter to Rosaline is juxtaposed with the florid style of Armado’s letter to Jaquenetta. Finally, the aborted Masque of the Muscovites is mirrored in the equally abortive Masque of the Nine Worthies. The classic comic device of doubling plot sequences is put into operation in a way that multiply refracts each scene and thus reinforces their comic effect. A further source of satire is the ironic portrayal of court culture. There is an running battle between the various sets of courtiers that captures the tensions at the heart of courtly society itself: ‘Its seemingly tranquil surface proves on closer inspection to race with the ebb and flow of friendships and rivalries, alliances and ruptures, loyalties and betrayals, gestures of social solidarity and subversive private will, as the courtiers who form the central cast vie for prestige, now competing with and now against one another.’69 These rivalries, as we have seen, are often carried out by means of jesting and wit. In Love’s Labour’s Lost there are two main centres of competition – the tension between the diverse male courtiers, and the ‘civil war of wits’ (2.1.225) that women and men engage in. Probably the most vivid visual image for the rivalry between the members of the academy is the eavesdropping scene, which brings the issues of secrecy and spying that lurk beneath the surface of the world of male bonding into sharp focus – albeit in a comic mode. Each lord is debunked and his rhetoric deflated by the others. It is significant that all the courtiers of Navarre express their willingness to betray their loyalty to the King. The King himself engages in a game of subterfuge, secretly undermining the contract he himself has imposed on his court by wooing the Princess of France. Once he has exposed the other perjurers, the King warns them to beware of the devastating mockery of Berowne, the chief jester at Navarre: ‘How will he scorn, how will he spend his wit! / How will he triumph, leap and laugh at it!’ (4.3.144–5) Berowne’s triumph is only short-lived, however. Once Costard arrives with his letter addressed to Rosaline he, too, is revealed as belonging in the same camp as the other deceivers. As Costard puts it scathingly, ‘Walk aside the true folk and let the traitors stay’ (209). All the courtiers, including their King, have been unmasked as unhesitatingly prepared to commit treason. Despite their mutual leg-pulling about the ladies they are planning to woo, the members of the academe are, in fact, united in their battle against the other fronts in this play. Their male bonding is sealed with laughter – as Boyet, who subsequently eavesdrops on them, notes, ‘With that they all did tumble on the ground, / With such a zealous laughter, so profound, / That in this spleen ridiculous appears, / To check their folly, passion’s solemn tears’ (5.2.115–18). He describes a scene of mutual mirth that strengthens the bond between four former study-mates, now combined in the struggle to conquer the ladies. This wooing is seen in explicitly belligerent terms. The King sounds the battle-cry:

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Courtliness and laughter

39

‘Saint Cupid, then! And, soldiers, to the field!’ (4.3.340). It is the main competitor in the field on whom they vent their joint anger and frustation. In the face of their miserable failure at impressing the ladies, the courtiers of Navarre reveal their envy of their opposite number at the court of France, Boyet. Berowne articulates what the entire company feels when he pours scorn on Boyet as a hypocritical dissembler, as ‘honey-tongued Boyet’ (5.2.334). Ironically, the terms in which he castigates his rival are resonant of the tradition of anti-court invective. His critique of Boyet has two main thrusts. Firstly, Berowne derides Boyet for marketing his wit as if it were a commodity: ‘He is wit’s pedlar and retails his wares / At wakes and wassails, meetings, markets, fairs; / And we that sell by gross, the Lord doth know, / Have not the grace to grace it with such show’ (5.2.317–20). He insinuates that Boyet is no better than a common entertainer, lacking courtly grace. In other words: he is an upstart, a social climber. Even worse, he disseminates courtly ideals among the vulgar. Ironically, while claiming that the courtiers are more generously endowed with wit (selling by the gross), Berowne indirectly admits that they, too, are in the business of turning their skills to account for personal gain. Berowne proceeds to jeer at the effeminate art of this ideal courtier, whom he dubs ‘Monsieur the Nice’. Boyet, Berowne declares, is a lady’s man, who has the ladies eating out of his hand. ‘The ladies call him sweet. / The stairs, as he treads on them, kiss his feet’ (329–30). Here Berowne overlays the image of social climbing with sexual innuendo. This paragon of virtues can sing, preside over court ceremonies, and ‘smiles on everyone, / To show his teeth as white as whale’s bone’ (331–2). . . . Why, this is he That kissed his hand away in courtesy. This is the ape of form, Monsieur the Nice, That when he plays at tables chides the dice In honourable terms. (323–7)

On one level this is a scathing parody of a courtier, ludicrous in his preciosity and fastidious refinement. His exaggerated manners expose him for what he is: a fake, an ‘ape’, an imitator of true courtiers. What shadows this savage critique of a would-be courtier is, of course, the question of how one would define the essence of the true courtier. In a world where courtliness was defined by performance, where the mask was the man, how was one to discriminate between the fake and the authentic? Within the frame of the plot, these comments receive an ironic twist. Berowne and his companions are clearly jealous of a courtier who is better at the job than they are.

40

Shakespeare and laughter

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

When the courtiers realize that their plot to dazzle the ladies in the guise of Muscovites has miscarried badly, they suspect Boyet of being the culprit. The vitriol Berowne now spews at the fellow courtier is no longer a jest. He rounds on Boyet viciously, accusing him of being a sycophant and a hanger-on who capitalizes on his position as inofficial court jester at the Princess’s court: Some carry-tale, some please-man, some slight zany, Some mumble-news, some trencher-knight, some Dick That smiles his cheek in years and knows the trick To make my lady laugh when she’s disposed. (5.2.463–6)

Berowne describes a rival who is as skilled in the arts of jesting, gossip and love-making as he himself is. He lewdly intimates that Boyet offers sexual favours to the Princess in return for his position of trust at her court. The lady’s laughter, he insinuates, is both an expression of her pleasure at the entertainment he offers and an articulation of her sexual gratification – in a conflation of women’s laughter and their sexual accessibility that draws on the stereotypical views about women in circulation in Renaissance society. Berowne reinforces the thrust of his accusation, demanding, Do not you know my lady’s foot by th’ squier, And laugh upon the apple of her eye? And stand between her back, sir, and the fire, Holding a trencher, jesting merrily? (474–7)

His abuse is larded with crude innuendo, involving terms that Elizabethans would be familiar with, such as ‘know’, ‘stand’ and ‘fire’ (for the vagina). This is quite unlike the subtle erotic banter the courtiers have exchanged with the ladies throughout the play. Slander, not jesting, is what is at stake. Berowne rounds off his diatribe with a sneer: ‘Die when you will, a smock shall be your shroud’ (479), casting a slur on his opponent’s masculinity. Boyet returns the attack with a mocking retort that reveals the slippage between humour and warfare: ‘Full merrily / Hath this brave manage, this career, been run’ (482–3). Boyet alludes to Berowne’s attack in terms of a militaristic battle charge. The hostile tirade directed at a fellow courtier immediately precedes the comic highlight of the Masque of the Nine Worthies. In a significant volteface, the rivals close ranks when it comes to heckling the characters from other social groups. Indeed, the perfect synchronicity in their attacks on the Worthies welds a bond between the erstwhile enemies that holds for the rest of the play. Berowne is forced to admire Boyet’s skill at jeering: ‘Well said, old mocker. I must needs be friends with thee’ (545). After which they join forces in perfect

Courtliness and laughter

41

harmony, in a collegial division of labour – as when they mock Nathaniel posing as Alexander the Great:

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Boyet: Your nose says no, you are not; for it stands too right. Berowne: Your nose smells ‘no’ in this, most tender-smelling knight. (561–2)

Indeed, in harrassing the Worthies all the courtiers work a joint act, feeding each other lines. An example is their baiting of Holofernes: Boyet: Therefore, as he is an ass, let him go. And so adieu, sweet Jude. Nay, why dost thou stay? Dumaine: For the latter end of his name. Berowne: For the ass to the Jude? Give it him. Jud-ass, away! (619–22)

The hostility between members of the elite is now deflected to scapegoat figures from the lower ranks of society, who are roundly mocked. It is significant that not Costard and Dull are their main targets, but the pedants and the Spanish knight. It was members of the middling sort and the lower gentry, after all, who were most avid in aping the codes of conduct of the elite. The antagonism between the courtly opponents is mirrored in the challenge issued by Costard to Armado. The lords are united in setting Armado and Costard at each other’s throats, cheering on the contestants as in a form of blood sports – traditionally an occasion for elite male bonding. The battle between the sexes in the play takes a slightly different trajectory. From the very outset the ladies have the upper hand. Even Berowne is no match for their wit. At their first encounter Berowne condescends to give advice to his female competitor in wit, Rosaline: ‘Your wit’s too hot, it speeds too fast, ’twill tire.’ Rosaline checkmates him with her retort, ‘Not till it leave the rider in the mire’ (2.1.119–20), taking up the riding metaphor and turning it to her own advantage. In the war between the sexes, the women win hands down. As Boyet notes admiringly, observing his side beating their opponents: The tongues of mocking wenches are as keen As is the razor’s edge invisible, Cutting a smaller hair than may be seen; Above the sense of sense, so sensible Seemeth their conference. Their conceits have wings Fleeter than arrows, bullets, wind, thought, swifter things. (5.2.256–61)

It is the women in this play who possess the power of trenchant wit, who have the imaginative faculty to produce sophisticated and deadly wordplay or cutting

42

Shakespeare and laughter

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

bon mots. They are the true adepts in the art of wit. The male courtiers, by contrast, are pitiful failures in the skill of jesting, ‘gross, gross, fat, fat’, burntout, virtually impotent: ‘Tapers they are, with your sweet breaths puffed out’ (267–8). In the competition of wits with the courtiers of Navarre, the ladies of France are clearly the winners: There’s no such sport as sport by sport o’erthrown, To make theirs ours and ours none but our own. So shall we stay, mocking intended game, And they, well mocked, depart away with shame. (153–6)

In this game of oneupmanship, the ladies beat their rivals and put them to flight. They parry every thrust, ‘mock for mock’ (140). The term mock encompasses both laughing one’s rival to shame and the connotations of dissembling. Whether the courtiers are presenting a performance of courtliness, or whether they are attempting to hoodwink the ladies with their disguises and games of wordplay, their opponents are armed to retaliate point by point. The ladies in Love’s Labour’s Lost do not merely demonstrate their superiority in wit. They also reveal a remarkable sense of independence – ‘ours none but our own’. They are perfectly capable of engaging in verbal games without the men of the academe, as the interaction between the court ladies Rosaline, Katherine, and Maria shows. The Princess encourages her companions, cheering them on like a coach at a game of tennis: ‘Well bandied both! A set of wit well played’ (29), but also admonishing them not to stoop to malevolent wit. In response to an unkind sally made by Rosaline she exhorts, ‘A pox of that jest and I beshrew all shrews’ (46). The academy of Navarre might be a failed male utopia, but the ladies quietly set about creating a little proto-feminist community where male courtiers are largely irrelevant. In a merry exchange with Boyet, who boasts of his prowess in having deflated Berowne, Katherine mocks both men equally: ‘Two hot sheeps, marry!’ (2.1.218). Sheep were proverbially sleepy and noted for their submissive nature. When Boyet turns the remark into witty wordplay with sexual connotations, Katherine parries him with the assertion, ‘My lips are no common, though several they be’, sustaining the punning image of sheep and pasture. At his query, ‘Belonging to whom?’ she replies, ‘To my fortunes and me’ (222–4). When Boyet tries to chaff the Princess, who has just been indulging in melancholy thoughts about ambition and fame, by drawing an analogy to shrews: ‘Do not curst wives hold that self-sovereignty / Only for praise’ sake when they strive to be / Lords o’er their lords?’ she undermines his sally with the words: ‘Only for praise, and praise we may afford / To any lady that subdues a lord’ (4.1.36– 40). To be sure, these words are spoken in jest, but the rest of the play bears out

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Courtliness and laughter

43

the firmly independent stance of the ladies. Rosaline relishes the thought of tormenting Berowne: ‘That same Berowne I’ll torture ere I go’ and gleefully plots: ‘How I would make him fawn, and beg, and seek’ (5.2.60–2). If this is the one prerogative vouchsafed the lady in the Petrarchan model of wooing, in an otherwise rigidly circumscribed social role, the ladies in the play exploit their moment of power to the hilt. The women pool their impressions of their wooers, indulging in group mockery of their letters and gifts. When hearing of the letter and string of pearls sent to Maria by Longaville the Princess remarks in jest, ‘Dost thou not wish in heart / The chain were longer and the letter short?’ (5.2.55–6). Maria heartily agrees with her, anticipating by some four hundred years the sentiments encapsulated in the line ‘Diamonds are a girl’s best friend’. Laughter takes many forms in Love’s Labour’s Lost. While a range of linguistic infelicities is mocked, wit is displayed as both a source of diversion and a tool of self-presentation. Urbane humour is an index of taste and thus a pointer to one’s identity. It is the ladies who possess the right skills of jesting – they are the ideal courtiers in the play. This by no means implies an benign, anodyne form of humour. Indeed, the ladies reveal a scathing sense of wit and deploy jesting as a sophisticated weapon in the battle of the sexes. But savage, uncouth humour is deplored. It appears as if in this play Shakespeare has dramatized many of the norms discussed in The Book of the Courtier and other courtesy manuals. The wittiest of the lords, Berowne, is sketched by Rosaline in the following terms: His eye begets occasion for his wit, For every object that the one doth catch The other turns to a mirth-moving jest, Which his fair tongue, conceit’s expositor, Delivers in such apt and gracious words That aged ears play truant at his tales And younger hearings are quite ravished, So sweet and voluble is his discourse. (2.1.69–76)

Berowne is praised for his skill in telling witty tales and his capacity to delight and entertain an audience. The description of wit seems to reveal an insight into the arbitrary and constructed nature of humour. ‘His eye begets occasion for his wit’ implies that the source of mirth is produced, not found – it is wit and the laughter of the audience that create humour and define a situation as funny. There is a striking relay among the senses – the jest is transmitted from the eye to the tongue in order to capture the ear of the audience.70 Laughter is a collaborative affair, both in terms of the senses involved and the interaction between the audience and the producer of wit. Above all, its function is recreational, not punitive – it generates pleasure and not aggression.

44

Shakespeare and laughter

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

By contrast, an early critique of another courtier, Longaville, anticipates the final exhortations delivered by the ladies to the crest-fallen lords whose suits they reject (or defer). Longaville is at first depicted as an exemplary courtier: ‘Well fitted in arts, glorious in arms’ (2.1.45). However, a fatal flaw sullies his virtues: The only soil of his fair virtue’s gloss – If virtue’s gloss will stain with any soil – Is a sharp wit matched with too blunt a will, Whose edge hath power to cut, whose will still wills It should none spare that come within his power. (2.1.47–51)

In Elizabethan England wit referred predominantly to one’s mental faculties and power of imagination. But it was also sometimes used to refer to the ability to associate ideas in an amusing way, as in its present meaning.71 Longaville’s quick intellect is clearly dominated by his wilful desires. By implication, this courtier’s sense of jesting is described as too bellicose – he seems to regard jesting as a power game and rides rough shod over the feelings of his opponents. Similarly, his wooing consists in aggressive sexual overtures. He has not as yet, it seems, imbibed the lessons taught by The Book of the Courtier. The elite code of conduct prescribes self-control and refined wit. If oneupmanship is the name of the game, it is now played at a more sophisticated level. The issue of laughter is particularly focalized in the last scene of the play. After a botched performance as Muscovites, where they are mercilessly sent up by the ladies they have set out to woo and conquer, the lords stand exposed to ridicule. Boyet in particular relishes the opportunity to taunt them for their loss of face. With relief the lords turn to the next performance on offer, the pageant of the Nine Worthies. Here they reveal their real talents to lie in jeering. The inept actors are cruelly heckled until Holofernes protests, ‘This is not generous, not gentle, not humble’ (5.2.623). The ladies, by contrast, remain restrained in their mirth. The Princess teaches the lords a lesson in true courtesy in her gracious reaction to the Worthies, encouraging them and entering into the spirit of the pageant – when the clown Costard suggests, ‘If your ladyship would say, “Thanks, Pompey”, I had done’ she takes the hint and obliges with ‘Great thanks, great Pompey’, only a touch of gentle irony audible in the repetitive pattern of her words (5.1.552–3). In the meantime, the scoffing reaches a climax when the lords set the rivals in love, Costard and Armado, upon each other and urge them to fight it out. There is a brief poignant moment when Armado, who refuses to oblige, is exposed as being too poor to wear a shirt beneath his doublet – no doubt a painful loss of face for the proud Spanish knight.72 Then this performance, too, is interrupted – by the messenger Marcadé, bearing news of the death of the father of the Princess. Before the company breaks up, the ladies exact

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Courtliness and laughter

45

vows of penitence from the suitors. But a special sentence lies in store for Berowne. Rosaline imposes the task upon him of utilizing his wit for a charitable purpose – entertaining the sick and dying for a year. This is a corrective for his ‘gibing spirit’ (5.2.846), meant to purge cynicism and mockery from his character. As Rosaline exhorts, ‘A jest’s prosperity lies in the ear / Of him that hears it, never in the tongue / Of him that makes it’ (5.2.849–51). Jesting was not about selfpromotion but was to be adapted to one’s social situation, she asserts. The lords are apparently being taught a lesson in the ethics of laughter. The lords compound their sins (solipsism, oath-breaking) by transgressing the rules of proper laughter. Punishment is meted out to them, it seems, for their lack of compassion, their lack of restraint, their excessive mockery. However, I wish to suggest that the courtiers in the play are not being chastised for the lack of sympathy they display. They are rapped over the knuckles for overstepping the boundaries of class decorum. The play, Thomas Greene asserts, is really about social manners. ‘It is concerned with styles, modes of language and gesture and actions which befit, in varying degrees, the intercourse of civilized people. And being a comedy, it is concerned with the failures of inadequate styles.’73 The boorish, unruly heckling of the lords in the play marks their laughter as vulgar. What they lack is true courtly grace. When Rosaline chides Berowne she addresses his reputation for ‘wounding flouts / Which you on all estates will execute / That lie within the mercy of your wit’ (5.2.832–4). The ideal courtier, by contrast, has long distanced himself from jeering and gibing at his inferiors, together with other habits like blowing his nose on the tablecloth. And it is this doctrine that the ladies impart to the lords. Theirs is a lesson in class conduct, clothed in terms of a moral. Aesthetics and self-presentation, not ethics, are what are at stake. Shakespeare did not merely stage the discourses about jesting. Instead, his play enacts the transition from jeering to wit, from laughter as a punitive tool to laughter as a source of gracious recreation. The play forms part of a project to mould the taste of the playgoers. Shakespeare appropriates norms from courtly manuals and adapts them to the public theatre. The play is permeated with metadramatic signals that point to its status as an artefact. In the eavesdropping scene Berowne makes this point extravagantly: ‘All hid, all hid, an old infant play. / Like a demi-god here sit I in the sky, / And wretched fools’ secrets heedfully o’er-eye’ (4.3.75–7). Later he mockingly laments, O, what a scene of foolery have I seen, Of sighs, of groans, of sorrow and of teen! O me, with what strict patience have I sat, To see a king transformed to a gnat! To see great Hercules whipping a gig, And profound Solomon to tune a jig . . . (160–5)

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

46

Shakespeare and laughter

This alludes to the scene of foolery the audience itself has observed, as the King and his companions unburden their shallow feelings to each other in a series of Chinese-box-like playlets. Berowne’s remarks also point forward to the the pageant of the Worthies. At the end of the play we see a similar playwithin-a-play staged to the one he describes, with heroic figures like Hector and Hercules bathetically debased by being mimed by nincompoops like Armado and the diminutive page Moth. The burlesque of the Worthies parodies the failure of the courtiers to live up to their own heroic pretensions. Similarly, the Princess makes a pertinent remark about the Masque of the Worthies that reflects immediately upon the play the audience are watching: That sport best pleases that doth least know how – Where zeal strives to content and the contents Dies in the zeal of that which it presents; Their form confounded make most form in mirth, When great things labouring perish in their birth. (5.2.514–18)

The Princess delivers both a defence of the Masque and an astute account of the workings of humour. Deflation of expections is a central comic device, as is bathos – great mountains giving birth to a mouse. Berowne’s self-mocking reply, ‘A right description of our sport, my lord’ (519) refers to the masque the courtiers themselves have staged as well as the plot of Love’s Labour’s Lost itself. The play consists of a string of performances that all terminate in a fiasco. In the end, the play sends up comedy itself. All standard generic expectations of a happy conclusion with the rituals of courtship ending in nuptials are thwarted. As Berowne complains, ‘Our wooing doth not end like an old play: Jack hath not Jill. These ladies’ courtesy / Might well have made our sport a comedy.’ When the King reminds him that in a year’s time the period of penance will be over, Berowne grouches, ‘That’s too long for a play’ (5.2.862–6). Shakespeare’s play is the one exception to the series of bungled performances the play presents. Love’s Labour’s Lost, effervescent with wit and elegance, demonstrates the courtly ideal of art that conceals art (sprezzatura) in action. All the characters and their linguistic styles offer a foil for Shakespeare to flaunt his own theatrical skill – especially his remarkable command of an entire range of comic devices, from buffoonery to repartee and quicksilver wordplay. It is not a matter of teaching a lesson – if courtly life is lampooned, so are the members of the middling sort and the clowns. Everyone is sent up in this play. But the humour at stake is not vicious but gracious. The characters are ironically mocked for their failings, but not scapegoated. Similarly, the ladies’ gracious behaviour as spectators points the way for the audience at the theatre to emulate. The

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Courtliness and laughter

47

play reflects the move towards wit and refined, recreational humour in aristocratic codes of conduct. Unlike John Lyly, Shakespeare was not writing comedies for a coterie audience of courtiers, who would be fully conversant with the precepts governing proper behaviour. What Shakespeare does is import these norms into the sphere of public entertainment and establish them as a property of the theatre itself. For an early modern playwright, questions of taste increasingly came to be bound up with forms of humour. Furthermore, Shakespeare adopts the aristocratic idea of purposeless play for the commercial theatre. To be sure, he is not the only playwright to do so. As Anne Righter points out, a general movement from didacticism to entertainment is what marks early modern comedy.74 The play ends on a melancholy note, with the songs celebrating spring and winter pervaded by a sense of ambivalence. Neither season is unequivocally endorsed – each bears the mark of both pleasure and pain. Similarly, at the end of Love’s Labour’s Lost the laughter in the play evokes a knowledge of the darker side of life. The penance imposed on Berowne is spelt out by Rosaline: You shall this twelvemonth term from day to day Visit the speechless sick and still converse With groaning wretches; and your task shall be With all the fierce endeavour of your wit To enforce the pained impotent to smile. (5.2.838–42)

Berowne is appalled, protesting, ‘To move wild laughter in the throat of death? / It cannot be, it is impossible. / Mirth cannot move a soul in agony’ (843– 5). Berowne associates laughter with a game of wits in a mutual admiration society of peers. Alternatively, it is an instrument to exclude outsiders through mockery. Rosaline points to laughter as a source of pleasure, not punishment. She hints at how the power of laughter might, at its best, be turned to account: as a defence mechanism against fear and pain. Laughter can serve as a survival strategy, as the articulation of resilience against fate. Laughter is a way of gaining mastery over what threatens to master us. What this involves is a sense of detachment from one’s own situation. The analogies to play are apparent: play, too, is a means of gaining control over reality.75 It is always bound up with an awareness of being in two worlds simultaneously. The courtiers might be preoccupied by play, but theirs is a solipsistic form of play that ignores reality altogether.76 They live in a Peter Pan world that evades the necessity of growing up. Of the King Rosaline remarks, ‘he hath been five thousand year a boy’ (5.2.11), and Berowne himself describes their behaviour as ‘ridiculous’: ‘All wanton as a child, skipping and vain’ (5.2.753–5). Courtly play, like courtly

48

Shakespeare and laughter

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

laughter, might create gratuitous pleasure, but the ideal courtier would do well to bear the reality outside the playground in mind. Love’s Labour’s Lost demonstrates how one might create a play that is shot through with reminders of the fragility of our playworlds without abandoning the aim of gratifying our desire for delight. Notes 1 Baldesar Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, trans. Charles S. Singleton, ed. Daniel Javitch (New York: Norton, 2002), Bk 2 Sect. 57, p. 114. Subsequent references to be given in parentheses, with section and page numbers. 2 See Peter Burke, The Fortunes of the Courtier: The European Reception of Castiglione’s Cortegiano (Cambridge: Polity, 1995), pp. 70–2. 3 Harry Berger, Jr, The Absence of Grace: Sprezzatura and Suspicion in Two Renaissance Courtesy Books (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), p. 9. 4 Cicero, On Obligations (De officiis), trans. P. G. Walsh (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), Bk 1.126–8, p. 43. 5 See Joseph Anthony Mazzeo, ‘Castiglione’s Courtier: The Self as a Work of Art’, in Renaissance and Revolution: The Remaking of European Thought (London: Methuen, 1965), pp. 131–60. 6 Burke, The Fortunes of the Courtier, p. 12. 7 Norbert Elias, The Civilising Process: The History of Manners and State Formation and Civilization, trans. Edmund Jephcott (1939; Oxford: Blackwell, 1994). 8 For critiques of Elias see e.g. Berger, The Absence of Grace, as well as Anna Bryson, From Courtesy to Civility: Changing Codes of Conduct in Early Modern England (Oxford: Clarendon, 1998). 9 See Jennifer Richards (ed.), Introduction, in Early Modern Civil Discourses (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), p. 5. 10 Burke, The Fortunes of the Courtier, pp. 154–5. 11 Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Pratice, trans. Richard Nice (1972; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), p. 94. Emphasis in the original. 12 Desiderius Erasmus, De civilitate morum puerilium: On Good Manners for Boys, trans. Brian Macgregor, Vol. 25 of Collected Works of Erasmus, ed. J. K. Sowards (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985), pp. 269–89. 13 See Burke, The Fortunes of the Courtier, pp. 1–18. Bryson traces the evolution of the term civility in chapter 2 of her study From Courtesy to Civility, pp. 43–74, to which I am indebted in the following. 14 Erasmus, De civilitate, pp. 275–6. 15 Henry Peacham, The Complete Gentleman, The Truth of Our Times, and The Art of Living in London, ed. Virgil B. Heltzel (1622; Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1962), p. 144. In quotations from early modern sources I have modernized all spelling. 16 See Bryson, From Courtesy to Civility, pp. 43–74. 17 Ibid., pp. 107–50.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Courtliness and laughter

49

18 Ibid., p. 108. 19 Provine, Laughter, pp. 41–2. 20 Wayne A. Rebhorn discusses The Courtier in terms of a stylized social game. See his Courtly Performances: Masking and Festivity in Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1978), especially pp. 137ff. 21 See Daniel Javitch’s illuminating study, Poetry and Courtliness in Renaissance England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), pp. 50–75. 22 George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, ed. Gladys Doidge Willcock and Alice Walker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), p. 155. 23 Quoted in Louis Montrose, The Purpose of Playing: Shakespeare and the Cultural Politics of the Elizabethan Theatre (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), p. 41. 24 Roger Caillois, Man, Play, and Games, trans. Meyer Barash (New York: The Free Press of Glencoe, 1961), p. 167. 25 Javitch, Poetry and Courtliness, p. 40. He compares Castiglione to Cicero in pp. 18– 49. 26 Burke, The Fortunes of the Courtier, p. 35. 27 Frank Whigham, Ambition and Privilege: The Social Tropes of Elizabethan Courtesy Theory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), p. 92. 28 On jesting in Castiglione see J. R. Woodhouse, Baldesar Castiglione: A Reassessment of The Courtier (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1978), pp. 101–8. 29 Whigham, Ambition and Privilege, p. 42. 30 See Russ Macdonald, Shakespeare and the Arts of Language, Oxford Shakespeare Topics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 137–63. 31 Burke, The Fortunes of the Courtier, p. 79. 32 See F. P. Wilson, ‘The English Jestbooks of the Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 2 (1938–39), 145–7. 33 Quoted in Burke, The Fortunes of the Courtier, p. 112. 34 For this development see Macdonald, Shakespeare and the Arts of Language, pp. 10–29. 35 See James L. Calderwood, Metadrama in Shakespeare’s Henriad: Richard II to Henry V (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), pp. 210–11. 36 Ibid., p. 193. 37 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Tavistock, 1970), p. 47. 38 See Macdonald, Shakespeare and the Arts of Language, pp. 137–63. 39 See, for instance, Malcolm Evans, Signifying Nothing: Truth’s True Contents in Shakespeare’s Texts (1986; Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1989), pp. 50–67, and Terence Hawkes, Shakespeare’s Talking Animals: Language and Drama in Society (London: Edward Arnold, 1973), pp. 53–72. 40 See Ruth Kelso, Doctrine for the Lady of the Renaissance (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1956), p. 1. 41 Burke, The Fortunes of the Courtier, p. 96. 42 Kelso, Doctrine for the Lady, p. 5. 43 Quoted in Louis B. Wright, Middle–Class Culture in Elizabethan England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1958), p. 104. Emphasis in the original.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

50

Shakespeare and laughter

44 See Suzanne W. Hull, Chaste, Silent and Obedient: English Books for Women 1475–1640 (San Marino: Huntington Library, 1982), for research on the market for literature for women. 45 See Lisa Jardine, Still Harping on Daughters: Women and Drama in the Age of Shakespeare (Brighton: Harvester, 1983); Joan Kelly-Gadol, ‘Did Women Have a Renaissance?’, in Becoming Visible: Women in European History, ed. Renate Bridenthal and Claudia Koontz (Boston: Houghton Miffin, 1977), pp. 139–64; and Karen Newman, Fashioning Femininity and English Renaissance Drama (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991). 46 Jardine, p. 58. 47 Ovid, The Art of Love, and Other Poems, trans. J. H. Mozley (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1929), 3.282–4; p. 139. 48 See Newman, Fashioning Femininity, pp. 3–12. 49 Juan Luis Vives, The Passions of the Soul: The Third Book of De Anima et Vita, trans. Carlos G. Norena, Studies in Renaissance Literature, Vol. 4 (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen, 1990), pp. 57–9. 50 Ibid., p. 59. 51 Vives, The Education of a Christian Woman, pp. 129, 125. 52 Ibid., p. 130. 53 Richard Brathwait, The English Gentlewoman (Amsterdam: Da Capo Press, 1970), p. 89. Emphasis in the original. 54 Steeven Guazzo, The Civile Conversation, trans. George Pettie (London: Constable and Co., 1925), Vol. 1, pp. 240–1. 55 See Berger, The Absence of Grace, pp. 63–86. 56 See Jardine, Still Harping on Daughters, pp. 37–67. 57 See Carla Freccero, ‘Politics and Aesthetics in Castiglione’s IL Cortegiano: Book III and the Discourse on Women’, in David Quint et al. (eds), Creative Imitation: New Essays on Renaissance Literature in Honor of Thomas M. Greene, Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, Vol. 25 (Binghamton, NY: Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, State University of New York, 1992), pp. 259–79, and Dain A. Trafton, ‘Politics and the Praise of Women: Political Doctrine in the Courtier’s Third Book’, in Robert W. Hanning and David Rosand (eds), Castiglione: The Ideal and the Real in Renaissance Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), pp. 29–44. 58 Berger, The Absence of Grace, pp. 80–3. 59 J. Dennis Huston, ‘“Form Confounded” and the Play of Love’s Labour’s Lost’, in Shakespeare’s Comedies of Play (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981), p. 38. 60 James L. Calderwood, ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost: A Dalliance with Language’, in Shakespearean Metadrama: The Argument of the Play in Titus Andronicus, Love’s Labour’s Lost, Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Richard II (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1971), p. 72. Other critics who discuss the issue of language in the play are Malcolm Evans, Signifying Nothing, and Terence Hawkes, Shakespeare’s Talking Animals. Also see Keir Elam, Shakespeare’s Universe of Discourse: Language-Games in the Comedies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), pp. 289–308. 61 See Louis A. Montrose, ‘“Sport by Sport O’erthrown”: Love’s Labour’s Lost and the

Courtliness and laughter

62

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

63

64 65 66 67

68 69

70 71 72

73 74 75

76

51

Politics of Play’, in Gary Waller (ed.), Shakespeare’s Comedies (London: Longman, 1991), pp. 56–72. See Lynne Magnusson, ‘Language and Comedy’, in Alexander Leggatt (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Shakespearean Comedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 156–62. William Shakespeare, Love’s Labour’s Lost, ed. H. R. Woudhuysen, The Arden Shakespeare (London: Thomson Learning, 1998) 1.1.273–83. Subsequent references to be given in parentheses. See William C. Carroll, The Great Feast of Language in Love’s Labour’s Lost (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), p. 17. Calderwood, ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost: A Dalliance with Language’, pp. 64–7. Macdonald, Shakespeare and the Arts of Language, p. 141. C. L. Barber, ‘The Folly of Wit and Masquerade in Love’s Labour’s Lost’, in Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy: A Study of Dramatic Form and Its Relation to Social Custom (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959), p. 96. Stephen Booth, ‘Shakespeare’s Language and the Language of Shakespeare’s Time’, Shakespeare Survey, 50 (1997), 12. Graham Holderness, Nick Potter, and John Turner, ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost: The Court at Play’, in Shakespeare: The Play of History (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988), pp. 19– 20. I am grateful to Shankar Raman for drawing this to my attention. See Alexander Schmidt, Shakespeare Lexikon and Quotation Dictionary (Berlin: Georg Reimer, 1902). See Anne Barton, ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost’, in Harold Bloom (ed.), William Shakespeare: Comedies and Romance: Modern Critical Views (New York: Chelsea House, 1986), pp. 128– 9. Thomas M. Greene, ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost: The Grace of Society’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 22 (1971), 315. Emphasis in the original. See Ann Righter, The Idea of the Play (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1962), p. 54. See Catherine Bates’s incisive study Play in a Godless World: The Theory and Practice of Play in Shakespeare, Nietzsche and Freud (London: Open Gate Press, 1999), to which I am indebted throughout. See Louis Adrian Montrose, ‘Curious-Knotted Garden’: The Form, Themes, and Contexts of Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost (Salzburg: Institut für Englische Sprache und Literatur, 1977) esp. chap. 6, pp. 122–53.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

2

Laughter and recreation in the Shakespearean theatre Early modern medical theories of laughter

E

arly modern thinkers were fascinated by the phenomenon of laughter. A wide range of scholars, from medical experts to moral reformers, commented on the theme of laughter in their writings. A key precept on which their discussions were based was the Aristotelian tenet that laughter was the property of the human race.1 Medical theorists were exercised by the problem of where laughter originated and what organs were involved in the articulation of laughter. One of the best-known experts, the French royal physician Laurent Joubert, published in 1579 a treatise on laughter which was widely cited.2 Joubert observed that laughter and tears were closely related to each other – a point raised by many thinkers of the time. He attempted to take the ambivalence that characterises laughter into account. For Joubert laughter was an expression both of joy and of anguish. It was caused by a strong affective stimulus. The seat of laughter was the heart, which is where the emotions were located. Joubert draws on Aristotle’s notion that ugliness is the chief stimulus for laughter.3 Ugliness triggers a sense of melancholy, and this sadness was what tempered the joy of laughter. He defines laughter as follows: ‘Laughter is a movement caused by the jubilant mind and the unequal agitation of the heart, which draws back the mouth and the lips, and shakes the diaphragm and the pectoral parts with impetuosity and broken-up sound, through all of which is expressed a feeling over an ugly thing unworthy of pity’ (73). In other words: laughter is caused by the rapid contraction of the heart, a movement which is imparted to the diaphragm, which in its turn causes the accelerated rhythmic expiration that – accompanied by vocalization – we associate with laughter. For early modern thinkers, the question of melancholy or sadness was never far removed from mirth. Discussions of the physiological dimensions of laughter are frequently to be found in the context of treatises on melancholy and its cure. The English physician Timothy Bright explicitly refers readers to Joubert’s work – ‘in my judgement not inferior to any of this age’.4 In a chapter with the title ‘Why and how one weepeth for joy, and laugheth for grief ’ Bright

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Laughter and recreation

53

borrows Joubert’s graphic analogy between the diaphragm and a pair of bellows.5 The reason for the close proximity between laughter and tears was the fact that any strong emotion would trigger the same violent physiological motion. Contractions of the heart were not the only explanation put forward for the phenomenon of laughter. The spleen was often seen as the seat of mirth.6 Shakespeare frequently echoes this belief in his plays. Indeed, the term spleen was used as shorthand for a fit of laughter. In Twelfth Night Maria promises her fellow revellers ‘sport royal’ (2.3.172) watching Malvolio make an ass of himself: ‘If you desire the spleen, and will laugh yourself into stiches, follow me’ (3.2.65– 6). The spleen was also the organ associated with other passions such as anger. Joubert himself discusses the idea of the spleen as the cause for laughter: Why, then, does one say the spleen moves us to laugh, as if the office and seat of laughter were in the spleen, or as if the spleen were the instrument of laughter? . . . Because it is soft and limp, resembling a sponge, drawing to itself the thicker and more murky blood, which the spleen likes and on which it nourishes itself. This it is the cause of joy, accidentally. For the purer and clearer the blood is the more joyous and gay is the mind . . . (111; emphasis in the original)

Joubert elegantly depreciates the school of thought that attributed laughter to the spleen – by incorporating it into his own theory. The spleen was merely the handmaiden of the phenomenon that he had outlined, namely the convulsive agitation of the heart. The spleen carried out a cleansing function that was responsible for a clean supply of blood – and a freely circulating system of humours was what engendered happiness (as opposed to melancholy). By contrast, a swollen spleen was a sign of an imbalance in the humoral system that overwhelmed the spleen’s capacity to absorb and thus purge the humoral excess. There were other medical theories about the origin of laughter in circulation. In 1587 another French doctor, Nicolas Nancel, published a highly regarded treatise with the title De risu in which he took issue with the idea that either the heart or the spleen were the seat of mirth. It was the head that was responsible for laughter. The agitation of the body was triggered by the palpitations of the brain, whose dilation and contraction aroused the muscles to action. Violent emotional agitation of the brain would even call forth tears, which was why mirthful laughter was so often accompanied by tears.7 Whatever their differences, what is of import is the fact that medical experts insisted on the therapeutic value of laughter. The Reader’s Digest truism that laughter is the best medicine has its roots in medical thought that reaches back to the ancients. According to Galenic physiology, movement and agitation of the body (be it the heart, the spleen, or the diaphragm) had a positive impact

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

54

Shakespeare and laughter

on bodily health. The humoral body was characterized by its corporeal fluidity. Blood, semen, milk, sweat, tears, and other bodily fluids were continually changing into each other.8 This meant that corporeal agitation caused by laughter contributed to the fluid movement of humoral fluids and was conducive to achieving the ideal internal balance of humours. The scholar Robert Burton recommended ‘mirth and merry company’ explicitly as a remedy for melancholy. Jests and merry tales were an ideal means to expel grief and induce happiness. ‘For these causes our physicians generally prescribe this as a principal engine, to batter the wall of melancholy, a chief antidote, and a sufficient cure of itself.’9 To be sure, the Aristotelian mean is continually exhorted, and excessive laughter is to be eschewed, as is scurrilous and derisive humour. As Burton perceptively notes, there is always an element of aggression intertwined with humour. He includes an entire section on jests as a cause for melancholy, not a cure. ‘Biting jests’ can have a devastating effect on one’s self-esteem and pierce deeper than any physical wound.10 Conventional wisdom insisted on the health-enhancing properties of laughter – an argument endlessly rehearsed by those whose livelihood depended on retailing mirth. In an early sixteenth-century play, Nicholas Udall’s Ralph Roister Doister (1538), the prologue sets forth the standard case for the defence: For Mirth prolongeth life, and causeth health. Mirth recreates our spirits and voideth pensiveness, Mirth increaseth amity, not hindering our wealth, Mirth is to be used both of more and less, Being mixed with virtue in decent comeliness. As we trust no good nature can gainsay the same: Which mirth we intend to use, avoiding all blame.11

Similarly, the players in The Taming of the Shrew, persuading the transformed Sly to give himself up to the pleasure of their performance, frame their argument in explicitly therapeutic terms: For so your doctors hold it very meet, Seeing too much sadness hath congealed your blood, And melancholy is the nurse of frenzy. Therefore they thought it good you hear a play And frame your mind to mirth and merriment, Which bars a thousand harms and lengthens life. (Induction 2, 126–31)

Those in the business of purveying entertainment insisted on the healthful aspects of laughter. Medical experts were more cautious – Joubert points out that laughter can make you fat: ‘those who laugh more easily are inclined to

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Laughter and recreation

55

become fat, and . . . fat people laugh more easily’ (124).12 The reason was that fat consisted basically of excessive blood which had not been converted into either choler or semen. Not that obesity in itself was the catastrophe that medical (and lifestyle) experts in our century would label it. But Joubert warned that excessive laughter could have detrimental effects, in the end leading to what we might term heart failure. In many ways Joubert’s treatise remains conventional in its approach, favouring a recourse to classical authorities over new findings from anatomy and physiology. Thus there is no mention of the corrections to Galenic thought formulated by Vesalius or his Paris student, Michael Servetus, who first pointed to the pulmonary circulation of the blood in mid-century.13 What makes Joubert so radical is that he is not really spurred by the idea that laughter is good for health. Indeed, he points out that laughter belongs in a group with many ‘necessary and inevitable things, sometimes healthy, sometimes unhealthy, according to their use or abuse’ (128). What stirred him to delve into ‘this beautiful subject’ (90) was a hunger for scientific knowledge: ‘with a curious desire I go searching constantly, as though insatiable, all that I can grasp’ (93). The soul ‘is like a little God’, he explains, ‘there is nothing that can satisfy it’ (91). The reason laughter is peculiar to humanity is that ‘being endowed with the most worthy of souls, he might feel the most excellent, admirable, and pleasant emotion there is’ (71). It is clear that Joubert was deeply influenced by Neoplatonic thought, in particular by that of Marsilio Ficino – one of the most eloquent champions of laughter. Joubert cites Ficino with the words, ‘the heavens created you out of joy, which they have made clear to be their way of laughing . . . as if they were at play’ (126). Laughter harmonized with the movement of the spheres. Ficino saw human laughter as the analogy of divine laughter. Pleasure and happiness in the beauty of the world were the most apt ways to celebrate God and His creation.14 It was this principle of pleasure that underpinned his conjunction of laughter with grace. ‘Ficino identified laughter as pleasure; pleasure was grace; therefore, laughter could be grace.’15 Joubert follows Ficino’s example and offers a paean to the aesthetics of laughter: ‘Certainly there is nothing that gives more pleasure and recreation than a laughing face’ (10). This was in pointed contradiction to classical norms of beauty that stigmatized the facial distortion produced by laughter as ugly. These ideas radically challenged the strand of thought that linked laughter with scorn and contempt.16 The tradition hostile to laughter reached back to the ancients and dovetailed neatly with a Christian stance that equated laughter with folly – it was claimed that Plato, like Jesus, had never laughed. This remains the dominant view in the Renaissance. However, in humanist discourses on laughter a shift of emphasis from derision to pleasure,

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

56

Shakespeare and laughter

from laughter as a social corrective to laughter as a source of recreation becomes discernible. In the context of medicinal views of laughter it might be interesting to take a brief look at modern scientific research. The idea that laughter is good for one’s health is deeply engrained in popular ideology. It is incessantly rehearsed in agony-aunt columns in magazines and internet websites. Nevertheless, there is no hard scientific evidence to support this cherished myth. There is no conclusive proof that laughter is good for you. What is apparent is that laughter is intrinsically bound up with pleasure. Happy people live happier, but not necessarily healthier lives. In a culture where pleasure is the most highly valorized good, however, it is an article of faith that pleasure per se is good for one’s health. For the most renowned expert in the field of laughter, the neuroscientist Robert Provine, laughter is patently what distinguishes human beings from other primates. He traces a direct link between the evolution of our bipedal locomotion and the sophisticated development of speech. ‘Quadrupeds must synchronize their locomotor and breathing cycles to increase the rigidity of their air-filled thorax to absorb the powerful forelimb impacts during running’, he explains.17 By contrast, our upright gait led to the freeing of respiration and vocalization – which in turn engendered the vocal virtuosity so typical for human speech. Chimpanzees, for instance, exhibit certain traits similar to laughter in human beings, such as expressing their pleasure in play and when tickled. But their inflexible respiratory-vocal system limited their articulation of this pleasure to a single panting sound. If this theory is correct, laughter is above all produced by the neuromuscular mechanism of breath control and the respiratory engine of speech production. In other words: the evolution of laughter is linked to the emergence of human speech. Laughter is a signal in the repertoire of human communication. Erasmus put his finger on this point when he insisted that, pace Aristotle, the true property of the human race is speech.18 Classical theories of laughter Classical theories of laughter ultimately have their source in the ideas of Plato. As A. N. Whitehead once remarked, the entire tradition of European philosophy might be regarded as ‘a series of footnotes to Plato’.19 While Plato’s call for censorship of the arts in the ideal republic is well known, this is less the case with his ideas on laughter. For Plato, laughter is indissolubly linked to derision. It is an expression of malice and is directed against the ridiculous. People are ridiculous when they transgress the Socratian injunction to ‘know thyself ’ – that is, when they display a lack of self-knowledge.20 Much as they

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Laughter and recreation

57

deserve our scorn, we need to regard laughter with caution. Laughter appeals to the lower, less rational part of our nature. Accordingly, it always carried the risk of a loss of self-control. In the Republic laughter was to be permitted in homoeopathic doses: ‘surely we don’t want our guardians to be too fond of laughter’.21 This would set a bad example to the wards of the state. Similarly, representations of role models (including the gods) were to be carefully censored to remove traces of their succumbing to mirth. In Book X of The Republic Plato puts forward the argument that laughter on stage indulges our lower nature and allows our rational self to relax its control: ‘You are giving rein to your comic instinct, which your reason has restrained for fear you may seem to be playing the fool, and bad taste in the theatre may insensibly lead you into becoming a buffoon at home.’22 In other words: laughter bred vulgarity. Plato sets the framework for all subsequent discussion of laughter. It is evident that the definition of laughter as an articulation of scorn and as the gratification of our lower instincts was foundational for later theories, especially the superiority theory of laughter that found its most influential proponent in Hobbes. Furthermore, laughter would henceforth be bound up with questions of taste. As always with regard to Plato, Aristotle attempts to steer a middle course. He agreed with Plato that laughter was essentially a form of derision. But it is important to note that the human flaws at stake are minor vices. In the Nicomachean Ethics he recommends a golden mean between a vulgar and buffoonish excess of laughter and a boorish lack of humour. Buffoons he defines as ‘vulgar fellows, who itch to have their joke at all costs, and are more concerned to raise a laugh than to keep within the bounds of decorum’. Boors, on the other hand, ‘never by any chance say anything funny themselves and take offence at those who do’. Nevertheless, he concedes that ‘relaxation and amusement seem to be a necessary element in life’.23 Aristotle’s stroke of genius is the invention of the cathartic function of the arts – defusing their amoral potential and harnessing them for an ethical standpoint. He achieves this by positing the instructive value of art. As Aristotle famously described the subject of comedy in Poetics, the ridiculous was a species of the ugly; it ‘comprises any fault or mark of shame which involves no pain or destruction’.24 It was only in the writings of the fourth-century grammarian Donatus that the didactic function of comedy was explicitly defined.25 Laughter served a useful purpose. It was a social corrective – the chastened members of society as well as spectators would learn to correct their faults and their aberration from societal norms. None the less, for future generations of critics it remained indisputable that tragedy retained its superiority. For Aristotle claimed that comedy dealt with people who were worse than the average, whereas tragedy treated of people better than the norm. It was in the Renaissance, however, that

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

58

Shakespeare and laughter

this distinction gained decidedly class overtones. Tragedy was thought to be the genre treating of nobility, comedy the type of play concerned with average people. As Laurence Danson points out, ‘A distinction based on Greek ideas of moral and social values has been translated into the social and, specifically, class terms of an entirely different culture.’26 Accordingly, the stakes rose with regard to the didactic mileage to be gained. Laughter might be a useful instructive tool, but tragedy taught the really important lessons in life. Aristotle’s Poetics was rediscovered only in the sixteenth century. But his ideas were recycled in Cicero’s De Oratore which, together with Institutio oratoria of Quintilian, laid the groundwork for early modern ideas of the comic.27 Cicero’s treatise offers the fruits of his experience as the most renowned orator of his time and is intended as a handbook for future politicians. One of the rhetorical tools he examines is humour. It is written in the form of a philosophical dialogue between a number of historical persons, and the speaker in the section on wit is the statesman Julius Caesar Strabo Vopiscus. He begins expounding his views on laughter by setting out the parameters of his survey: ‘As regards laughter there are five matters for consideration: first, its nature; second, its source; third, whether willingness to produce it becomes an orator; fourth, the limits of his licence; fifth, the classification of things laughable.’28 The first two points are summarily dismissed: ‘all this I leave to Democritus’, the laughing philosopher, he declares, since no one has managed to penetrate the mystery of laughter. Cicero’s speaker goes on to rehearse the Aristotelian notion of ugliness as the main source of the comic. As to its aptness, Vopiscus regards laughter as too powerful a rhetorical instrument to relinquish. Not only does it show ‘the orator himself to be a man of finish, accomplishment and taste’, it is also a source of pure amusement.29 Limits to comic licence are imposed on the one hand by serious subjects such as crimes of a particularly heinous nature, and on the other by victims arousing more pity than scorn. Vopiscus then proceeds to analyse the varieties of wit. It is here that Cicero’s most incisive contributions to the discussion of humour are set out. He divides wit into two main categories: wit of matter, consisting of ancecdotes or humorous stories, and wit of form, encompassing witty remarks and puns. These two types can also be classified as wit ‘employed upon facts’ and wit ‘upon words’.30 Verbal witticisms include equivocation, play upon words, and irony, as well as the comic defusion of expectation. The former type, wit of matter, can imply humorous narrative but also include actual mimicry and caricature. As Cicero admits, there are many comic strategies that orators share with other comic performers: ‘Then there are jokes which are somewhat absurd, but for that very reason often comical, and which are appropriate not only to actors in farce, but also in some degree to us orators.’31 Nevertheless,

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Laughter and recreation

59

the orator must guard against the following dangers: ‘he must not let his jesting become buffoonery or mere mimicking’.32 It is remarkable how the anxiety to distinguish the orator from the actor or comedian shadows the text. This is partly because Cicero brings a new element into the discussion of laughter – the entertainment factor. Jests and witticisms have the power to amuse – and this power reflects back on the orator himself. In effect, what Cicero provides in his treatise is a guide for the professional performer. Quintilian’s remarks on laughter, written a century after Cicero, were a further important source for Renaissance theorists. He makes no bones about his admiration for ‘the prince of orators’, whom he regards ‘as being the possessor of a remarkable turn of wit’.33 Many of his examples are taken from the collections of Cicero’s jests. He follows Cicero in summarily dismissing the idea of delivering a definition of laughter: ‘I do not think that anybody can give an adequate explanation, though many have attempted to do so, of the cause of laughter’, he declares.34 As regards the source of laughter, he follows Cicero (who follows Aristotle) to point to deformity or ugliness as the main basis for humour.35 Quintilian, too, warns against blurring the boundaries between the orator and the jester: ‘It is most unbecoming for an orator to distort his features or use uncouth gestures, tricks that arouse such merriment in farce. No less unbecoming are ribald jests, and such as are employed upon the stage.’36 The orator should take care to avoid both the vulgarity of comic mimicry and the obscenity of farce. Quintilian echoes Cicero in subdividing humour into two types, ludicrous incidents and the witty use of words. The greater part of his section on laughter focuses on the latter, which he much prefers: ‘jests which turn on the meaning of things are at once more pointed and more elegant’.37 In the numerous examples that he sets out, it is in particular short, sharp wit that he favours. Indeed, his main concern in this part of his treatise is to elevate wit to the status of an art. To this end Quintilian draws on the Ciceronian idea of urbanitas and specifically enlists the support of Domitius Marsus, who wrote a treatise on urbanity in which he describes urbane wit as peculiar to Rome.38 Marsus defines urbane wit as follows: ‘Urbanity is a certain quality of language compressed into the limits of a brief saying and adapted to delight and move men to every kind of emotion, but specially suitable to resistance or attack according as the person or circumstances many demand.’39 Brevity is the soul of wit. Urbane humour is a rhetorical skill that serves both to amuse and to score points against one’s oponents. To this definition Quintilian adds a further note: ‘to my thinking urbanity involves the total absence of all that is incongruous, coarse, unpolished and exotic whether in thought, language, voice or gesture’.40 Urbane wit, he insists, is marked by both eloquence and elegance of taste. It serves to define

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

60

Shakespeare and laughter

the orator as a ‘man of finish’. The idea of humour as a means of displaying taste and cultivation goes back to Aristotle. In the Nicomachean Ethics he draws a distinction between the joking of the well-bred and the vulgar: ‘the jesting of a gentleman differs from that of a person of servile nature, as does that of an educated from that of an uneducated man’.41 The approaches to humour outlined above together lay the foundation for early modern attitudes to laughter. The aggressive component of laughter is stressed – laughter is perceived above all as an articulation of scorn, as expressed by a plethora of terms for jeering and taunting, such as flouting or fleering. Laughter triggered by comedy is legitimized as serving the function of a normative tool, shaming deviants from social norms into correcting their ways – and warning spectators to adhere to these norms for fear of having the same punishment meted out to them. When it is not explicitly anchored to a moral purpose, laughter is seen as essentially frivolous, evidently lacking gravitas. Excessive laughter is a sign of vulgarity. But the fact that laughter is a source of pleasure is also taken into account, in particular by practitioners of the performing arts. They are eager to appropriate the power of laughter for the professional performer. Finally, humour is enlisted in the service of self-presentation – as a means of displaying one’s sophistication and taste. Humanist views on laughter In the Renaissance the pleasurable, recreational aspects of laughter are increasingly foregrounded – while the idea of laughter as a normative tool retains its sway. A number of writers pointed out that laughter was by no means always linked to derision. In his commentary on Aristotle, Castelvetro asserted that, while most laughter did indeed arise from feelings of scorn, some laughter could simply arise from pleasure, unconnected to feelings of superiority. He also stresses the importance of surprise in provoking laughter.42 Here he echoed another commentator on Aristotle, Madius, in his essay De ridiculis (1550), who found a basis for the ridiculous in admiratio – a sense of wonder that was stimulated by the unexpected.43 The key concept of admiratio was actually introduced into the debate about laughter by medical writers, led by Girolamo Fracastoro in his De sympathia of 1546, who drew attention to the element of surprise that was often involved in triggering laughter.44 These voices pave the way for the incongruity theory of laughter that was to dominate views about laughter from the mid eighteenth century until the ascendancy of Freudian psychoanalysis. The Renaissance saw the flowering of jestbooks and collections of witticisms, compiled by scholars ranging from Poggio Bracciolini (with a decided taste for the bawdy) to Thomas More and Erasmus. In defence of recreation

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Laughter and recreation

61

humanists pointed to Aristotle’s definition of pleasure as a good: ‘even the temperate man has pleasures’, he declared, and described pleasure as ‘an experience of the soul’ that was ‘in conformity with virtue’.45 Admittedly, medieval thinkers had drawn on similar arguments in justification of play and pleasure – Aquinas, for instance, had asserted in the Summa theologica that ‘pleasure is rest for the soul’.46 Nevertheless, at the heart of the shift in attitudes towards laughter lies the Neoplatonic revalorization of pleasure, partly fuelled by the rediscovery of Epicurean thought. While most thinkers continued to reject Epicureanism as hedonistic and amoral, two important humanists did endorse Epicurean ideas – Ficino and Erasmus, who, characteristically, declares Christ to be an Epicurean in his colloquy Epicureus.47 Erasmus published an entire collection of witty anecdotes with the title Convivium fabulosum (The Fabulous Feast) in 1524.48 In the preface to his collection of Apophthegmes Erasmus declares, ‘Neither do I esteem it a thing worthy blame ever now and then with laughter to refresh the mind with cures and matters of charge in manner tried, so that the matter to laugh at be pure wit and honest.’49 To be sure, utility does not disappear from the picture entirely. Recreation served a useful purpose: as Erasmus points out, it was ‘a thing of high utility and profit with sober mirth to refresh the lustiness of the minds, and to make the same cheerful to honest travails and labours’.50 Laughter served to relax the mind to fortify one to work more efficiently. Or as Aristotle put it, ‘Play in order that you may work . . . For amusement is a form of rest; but we need rest because we are not able to go on working without a break, and therefore it is not an end, since we take it as a means to further activity.’51 Pleasure was necessary, but only as a means, not as an end in itself. Ambivalence towards the phenomenon of laughter is reflected in the writings of some of the foremost intellectuals of the age. In England the leading humanist thinker and statesman Sir Thomas More is a case in point. During his lifetime More had acquired a reputation as a wit and entertainer. Indeed, anecdotes accumulated around him after his death and entered jestbook literature, an honour usually reserved for famous jesters. They also left their trace in William Camden’s Remaines (1605) and even found their way into Francis Bacon’s collection of Apophthegms, New and Old, published in 1625. According to legend More died with a jest on his lips – requesting help to mount the scaffold, he remarked that he would not need help on the way down. More was probably involved in the project of compiling the first collection of English wit, the jestbook A Hundred Merry Tales, first published in 1526.52 By Shakespeare’s time it had become a byword for bad jokes: Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing is mortally insulted when told that rumour has it that she has pinched her jests from the Hundred Merry Tales (2.1.111). Nothing ages faster than humour. Nevertheless,

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

62

Shakespeare and laughter

the jestbook was so well known that the allusion was clear to theatre audiences seventy years after it first appeared. The More circle, which included the printer and playwright John Rastell, his brother-in-law, as well as the dramatist John Heywood, delighted in that archetypal humanist pastime of collecting jokes and riddles of all kinds.53 More himself wrote one jestbook in verse, A Merry Jest How a Sergeant Would Learn to Play the Friar.54 It is in More’s Dialogue of Comfort Against Tribulation that the ambivalence in his attitude towards laughter becomes visible. Admittedly it was composed in circumstances not exactly conducive to mirth – More wrote it while in prison awaiting his trial. More discusses the issue of laughter in connection with suffering, only to rehearse the orthodox Church view that in this world weeping was to be preferred to laughter. He points to the passage in the Sermon of the Mount, ‘Blessed are ye that weep now: for ye shall laugh’ and ‘Woe unto you that laugh now! for ye shall mourn and weep’ (Luke 6: 21; 25). More admits that Jesus probably never laughed: ‘I will not swear that he never did but at the least wise he left us no samples of it. But on the other side he left us example of weeping.’ The entire thirteenth chapter in volume 1 is devoted to justifying pain and tribulation as something to be not only endured but actually welcomed as a sign of God’s love: ‘and if we cannot (as Saint Paul saith we cannot) come to heaven but by many tribulations: how shall they come thither than that never have none at all’.55 The pain we endure is a mark of God’s favour. However, in a later chapter he discusses ‘Whether a man may not in tribulation use some worldly recreation for his comfort’. Here he has his speaker declare, ‘a merry tale with a friend, refresheth a man much and without any harm lighteth his mind and amendeth his courage and his stomach so that it seemeth but well done to take such recreation’. He admits regretfully ‘better would I wish it but I cannot help it’, and goes on to hedge this admission of pleasure about with admonitions to ‘make these kinds of recreation as short and seld as we can, let them serve us but for sauce and make them not our meat’ and to bear in mind that all wordly pleasure is as nothing compared to the bliss awaiting us in the world to come.56 Nevertheless, it is noteworthy that a thinker of More’s stature takes a stance in defence of recreation and the pleasure caused by humour. ‘Mirth and merriment’ There is one aspect of laughter that is largely ignored in the theories looked at so far. Perhaps this is not surprising in an age that knew no canned laughter. It is the fact that laughter is always a social phenomenon. Recent scientific research has revealed that laughter has more to do with human relationships than jokes: ‘laughter is a social behaviour that virtually disappears in isolated

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Laughter and recreation

63

people being scrutinized in a laboratory setting’.57 This had in fact been pointed out by anthropologists who examined laughter in the context of different cultural communities, and who observed highly standardized humorous behaviour between persons or groups which served to reinforce social bonding.58 To be sure, early modern scholars acknowledged the contagious nature of laughter – Nancel compared the effect of laughing to that of yawning. Neuroscientific research actually confirms this observation, and the occasional outbreak of laugh epidemics (as in 1962 in Tanganyika, now Tanzania) might well be rooted in neurobiological mechanisms.59 Laughter is above all a communal affair. While early modern thinkers do not explicitly draw attention to this fact, the term laughter is frequently used as a metonym for festivity and mirth. The communal dimension of laughter is, of course, what canned laughter on television taps into – by creating the impression of a community of viewers and recruiting the contagious effect of laughter, laugh tracks on sitcoms transform an isolated viewing experience into a social performance of the comic.60 Most early modern laughter occurred within the framework of festivity.61 There were, after all, more than a hundred holy days a year to be celebrated in the early sixteenth century calendar.62 The main festivals were the Twelve Days of Christmas, Shrovetide, Easter, May Day, Whitsuntide and Midsummer. In addition, there were local ales or parish feasts and wakes (commemorating the dedication of the parish church) that called for festivity. On occasion the charivari was undertaken, accompanied by festive exuberance and merriment. This was a punitive expedition against a member of society who had transgressed marital norms (for instance, cuckolds or henpecked husbands). Even if England did not celebrate carnival to the extent as was the case in Europe, festivals in general were marked by carnivalesque features such as excess in food, drink, sex, and violence. Often a battle between allegorical figures representing Carnival and Lent was fought out – the latter a kill-joy known as ‘Jack a Lent’. Festivity was often characterised by the motif of inversion or misrule. Social hierarchies were upended, workaday norms reversed, and moral restraints no longer binding. The trope of inversion found its expression in cultural performances and representations of all kinds – prints depict a world where fish flew and birds swam, where horses went backwards, where servants rode while their master followed on foot, and where women sported weapons while men nursed babies. Gender reversal was often extravagantly staged, and most festivity included men dressed as women in Maid Marian parodies. Inversion was carried right into the heart of the religious establishment, with the celebration of mock masses and the election of a boy bishop on the Feast of Fools. Literary critics have frequently read a subversive meaning into the images of inversion. Since the early 1970s, when the work of the Russian scholar Mikhail

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

64

Shakespeare and laughter

Bakhtin was discovered by scholars in the West, discussion of Renaissance mirth leads many critics to apply the Bakhtinian theory of carnival. Bakhtin regarded carnival as opposed to the official culture imposed by authority. Festivals ‘were the second life of the people, who for a time entered the utopian realm of community, freedom, equality, and abundance’. By contrast, official feasts sanctioned and reinforced the existing regime. Carnival celebrated tempory liberation from the established order – the suspension of all hierarchical rank and normative rules. During this period a space was opened up for social communication which transgressed everyday regulatory norms – unfettered speech that included the cheerful use of abuse and blasphemy and the comic deflation of all forms of hierarchy. Laughter was the signal of carnival abandon: ‘Carnival laughter is the laughter of all the people. Second, it is universal in scope; it is directed at all and everyone, including the carnival’s participants . . . Third, this laughter is ambivalent: it is gay, triumphant, and at the same time mocking, deriding. It asserts and denies, it buries and revives.’63 At the heart of carnival lay the notion of the world as an endless cycle, defined by revival and renewal. This, Bakhtin asserts, was the cornerstone of the revolutionary impulse in carnival, since the people knew that they were essentially indestructible, whatever oppression might be meted out to them by the powers that be. Historians are more sceptical about the implications of festivity. Peter Burke acknowledges that an abundant flow of alcohol during festivals and the opportunity to congregate and discuss current affairs did on occasion lead to the articulation of suppressed protest in ritualized form. But the main function of festive occasions was to celebrate the community and reaffirm communal solidarity.64 Indeed, institutionalized inversion often had the effect of shoring up the established order, serving the purpose of a safety-valve – as was argued by clerics as early as 1444, defending the inversionary customs of the Feast of Fools: ‘We do these things in jest and not in earnest, as the ancient custom is, so that once a year the foolishness innate in us can come out and evaporate. Don’t wine skins and barrels burst very often if the air-hole is not opened from time to time? We too are old barrels . . .’65 Social historian Barry Reay has argued: Bakhtin’s grand claims, so influential in twentieth-century cultural studies, do not describe the capacities of the English carnivalesque. The only moments when these forms were truly threatening were at times of genuine crisis in the social order, and such moments were rare in early modern England. The weight of festive ritual was towards social conservatism, the reinforcement of male dominance and social hierarchy.66

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Laughter and recreation

65

It is evident there is nothing inherently revolutionary in the trope of inversion.67 In theory, of course, inversion was a comic motif: it displayed a world of chaos and folly. And the proper response to folly was laughter. A phenomenon to be found in a variety of hierarchical societies throughout the ages, it embodied a deeply conservative impulse – to reaffirm order. Bakhtin’s view is flawed by an anachronistically literalist reading of carnival – as a celebration of the state of inversion itself. In traditional societies, however, carnival practices have always been incorporated in social life during periods of festivity precisely to remind its members of the precariousness of order and the need to reinforce it. Zuni Indian clowns do not consume quantities of excrement to celebrate forbidden pleasures, but to strengthen the strict purity taboos within their societies.68 From a Christian perspective, laughter at humanity’s gross physicality was a way of mocking the abyss between our material nature and our high-flown aspirations, located as we are half-way between the bestial and the divine on the Chain of Being. Ironically, critics have misread Rabelais’s exuberance and fascination with the grotesque aspects of life as a delighted wallowing in materiality. In practice, as cultural historians have pointed out, the elite participated enthusiastically in popular festivity and games of inversion. Gentry were involved in both charivaris and in anti-enclosure riots. There existed a common stock of cultural values between both elite and popular strata of society, including the belief in patriarchal ideas, the ideology of customary rights, and the adherence to Protestant nationalism.69 Indeed, there was a remarkable interaction between both poles of society, with shared beliefs and faith in the rule of law permeating all sections of society. Similarly, staples of popular culture such as chapbooks and ballads were avidly consumed by both groups. The gentry took part in the recreational life of the countryside, participating in cock-fighting, bullbaiting, pugilism, horse-racing, cudgelling, harvest festivities, and hunting.70 What is most striking about the trajectory of popular culture in the early modern period, as Peter Burke has noted in a pioneering study, is the gradual withdrawal of the elite from participation in popular culture and the emergence of an increasingly rigid divide between both poles of cultural practice. Ronald Hutton attributes this development to the convergence of several factors.71 First, the ‘reformation of manners’ was launched by religious reformers in an attempt to stamp out the last vestiges of paganism in popular ritual, seen as remnants of Roman Saturnalian practices. To be sure, recurrent bursts of reforming zeal can be traced from the fifteenth century well into the eighteenth century.72 Since the beginning of Christianity religious authorities had been concerned about indecorous behaviour during merry making, especially when it occurred on church premises. Mirth was condemned as encouraging sins of the flesh and fostering a disproportionate emphasis on worldly pleasures. Secular authorities,

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

66

Shakespeare and laughter

too, had long been wary of the dangers of unruliness and disorder during periods of festivity. But it was only with the radical phase of the Edwardian Reformation that a campaign to eradicate popular customs was instigated. The aim was to uproot the last remains of idolatry. Within one to three years after the death of Henry VIII the movement to destroy shrines and images had virtually triumphed across the country. Seasonal rituals of the English Church were radically curtailed. The campaign also had a shattering effect upon secular customs such as church ales, maypoles, and hobby horses. Interestingly, the first lament for merry England was articulated as early as 1552: the Cambridge scholar Dr John Caius mourned ‘the old world, when this country was called merry England’.73 The Marian Revival briefly restored seasonal festivity, but the Elizabethan Settlement completed the process of transforming the religious festive cycles of the old faith. Archbishop Grindal stamped out the last traces of religious drama with determination and tenacity. Only the secular customs remained, but these came under a new wave of attacks under Puritan auspices. May games, maypoles, dancing, gaming, drinking, and football were savagely condemned as incitements to lechery and idleness. Above all, the sabbatarian movement led to an enforced prohibition of games and sports on Sundays, which is when they usually took place. The reformation of manners was a phenomenon that took hold of most of Europe, implemented by the forces of both the Reformation and the CounterReformation. But other factors played a role in the decline of popular festivity. In England a sharp increase in poverty, fuelled by economic vicissitudes and a string of disastrous harvest failures, led to the formation of an underclass of masterless men consisting of vagrants and petty criminals, who might be regarded as a form of lumpenproletariat. The poor seemed to be posing a threat to the stability of society. A contemporaneous development was the growth in education and refinement for the elite. The focus of interest shifted to a culture of manners that increasingly gained in influence and prestige. The elite withdrew from popular culture and from their involvement in country pastimes, no longer providing large-scale hospitality to their retainers. It remains a moot point to what extent ideological factors or economic circumstances influenced the demise of popular festivity in the country. Certainly the transition to a market economy exerted pressure to reduce the number of holidays. This was related to attempts to impose a more rigorous labour discipline and adapt the population to conditions of proto-industrial production. At the same time the birth of a consumer society became apparent, with the concomitant beginnings of the commercialisation of leisure.74 The distinction between work and leisure is one that it is not possible to draw in pre-industrial society.75 The close relationship between the agricultural

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Laughter and recreation

67

cycle and the liturgical year meant that work and ritual were not clearly marked off from each other – not only was the agrarian year punctuated by feasts of the Church but virtually all medieval industries were seasonal in character. Both labour and religion were indispensable means of preserving the unity of the group. Recreational aspects were inextricably bound up with each. The medieval craft guild, for instance, combined economic functions with social aspects within a religious framework. Keith Thomas points out that the transition to a market economy was closely linked to a change in attitudes to work. A new work ethic was instigated in Protestant thought and subsequently propagated by the reformers of the Counter-Reformation. This implied that, as has been discussed above, occasions for recreation were banished from their customary place within the institution of the established Church. But this also meant that purely secular uses of hitherto religious practices such as music emerged, as did secular centres of entertainment. Instead of lamenting the decline of popular culture, historians such as Tim Harris contend that culture is a process that is constantly undergoing change. As Harris points out, ‘The commercialisation of society . . . had the effect of opening up new cultural horizons, and of making available pursuits and leisure activities which had hitherto been the preserve of a select few – first for the middling ranks of society, but gradually over the course of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries for the lower orders as well.’76 What evolved with the suppression of popular festivity is the displacement of mirth on to what emerges as an incipient entertainment industry – the theatre. Seasonal cycles of mirth were transmuted into a localized site of pleasure: carnival on a daily, if temporary basis. (‘We’ll strive to please you every day’, as Feste promises in Twelfth Night, 5.1.407). The link between laughter and mass entertainment is not new, of course. Erich Segal makes a similar point in connection with Plautine comedy in his book Roman Laughter.77 What is new, however, is the formation of a nascent entertainment business grounded in the conditions of an increasingly effective market economy. In a brilliant study, Big-Time Shakespeare, Michael Bristol analyses what he terms ‘the greatest show business success story of all time’.78 He traces three stages in the formation of early modern show business. The first stage involves the emergence of professional theatre companies who performed for a living for the greater part of the year – in contrast to the amateur performances staged by guilds during the early medieval period. In the second phase purpose-built theatres were constructed and leased to theatre companies. In the third phase members of the repertory company themselves invested in playhouses and eventually formed partnerships with booksellers for the sale of plays.79 The first playhouses in London were constructed in 1576. While the exact

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

68

Shakespeare and laughter

constitution of Shakespeare’s audience has sparked off a debate among Shakespearean scholars, the consensus points to a remarkable inclusiveness in the playgoing public.80 Only the highest echelons of society, who could afford private performances or attended performances at court, or the lowest strata of the populace, for whom even the low entrance fees were out of reach, were absent among the audience of theatres such as the Globe. In the early seventeenth century an increasing dispersion among the theatre going spectatorship could be observed, with indoor halls such as the Blackfriars drawing a more select crowd.81 Nevertheless, the audience in the Elizabethan period did to a large extent reflect the make-up of urban society, as Robert Weimann has pointed out: ‘Its audience was made up of every rank and class in society . . . It was a multiple unity based on contradictions and as such allowed the dramatist a flexible frame of reference that was more complex and more vital to the experience of living and feeling within the social organism than the achievement of any other theater before or since.’82 Bristol contradicts the strain of academic wishful thinking that imbues the early modern theatre with subversion and marginality.83 Instead, the theatre might be seen as a striking example of innovative economic activity. What it helped carve out was a new market in cultural goods. Early modern London was a city undergoing an unprecedented expansion, largely due to mass immigration from the surrounding countryside. The consumers of these cultural commodities were mainly first-generation Londoners who were no longer rooted in their rural environs, but also not necessarily bound in by the framework of guild life. It was this new customer to whose needs and desires the theatre catered. The old forms of economic activity predicated on social status and on reciprocal bonds no longer applied in the case of the new socially undifferentiated cultural consumer. As Bristol explains, ‘A commodity is an article of commerce exchanged with a view to purely economic advantage among people who remain strangers to each other.’ This meant that the relationship between performers and spectators was based on social distance, as was the relationship within the audience itself. It was a shifting, anonymous community that constituted itself temporarily for a theatrical performance and then dispersed – but during this cultural event a roughly equal status was conveyed on all members of the community. As Michael Bristol puts it, ‘the socially undifferentiated consumer of cultural services was the most important invention of the early modern theatre’.84 To sum up: the early modern battle over laughter was not fought between an exuberant carnivalesque people and a lenten disciplinary social order, as Bakhtinian devotees would have it. The battle lines were drawn along lines of taste (or decorum). One of the most pernicious fallacies to have taken hold of

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Laughter and recreation

69

literary studies is the notion that laughter represents the authentic expression of the masses, a direct articulation of natural bodily impulses. This view misreads early modern attitudes towards the body in the light of contemporary concerns. Norbert Elias’s view of the early modern preoccupation with manners and the codification of behaviour in terms of a threshold of shame that is increasingly internalized has been reinforced by Freud’s influential thesis of the increasing repression of natural instincts as the price humanity has paid for the achievements of civilization (Civilization and Its Discontents, 1930). I wish to suggest that a focus on repression of the body might be misguided in connection with early modern thought. It is based on two fallacious assumptions: firstly, on the Cartesian mind body divide that was not yet in place at this time, and secondly on the notion that corporeal discipline was necessarily regarded as repressive. Laughter in the early modern age was not perceived in purely physiological terms – as indeed no corporeal phenomenon could be divorced from affective or cognitive impulses. Humoral pathology posited an intrinsic connection between emotions, moods, and temperament, and physical properties. Laughter was usually linked with the emotions or passions. If Joubert locates the seat of laughter in the heart with the emotions, not with the faculties of cognition in the brain, he nevertheless sees laughter as a phenomenon that demonstrates ‘the power that the soul has over the body’ (65). The soul consisted of a number of faculties apart from the intellective faculty, one of which was the appetitive faculty, which was responsible for emotions. Nor was laughter a sign of the body triumphing over reason, as is posited in today’s conventional wisdom. While the inception of laughter was involuntary, early modern scholars argued that it could be brought under control by the rational powers in the same way that breathing was involuntary but we are able to hold our breath. As Vives points out, ‘Laughter is always natural rather than willed, but it can be controlled by habit and reason to prevent excessive outbursts that shake the entire body.’85 For humanists such as Joubert, Vives, More, and Erasmus, celebrating laughter was not a matter of elevating the body over the mind. For a pre-Cartesian understanding of physiology it was impossible to separate the operation of laughter from that of the soul. Moreover, control of the operation of emotions on the body was not seen as the repression of ‘natural’ functions. Since Plato emotions had been regarded as important functions that should be directed, not suppressed. Indeed, self-discipline and moderation were regarded as a strategy of empowerment. Laughter was an external sign of the way the affects responded to a comic stimulus relayed by the senses. Since one’s outward demeanour displayed one’s inward qualities, corporeal propriety and restraint were a signal of one’s strength of character – of the power of the intellective soul (where the will was located) over the emotions. Thus both laughter and self-restraint

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

70

Shakespeare and laughter

were thought to be the distinctive mark of humanity’s elevated status. For humanists there was no contradiction involved. To be sure, what can be traced is the increasing divide between elite and popular culture that historians have detected as a major impetus in this period. The campaign to reform manners was spearheaded by precisely the same thinkers who propagated the value of laughter and recreation. As Joubert is anxious to point out, his endorsement of laughter holds only with reference to moderate laughter – ‘when it is dissolute or of long duration . . . laughter becomes ugly, improper, and lascivious’ (55). Erasmus compiles a list of wrong types of laughter, including the Ionian laugh, which revelled in the voluptuous, the Megarian laugh, which was associated with jesting at an indecorous moment, the laugh of Chios, wanton laughter during a lascivious game, the Ajax-laugh, which erupted without reason, as with the insane, and uncontrollable Syncrousic laughter.86 While humanist scholars such as Erasmus might celebrate bonhomie and sophisticated humour (however earthy it might appear to us), they were serious about discouraging the vestiges of pagan practices in popular festivity. While they might applaud the value of recreation and pleasure, they frowned upon the excesses of disorder, drunkenness, debauchery, and violence associated with popular festivals. Paradoxically it was the commercial theatre with its roots in festivity that reconciled the notions of pleasurable recreation and communality – by inventing the concept of commercial entertainment. This implied shifting the focus from laughter as a social corrective to laughter as playful diversion. Laughter in A Midsummer Night’s Dream A Midsummer Night’s Dream fuses elements from both elite and popular culture. It is indebted to material from classical literature, such as Ovidian mythology and Senecan drama. At the same time the play draws on folk customs like Maying, when young men and women went into the woods to celebrate May Day with singing and dancing, and Midsummer rites, which included amateur theatricals and the telling of tales about fairies and temporary madness.87 A mainstay of early modern festivity was the motif of inversion, in which relations of power were temporarily reversed. Human beings took on the attributes of beasts; women (including fairy queens) thwarted their husbands; a rude mechanical gained a queen as his mate. Folly reigned supreme, a provisional madness to which some were more susceptible than others. This was the case with lovers, who were prone to succumb to fantasy and elevate the passions over reason. In the play the lovers are so quick to transfer their affections from one object of desire to the next, so ready to betray the one they loved, and so willing

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Laughter and recreation

71

to metamorphose into new selves, that the audience is led to suspect that the juice of the magical flower merely acts as a catalyst for them to discard an already fragile notion of identity. Puck suggests as much to the soft-hearted Oberon when the latter chides him for mixing up the lovers into whose eyes the love-juice is to be trickled. Puck, blithely unrepentent, justifies himself by pointing out that among mortals, ‘one man holding troth, / A million fail, confounding oath on oath’ (3.2.92– 3).88 Mortals, he asserts, are notoriously fickle in their affections. Demetrius, for example, displays exactly the same behaviour before the love-juice is administered to him as after. As Helena laments, he swore eternal love to her before transferring his allegiance to her friend: ‘For, ere Demetrius look’d on Hermia’s eyne, / He hail’d down oaths that he was only mine; / And when this hail some heat from Hermia felt, / So he dissolv’d and show’rs of oaths did melt’ (1.1.242–5). Her imagery of mutation foreshadows the chain of transformations that subsequently take place in the magical, moonlit world of the Athenian forest. Ironically, Demetrius will later use a similar trope to assert his (second) change of heart: ‘my love to Hermia, / Melted as the snow, seems to me now / As the remembrance of an idle gaud’ (4.1.164–6). Helena confirms Puck’s cynical view of lovers: ‘Love is perjur’d everywhere’ (1.1.241). She herself, however, is only too ready to betray the friend of her childhood, with whom she had once been so close that they had seemed ‘Like to a double cherry, seeming parted, / But yet an union in partition, / Two lovely berries moulded on one stem’ (3.2.209–11). The play invites laughter at the predicament of the lovers, employing the classic comic device of identity confusion to mock the folly inherent in love. Analogously, the play recruits our laughter at the magical transformation of an asinine artisan into an ass. Furthermore, a rebellious spouse – in itself a reversal of proper gender relations – is ridiculed by having a lover foisted upon her who is the embodiment of topsy-turvydom. Not only is the translated Bottom closer to a beast than a man, in addition he is at the other end of the scale of social hierarchy to a queen. The magic employed in the play merely brings into focus the follies of the various characters, who are mocked through laughter. Thus the play seems to fulfil the injunction that comic laughter be a social corrective. Ben Jonson, that guardian of classical norms, draws on the Platonic–Aristotelian tradition of suspicion of laughter when he notes that even in a comedy laughter should be permitted only in small doses: ‘the moving of laughter is a fault in comedy, a kind of turpitude, that depraves some part of a man’s nature without a disease’. Laughter may be triggered by ugliness, as Aristotle postulated, but laughing itself is not a pretty sight. While it stops short of being an abomination, it is an unmistakable sign of folly. Jonson points out that ‘the

72

Shakespeare and laughter

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

ancient philosophers ever think laughter unfitting in a wise man’.89 It is permissible only when it serves a moral purpose, namely to correct folly itself. In the Prologue to Every Man in His Humour he describes the proper function of comedy in the following terms: When she would show an image of the times, And sport with human follies, not with crimes. ... I mean such errors, as you’ll all confess By laughing at them, they deserve no less:90 (Prologue 23–8)

Jonson echoes the Aristotelian precept that the subject of comedy is vice of the lesser sort, not large-scale depravity. He also gestures towards a cathartic notion of laughter that would have a parallel effect to the workings of pity and fear in tragedy. By laughing at the follies of characters on stage, the audience would be incited to reform itself – for fear of falling victim to the same punitive mockery. More recent critics have indeed seen the function of laughter in A Midsummer Night’s Dream as that of a normative tool. However, they have been of differing opinions as regards to precisely what end it is deployed in the play. C. L. Barber, one of the first critics to point to the links between popular festive rituals and Shakespeare’s plays, sees the main effect in a reaffirmation of social values. In his reading of the traces of early modern festivity in Shakespearean comedy, he detects a development ‘through release to clarification’, thus grafting the Freudian theory of laughter on to Aristotelian poetics.91 Inversion serves the function of a safety-valve that ultimately shores up the social order. The lovers are mocked for their folly and taught a lesson for life. Of Titania’s final submission to her husband, relinquishing the boy he so covets, Barber remarks: ‘So here is another sort of change of heart that contributes to the expression of what is consummated in marriage, this one a part of the rhythm of adult life, as opposed to the change in the young lovers that goes with growing up.’92 As he notes approvingly, the boy has been surrendered by Titania for his own good – he will now grow up in a man’s world, the court of Oberon. Feminist critics are more sceptical about the restored order. They point out that the patriarchal hierarchy has been re-established at the expense of women’s bonds (such as that between Titania and her votress).93 Titania’s affair with Bottom is seen as a truly gynocentric relationship, in contrast to the aggressive demands on her made by Oberon.94 Bottom, it emerges, is every woman’s dream. The punitive impulse of the play is not celebrated but deplored. Similarly, the laughter evoked by Bottom has been variously interpreted, particularly by New Historicist critics who perceive a link between the fictive mechan-

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Laughter and recreation

73

icals in the play and artisans in early modern society. Richard Wilson has drawn attention to the long-standing radicalism of cloth workers in early modern London.95 Particularly weavers were active in riots during the upheavals of the 1590s, caused by explosive inflation, unemployment, and discontent about the increasing enclosure of pasture lands.96 The series of harvest failures that exacerbated the catastrophic economic situation of these years is hinted at in the lines describing the marital dissent between the fairy rulers, which has reverberations in the world of nature: ‘The ox hath therefore strech’d his yoke in vain, / The ploughman lost his sweat, and the green corn / Hath rotted ere his youth attain’d a beard’ (2.1.93–5). Wilson notes that the commercial theatre appropriated and disciplined the language of carnival. By contrast, Annabel Patterson draws on Bakhtinian festive theory to insist on the utopian element in the play. For her Bottom is a winner. The play presents a representative of the commons who transgresses social boundaries to gain the fairy queen herself as a prize. Inversion bears a subversive impulse that is not erased by the subsequent developments of the play. The utopian dimension of infringing on social hierarchies is reflected in Bottom’s inarticulate description of his dream, ‘The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man’s hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report, what my dream was’ (4.1.209–12). The burlesque of a passage from Corinthians is a pointer to the dream of a world of greater social equality. Valuable though the insights of these critics are, I wish to suggest that an exclusive focus on the politics of the play has obscured other dimensions of the text, in particular how it evokes laughter. Laughter in A Midsummer Night’s Dream does not primarily work as a social corrective. We are not left with the impression of vicious humiliation, as in some of Jonson’s comedies. Nor are any of the figures shown as undergoing any sort of moral reform. For the lovers, the device of a magic dream serves to eradicate any awareness of the implications of their traumatic night: ‘These things seem small and undistinguishable, / Like far-off mountains turned into clouds’ (4.1.186–7). Demetrius wonders, ‘Are you sure / That we are awake? It seems to me / That yet we sleep, we dream’ (190–2). They remain entirely oblivious of the parallels between their own story and the fate of Pyramus and Thisbe, as their light-hearted jesting during the performance reveals. The character who dupes the lovers into making fools of themselves is Puck, a typical trickster figure. Tricksters are traditionally marked as both malevolent and benevolent at the same time. Their main characteristic is an entire lack of morals.97 Robin Goodfellow was a mischievous hobgoblin notorious for his practical jokes. He is described as a ‘shrewd and knavish sprite’ and identified for us by the fairy he meets:

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

74

Shakespeare and laughter

. . . Are not you he That frights the maidens of the villagery, Skim milk, and sometimes labour in the quern, And bootless make the breathless housewife churn, And sometime make the drink to bear no barm, Mislead night-wanderers, laughing at their harm? (2.1.33–8)

His list of pranks runs the gamut from the harmless, like tormenting housewives, to the cruel, such as leading travellers astray. He himself offers us a sample of his taste in humour: The wisest aunt, telling the saddest tale, Sometime for three-foot stool mistaketh me; Then slip I from her bum, down topples she, And ‘tailor’ cries, and falls into a cough; And then the whole quire hold their hips and loffe And waxen in their mirth, and neeze, and swear, A merrier hour was never wasted there. (2.1.51–7)

His speciality is horseplay, pulling chairs out from under the backsides of crones and thus regaling the entire company. Puck prides himself on his talent in evoking laughter. He sees his position as that of a court jester to Oberon and his main task to lie in providing entertainment: ‘I jest to Oberon, and make him smile’ (2.1.44). This is, of course, precisely what he does for us. The trickster gains our admiration through his sheer audacity. He revels in strategems and plots, and above all in creating chaos. Unlike the benign Oberon, Puck rubs his hands in glee at the thought of the confusion he has caused: ‘this their jangling I esteem a sport’ (3.2.353). For him (as for us) the lovers are merely actors: ‘Shall we their fond pageant see? / Lord, what fools these mortals be!’ (3.2.113–14) Malicious humour is what Puck thrives on – and what the audience delights in sharing with him. It is hard to imagine an agent of laughter less suited to teaching a moral. If the lovers seem to have survived being made a laughing-stock virtually unscathed, this is even more so the case with Bottom. In the repertory of comic personnel Bottom represents the opposite end to Puck. He is the generic comic butt, the buffoon whose function it is to trigger laughter through his pratfalls. Bottom remains unchanged by what he has undergone for the simple reason that he is impervious to any sort of experience. It would be fallacious to draw an analogy between laughter at a trickster or a comic butt on stage and the laughter that serves to mark the humiliation of a scapegoat in real life. Both Puck and

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Laughter and recreation

75

and Bottom fulfil one main purpose – to amuse the audience. Entertainment, not didacticism, is their brief. Our laughter is always on their side, since they are the figures who provide the pleasure we incessantly crave. Our laughter is that of complicity and admiration for a good comedian. They are not real characters at all, but comic cues that signal to the audience that humour is in the offing. Above all, they are indestructible. Clowns and tricksters never die. Nor is it at all clear that Titania is being disciplined. If she is being penalized by having an ass as a paramour, the shaming ritual would involve exposing Oberon as a cuckold. Analogies with festive rituals such as the charivari do not really hold. For these are ‘spirits of another sort’ (3.2.388) for whom the rules of mortal men do not apply. Certainly, they are not bound by constraints of middle-class morality, as the history of their past affairs with Theseus and Hippolyta demonstrates. Titania’s behaviour to her new lover does not exactly conform to any variety of gender norms the audience would be familiar with. ‘Out of this wood do not desire to go: / Thou shalt remain here, whether thou wilt or no’ (3.1.145–6) she informs Bottom peremptorily, ordering her minions to ‘Tie up my love’s tongue’ (194) when he babbles too much. Even his simpliest wishes are denied him: he desires hay or dried peas, she orders new nuts for his menu. The play makes abundantly clear that what we are witnessing is another world, a creation of exquisite poetry, where ‘Phoebe doth behold / Her silver visage in the wat’ry glass, / Decking with liquid pearl the bladed grass’ (1.1.208– 11), not the world of men. The main impression that the comedy creates is that of a game, a stylized spectacle which bears an affinity to the realm of play, governed by its own laws. This impression is effected through a spectrum of devices, which include the elegant lyricism of the verse, the ironic distance created to the characters on stage, the conjuring up of a fairy world, and the multiple strands of the plot. But it is above all the use of the metaphor of a dream and the layered structure of the play that underscore the artificiality of the play. The mise en abyme chain of dreams in the play relates the entire theatrical experience to a ‘weak and idle theme, / No more yielding but a dream’ (5.1.413– 14). In addition, the play uses multiple plays-within-a-play to mirror the situation in the theatre. We watch Oberon and Puck watch the lovers reel from one delusion into the next – only to watch the same lovers later watch the mechanicals bumble their way through their performance. A Midsummer Night’s Dream continually points up the fact that it is a fictive artefact, not a reflection of reality: it is just a game. In point of fact, A Midsummer Night’s Dream seems to flaunt its power to define a situation as comic by generating laughter. While the trickster and the clown invite laughter merely through their conventional status as stock comic devices, the play itself daringly juggles with the most tragic of motifs and turns them

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

76

Shakespeare and laughter

into sources of humour. The tale of Pyramus and Thisbe is presented in two variations, each a mirror image of the other. The first version, involving the lovers Hermia and Lysander fleeing parental wrath, is transposed into a comic key, ending in reconciliation and harmony. In the second permutation of the story the tragic ending is retained. But it is not merely comedy that is juxtaposed with tragedy – the play turns both versions into cues for laughter. The play-within-a-play is a parody of inept theatrical performance, which manages to transform the most sublime material into a farce. By contrast, the humour in the lovers’ plot is more subtly evoked – partly through the machinations of the trickster, Puck, partly through the device of comic mix-ups and doubling (the lovers are split into two virtually indistinguishable pairs), and partly through the language they use. The insults they hurl at each other are hilarious: ‘Out, tawny Tartar, out! / Out, loathed medicine!’ Lysander demands, attempting to expulse his ex-love (3.2.263–4), before descending to the depths of comic deflation: ‘Get you gone, you dwarf; / You minimus, of hindering knot-grass made; / You bead, you acorn’ (3.2.328–30). At a closer look it becomes apparent that there is nothing very funny about any strand of the plot. The entire play is shadowed by suggestions of violence, hatred, betrayal, and games of power. The classical sources Shakespeare mines tell their own story – they are suffused with brutality, lust, and the implacable workings of fate.98 There is a dark, ominous strain of imagery running through the play as a counterpoint to the beauty of the magical forest. Titania speaks of a world of ‘contagious fogs’, rotting corn, dying cattle and ‘rheumatic diseases’ (2.1.90–105); the fairies sing of other, unseen denizens of the woods: spotted snakes, newts, blind-worms, spiders and beetles (2.2.9–22). At the end of the play when Puck celebrates the renewed onset of fairy time, he simultaneously evokes a world invaded by dark, sinister powers: Now the hungry lion roars, And the wolf behowls the moon; ... Whilst the screech-owl, screeching loud, Puts the wretch that lies in woe In remembrance of a shroud. Now it is the time of night That the graves, all gaping wide, Every one lets forth his sprite In the church-way paths to glide. (5.1.357–68)

It is not just the threat of hostile natural and supernatural forces that haunts the play. The human protagonists reveal an ugly streak lurking beneath their

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Laughter and recreation

77

charm. Significantly, when Hermia swears to keep the tryst with Lysander she laughingly evokes the betrayed queen Dido and ‘all the vows that ever men have broke’ (1.1.175). The lovers turn against their loved ones with breathtaking cruelty, humiliating them with threats of rape and murder. In the midst of the enchanting artifice of the play we are confronted with a moment of pure terror. Hermia wakes to recount a nightmare to Lysander: ‘Methought a serpent ate my heart away, / And you sat smiling at his cruel prey.’ (2.2.148–9). Lysander has long abandoned her, expressing his deep loathing for his former beloved. There is an undercurrent of fear and violence lurking beneath the mirth and merriment in Shakespeare’s comedies. As the critic Ernst Kris put it, they remind us that human beings are ‘eternal pleasure-seekers walking on a narrow ledge above an abyss of fear’.99 It is through laughter that we are distanced from the disturbing implications of what is happening on stage. It is laughter that prevents the dream from turning into a nightmare. The main function of laughter in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, however, is to generate social cohesion. From the disparate consumers of a cultural commodity a community of mirth is created. This becomes particularly evident in the last act of the play. The entire act is superfluous from the point of view of the plot – by the end of Act 4 all strands have been neatly tied up, and Puck’s promise has been fulfilled: ‘Jack shall have Jill, / Nought shall go ill; / The man shall have his mare again, and all shall be well’ (3.2.460–2). But from a theatrical viewpoint the play-within-the-play forms the climax of the comedy. It offers the high point of hilarity in the entire play. As in a hall of mirrors, we watch an audience on stage laughing at the antics of a bunch of comedians. Unlike the analogous situation in Love’s Labour’s Lost, however, the spectators do not disrupt the play with their heckling.100 Commenting on a play was probably a common occurrence in the daylight performances of the early modern theatre. The ham actors continue with their play unperturbed, with only Moonshine showing signs of being flustered, deserting his jiggling verse lines to announce flatly, ‘All that I have to say is, to tell you that the lantern is the moon; I the Man i’th’Moon; this thorn-bush my thorn-bush; and this dog my dog’ (5.1.246–8). Bottom carries on dispensing good advice all around, as he has done throughout. The living, talking wall, a perennial source of merriment for the sophisticated audience, is commented on ironically by Theseus: ‘The wall, methinks, being sensible, should curse again.’ Bottom (quite oblivious of the irony) kindly takes it upon himself to explain the workings of the play to the Duke: ‘No, in truth sir, he should not. “Deceiving me” is Thisbe’s cue: she is to enter now, and I am to spy her through the wall. You shall see it will fall pat as I told you: yonder she comes’ (180–5). The play plays itself out, ending with a jig, and the mechanicals probably get to pocket their royal pension. As

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

78

Shakespeare and laughter

Ann Barton points out, ‘Although the artistic merit of the Pyramus and Thisby play is virtually non-existent, the performance itself is a resounding success. No feelings have been hurt, and everyone has had a thoroughly good time.’101 This cross-class sense of mutuality and unity in mirth is precisely what the play is intended to generate with the real audience. While an earlier generation saw the Shakespearean theatre as reflecting a unified merry England, more recent critics have stressed the theatre’s investment in producing a sense of community and what might be regarded as the beginnings of a public sphere. Louis Montrose has described the theatre as replacing the function hitherto fulfilled by communal religious ritual, uniting a society riven by religious dissent.102 Drawing on Benedict Anderson’s work, Peter Womack has pointed to the role of the theatre in creating an imagined community that would contribute to the construction of English nationalism.103 I wish to draw attention to the role of laughter as a cohesive agent in creating communities of mirth. This is rooted in the nature of laughter as a social practice – a collective phenomenon that creates a sense of communality. Paradoxically, laughter, a tool that can exacerbate hostility, also bears the potential of defusing social tension. As a result laughter can have the effect of facilitating social reconciliation. This is precisely why mirth has been seen as a means of social control. Montaigne recommends the theatre as a form of regulated social activity: Good governments take the trouble to bring their citizens together and assemble them for sports and games just as they do for serious acts of worship: a sense of community and good-will is increased by this. And you could not allow citizens any amusements better regulated than those which take place in the presence of all and in full view of the magistrate. I would find it reasonable that the magistrate or monarch should occasionally offer such amusements to the people for nothing, with a kind of fatherly goodness and affection, and that in the bigger towns there should be places set aside and duly appointed for such spectacles, which would be a diversion from worse and secret goings-on.104

Montaigne describes the communal cohesion generated by mass recreation as expedient for a well-governed polity. In reality things were not always as clearcut. The idea of the paternalistic ruler permitting diversion to forestall more dangerous social activity was the impulse that lay behind James I’s promotion of games in his Book of Sports in 1618. In his case, however, the backlash was lethal: the outrage that welled up among the godly (amongst them many members of the gentry) served to exacerbate the tension between Crown and parliamentary opposition. It is precisely the tendency of mirth to defuse social conflict that underlies Horkheimer and Adorno’s critique of what they term the culture industry.105

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Laughter and recreation

79

To be sure, they are referring to the mechanized forms of cultural production characteristic of the twentieth century, reserving their especial ire for Hollywood cinema and jazz music. However, the beginnings of this development can be traced back to the Shakespearean theatre. For Horkheimer and Adorno the social impulses generated by art are co-opted by the market values of the culture industry. In mass culture false conflicts are resolved, leaving a sense of empty harmony in their wake. The ethical and utopian dimensions of art are swamped by a fraudulent sense of reconciliation. All that is left is the quest for diversion. In this way mass culture induces conformity to the status quo. The culture industry, they conclude, serves the function of social control within a capitalist system. Mass culture is equated with mass deception. People are deluded into believing their desires are gratified while in reality they are cheated of happiness. As they famously argue, ‘Fun is a medicinal bath which the entertainment industry never ceases to prescribe. It makes laughter the instrument for cheating happiness.’106 The laughter provoked by the culture industry is the false laughter of acquiescence in a manipulative and exploitative system. To be sure, reducing tension is conducive to the smooth operation of the market economy. However, what this pessimistic vision overlooks is the potential for forging communities through cultural commodities. A different view is presented by the cultural anthropologist Victor Turner, who discusses what he terms the transition of the liminal into the liminoid in modern industrial societies.107 For Turner festive occasions in premodern cultures are organized around a liminal phase that is broadly characterized by misrule and topsy-turvydom, before norms are reclarified in a new stage of development. By contrast, modern societies are characterized by a rigid division between phases of work and leisure. In such societies cultural practices take on what Turner calls a liminoid aspect. For Turner, the main difference between liminal forms of popular festivity, such as carnival, and cultural performances in the industrial age lies in the element of optionality. Liminal situations invert societal norms, but inversion does not necessarily imply subversion. Liminoid cultural practices provide opportunities for the development of the individual rather than the community. Nevertheless, Turner insists that popular culture in the age of mass entertainment can foster the experience of communitas, a temporary form of communal solidarity and affiliation that none the less preserves individuality. ‘Entertainment is liminoid rather than liminal, it is suffused with freedom. It involves profoundly the power of play, and play democratizes.’108 The sense of community created by shared acts of imagination might be precisely what Hippolyta is suggesting: ‘all their minds transfigur’d so together, / More witnesseth than fancy’s images, / And grows to something of great constancy’ (5.1.24–6). What lies at the heart of Horkheimer and Adorno’s vision is a view of art

Shakespeare and laughter

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

80

as a political agent that serves a radical purpose, namely to critique the capitalist order and promote social change. Perhaps, however, the obsessive critical focus on the political ramifications of the early modern theatre as an agent of either subversion or social control are misguided. In a path-breaking study Paul Yachnin asserts that in the period between 1599 to 1625 the early modern theatre was vested in projecting a view of itself as powerless.109 It was engaged only in producing harmless entertainment, it seemed to say. Hitherto the theatre had been regarded as powerful, both by its supporters, who used it as a propaganda tool during the Reformation, and by its enemies, who regarded it as a pernicious influence on the morals of its spectators. In response to the range of pressures it was exposed to, the Elizabethan theatre insisted on its purely commercial function as a purveyor of pleasure. Topical allegorization was something its audiences expected. But the theatre increasingly embedded allusions in layers of ambiguity, so that potentially volatile political implications were simultaneously undercut by other possible meanings. The main survival strategy that the theatre adopted, however, was to promote the idea that art was an independent realm that had little to do with the everyday world – a golden dreamworld that provided pleasure but was of little consequence. It was in the business of providing collective daydreams, not dispensing political advice. One of the central themes of A Midsummer Night’s Dream is the relationship between art and reality. This is explored in a comic mode in the mechanicals’ play in Act 5. One might see the entire play-within-a-play as one gigantic joke about the amateur dramatic tradition that had flourished in the provincial towns and the metropolis itself until it was largely superseded by the emergence of the professional theatre.110 This is combined with a burlesque of the style of Tudor interludes fashionable in the 1570s. The very title of the play to be staged, ‘The most lamentable comedy and most cruel death of Pyramus and Thisbe,’ is a travesty of Thomas Preston’s Cambises, described as ‘A Lamentable Tragedie mixed full of pleasant mirth’.111 Shakespeare mocks the ranting bombast popular in early plays of this kind, a style particularly dear to Bottom’s heart, who cannot resist declaiming lines that he has memorized: The raging rocks, And shivering shocks, Shall break the locks Of prison-gates; And Phibbus’ car Shall shine from far And make and mar The foolish fates. (1.2.27–34)

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Laughter and recreation

81

There could hardly be a more pointed way of highlighting Shakespeare’s own exquisite lyricism, in contrast to preposterous rhetoric of this sort. In fact, the barrage of atrocious alliteration and poetic howlers fulfils an additional function to that of inciting mirth – it serves as a foil to the verse of the rest of the play. In other words, Shakespeare is advertising his command of both the art of poetry and the art of parody. The troupe of amateurs spend most of their rehearsal time debating theatrical matters of weighty import. A tragedy requires a death on stage, but would it not be unseemly to confront the courtly audience with death? Bottom, as always, has the solution: ‘Write me a prologue, and let the prologue seem to say we will do no harm with our swords, and that Pyramus is not killed indeed; and for the more better assurance, tell them that I, Pyramus, am not Pyramus, but Bottom the weaver. This will put them out of fear’ (3.1.15–20). In this play Shakespeare employs metatheatricality as a comic device. As the play makes a point of reminding us, Bottom has no more substance than Pyramus. But where Shakespeare plays games with theatrical illusion to enhance the pleasure of the audience, tapping into the awareness of being in different worlds simultaneously that is a marker of a play situation, the mechanicals bungle the most basic rules of the stage. The key factor completely misjudged by Quince and his company is the power of imagination. Throughout his plays Shakespeare explicitly invokes the spectator’s fantasy to contribute to the theatrical experience. Without ‘the quick forge and working-house of thought’ (Henry V, 5.1.22), he makes it clear, there would be no play. The Chorus in Henry V pointedly addresses the collaborative relationship between audience and actors: ‘And let us, ciphers to this great account, / On your imaginary forces work.’ On their own players are but ciphers, shadows who signify nothing. It is the coalition between spectators and actors which creates a ‘great account’, a work of art that can bridge the gap between past and present, between the limitations of stage reality and the creation of a collective vision: ‘Piece out our imperfections with your thoughts’, the Chorus urges (Prologue, 17–28). By contrast, Quince’s company does everything in its power to stifle the audience’s imagination. They are terrified that the spectators will not be able to distinguish between reality and illusion. Bottom’s advice consists in staging a death on stage and immediately defusing its effect by proclaiming that the deed was just playacting. This might indeed put the audience out of fear, but as we later observe, it also has them in stitches. He inspires Snout to proffer the same solution to the vexed issue of the fear-inducing properties of the lion: ‘Therefore another prologue must tell he is not a lion’ (3.1.33). Ironically, the mechanicals revert to the opposite extreme in the case of representing moonshine or a wall. In their anxiety to bring moonlight into the play they discard make-believe altogether:

82

Shakespeare and laughter

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Snout: Doth the moon shine that night we play our play? Bottom: A calendar, a calendar! Look in the almanac; find out moonshine, find out moonshine! (3.1.48–50)

Elizabethan audiences would be familiar with the problem of creating the impression of different natural conditions in a theatre hampered by a lack of technical facilities, including artificial lighting. The mechanicals solve the problem by having an actor come on stage armed with a bush of thorn, a lantern and a dog, announcing ‘I am the Man i’th’Moon; this thorn-bush my thorn-bush; and this dog my dog’ (5.1.248–9). As is to be expected, this has the audience rolling in the aisles. Professional playwrights resort to poetic invocation (‘Look how the floor of heaven / Is thick inlaid with patens of bright gold’) (Merchant of Venice, 5.1.57–8) and place their trust in the audience’s complicity in the illusion. The fundamental fallacy of the mechanicals is their inability to understand that the theatre is a distinct but complementary world that obeys its own rules. In other words: they fall into the trap of literalism, of equating makebelieve with reality. As R. W. Dent puts it, ‘On the one hand they fear their audience will imagine what it sees is real . . . on the other, they think the audience unable to imagine what it cannot see.’112 The error they make is not restricted to the swaggering ‘hempen homespuns’ (3.1.73). It reflected a widespread misconception regarding theatrical illusion and fed into antitheatrical polemic in varying degrees of hostility. If we posit an analogy between the theatre and play, the comments of theorist Gregory Bateson might be helpful. He argues that in entering a frame of play (as in make-believe) we always signal to others, ‘This is play’, clearly marking off the realm of play from that of reality. He identifies two pathological conditions with regard to play. The first is the literalist fallacy – when we ignore the barriers between the world of ‘as if ’ and reality. The second is the wilful misjudgement that denies the power of illusion altogether.113 In A Midsummer Night’s Dream the lovers, too, fall prey to both forms of delusion. In the play in the forest stagemanaged by Puck one might see the magic juice as a metaphor for the visual power of spectacle. In their endless self-absorption the lovers are beguiled by whichever illusion is dangled before their eyes, losing all sense of discrimination and breaking all oaths of loyalty. On the other hand, during the mechanicals’ play they are so busy mocking the ham actors that they remain blind to the way their fate is mirrored in the story of Pyramus and Thisbe. Immediately after Pyramus stabs himself they poke fun at the performance, quibbling on the number of points scored:

Laughter and recreation

83

Demetrius: No die, but an ace for him; for he is but one. Lysander: Less than an ace, man; for his is dead, he is nothing.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

(5.1.296–7)

They lack the imaginative faculty to see past the bungling presentation to the deeper truth it points to – the fact that their own story, too, might have ended quite differently. Although Theseus treats the botched theatrical production of the artisans with paternalistic condescension, it is he who articulates the most trenchant critique of imaginative power. On hearing of the lovers’ adventures in the woods he remarks, . . . I may never believe These antique fables, nor these fairy toys. Lovers and madmen have such seething brains, Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend More than cool reason ever comprehends. (5.1.2–6)

The opposition he sets up between fantasy and reason, between apprehension (alluding to sensual perception) and rational comprehension reflected the standard Renaissance hierarchy of values that elevated the intellect over the senses. The role relegated to the imagination (or fantasy) was that of a mediator between the two – the imagination transmitted sense impressions to the understanding.114 It was when the passions gained the upper hand and subjugated the imagination that the evidence of the senses was no longer reliable. This was, of course, precisely the case with the lovers, as the play demonstrates throughout. As Helena admits, ‘Things base and vile, holding no quantity, / Love can transpose to form and dignity: / Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind, / And therefore is wing’d Cupid painted blind’ (1.2.232–5). When the imagination, distorted by passion, interposes itself between the senses and reason, sense impressions are distorted. An extreme example is that of Titania falling in love with an ass and declaring, ‘So is mine eye enthralled to thy shape’ (3.1.134). The Elizabethan belief in the quasi-material quality of vision, as something that flowed into and out of the eye, bolstered this view of the disruptive effect of the imagination. The juice of the magical flower gives the entire nexus of vision and imagination a metaphorical form. This explains why the magical flower only serves to bring to light the submerged folly of the lovers themselves. But Theseus extends his indictment of the imagination to include poets: ‘The lunatic, the lover, and the poet / Are of imagination all compact’ (5.1.7–8).

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

84

Shakespeare and laughter

All three are examples for the imagination dominated by passion gaining sway over the rational faculties. Theseus continues: ‘And as imagination bodies forth / The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen / Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing / A local habitation and a name’ (5.1.14–17). Paradoxically, Theseus fails to follow through his argument about the pernicious effect of the imagination. Instead, what Theseus delivers in these lines is a description of the craftsmanship of the artist. The power of art, it emerges, is dependent on the potency of the imagination. The relationship is one of symbiosis rather than one of bondage or subjugation, for all Theseus’ gesturing towards the Platonic idea of the poet as being in the grip of a ‘fine frenzy’ (5.1.12). There is little of a ‘seething’ brain to be seen in the way the poet works. Instead, we observe the artist in the process of creating illusions with the help of his imaginative faculties. The antagonism Theseus evokes between reason and the imagination folds in upon itself. The artist has recourse to both reason and fantasy to create a work of art. To be sure, ironies abound in this passage. Theseus’ antitheatrical invective is undercut in a variety of ways, only one of them being the internal discrepancies in his argument. Generations of critics have pointed to the fact that Theseus himself is a creature out of an antique fable, all compact of airy nothing – a hero whose mythological status marks him out as a fiction.115 The character Theseus in A Midsummer Night’s Dream is an artefact created by the poet’s pen. Furthermore, the plot of the play proves him wrong. We have just witnessed that what the lovers relate did actually occur – within the framework of the make-believe world created by means of the playwright’s skill. The play also ironically hints at a more sober truth about the status of illusion in the Shakespearean stage. However much the mechanicals confuse the way theatrical art works, they do reveal an instinctual grasp of the larger issues at stake. ‘There are things in this comedy . . . that will never please’, Bottom muses (3.1.8). The solution he hits upon (‘tell them that I, Pyramus, am not Pyramus’) is precisely the strategy that the early modern theatre adopted to defend itself against political censorship as well as antitheatrical attacks.116 Metatheatrical allusions foregrounded the fictive status of what was being presented on stage. At the end of the play Puck turns to the audience with a valedictory appeal: If we shadows have offended, Think but this, and all is mended, That you have but slumber’d here While these visions did appear. And this weak and idle theme, No more yielding but a dream. (5.1.409–14)

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Laughter and recreation

85

He explicitly equates the play with a dream, insubstantial and irrelevant to the real world. Art is a realm apart that only tangentially impinges upon reality. The play offers a fantasy world that gives delight and hurts not. Shakespeare is not the first playwright to work the play as a dream trope, but in A Midsummer Night’s Dream it becomes the scaffolding that underpins the entire play. A Midsummer Night’s Dream deploys the device of a play-within-a-play to demonstrate the artist’s power to create pleasurable illusions from airy nothing – in contrast to the fatuous misunderstanding of the workings of the theatre displayed by the mechanicals. But above all the play-within-a-play flaunts the power of the entertainer to inspire laughter. The Pyramus and Thisbe interlude plays with the difference between involuntary humour and artfully stage-managed laughter. The outrageous rhetoric of the interlude with its excruciating alliteration (‘with bloody blameful blade, / He bravely broach’d his boiling bloody breast’) (5.1.145–6), its crass double entendres (‘My cherry lips have often kiss’d thy stones’) (188) and inane similes (‘His eyes were green as leeks’) (322), is declaimed in dead earnest by the aspiring thespians. This is of a piece with the ludicrous literal-mindedness of the characters – the Wall laboriously calls attention to its status as Wall: ‘this stone doth show / That I am that same wall; the truth is so: / And this the cranny is’ (160–2) while the tragic hero invokes the same wall with a string of absurd apostrophes: ‘And thou, O wall, O sweet, O lovely wall’ (172). The hilarity they inspire is quite unintentional. At no point are the artisans in control of the gales of laughter they provoke. By contrast, staging an audience in the throes of mirth at the involuntary antics of a clutch of hapless tragedians cannot fail to foreground the skill of the dramatist himself in catering to our craving for the pleasures of laughter. Similarly, the clumsier the amateur actors appear, the more they serve as a foil for the performance skills of the professional players – players of another sort altogether. An ironic device that serves to underscore the difference between unsolicited laughter and the skill of a comedian in stimulating mirth is the contrast between the Prologue spoken by Quince and the epilogue delivered by Puck. Quince solemnly announces: If we offend, it is with our good will. That you should think, we come not to offend, But with good will. To show our simple skill, That is the true beginning of our end. Consider then, we come, but in despite. We do not come, as minding to content you, Our true intent is. All for your delight, We are not here . . . (5.1.108–15)

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

86

Shakespeare and laughter

The garbled lines, unwittingly teetering on the brink of lese-majesty, epitomize the difference between amateurs and professionals. To paraphrase Lysander’s remark, it is not enough to act, but to act well. Good will is not sufficient – not in the highly competitive early modern market for cultural commodities. The humour lies in the fact that Quince unconsciously tells the truth: the sycopated syntax does make sense, if only in terms of a Freudian slip. The mechanicals do offend every faculty of good taste, and just as true is the fact that their skill is, to put it mildly, simple. The mangled punctuation throws into relief the disjunction between ‘true intent’ and ‘delight’ – ironically, the mechanicals do indeed delight, but in a completely different sense than was their intention. Puck, who doubles for the dramatist in his skill to stage an amusing show, begins his final speech with a travesty of the Prologue: ‘If we shadows have offended, / Think but this, and all is mended’ (409–10) – one final joke offered by an entertainer supremely confident of his skill to inspire laughter. His epilogue ends with an invitation to the audience to acquit their debt with applause: ‘Give me your hands, if we be friends’ (423). It is not only the power of the imagination to which A Midsummer Night’s Dream plays tribute – it is also the power of the entertainer to evoke laughter. In the end, of course, the power to entertain encompasses both the amateurs and the professionals – the actors who ‘offended’ were professionals, too, sending up their bumbling would-be colleagues in a burlesque presented for our pleasure. Notes 1 Aristotle, Parts of Animals, trans. A. L. Peck (London: William Heinemann, 1937) Bk 3.10. 2 Laurent Joubert, Treatise on Laughter, trans. Gregory David de Rocher (University, Ala.: University of Alabama Press, 1980). Subsequent references to be given in parentheses. 3 Aristotle, Poetics, trans. Stephen Halliwell, The Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995) Bk 5.1449a. 4 Timothy Bright, A Treatise of Melancholie (1586; Amsterdam: Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, 1969), p. 152. 5 Ibid., p. 150. 6 See F. David Hoeniger, Medicine and Shakespeare in the English Renaissance (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1992), pp. 177–8. 7 On Nancel’s theory see M. A. Screech and Ruth Calder, ‘Some Renaissance Attitudes to Laughter’, in A. H. T. Levi (ed.), Humanism in France at the End of the Middle Ages and in the Early Renaissance (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1970), pp. 220–1. 8 For an overview of Galenic theory see Hoeniger, Medicine, pp. 71–116.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Laughter and recreation

87

9 Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, ed. Thomas C. Faulkner, Nicolas K. Kiessling, and Rhonda L. Blair (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989), Vol. 2, Part 2, Sect. 2, Member 6, Subsec. 4, p. 117. 10 Ibid., Vol. 1, Part 1, Sect. 2, Member 4, Subsec. 4: ‘Scoffs, Calumnies, bitter Jests, how they cause Melancholy’, pp. 337–40. 11 Quoted in E. K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, Vol. 4 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1923), p. 188. 12 Here, finally, the solution to the question of Falstaff ’s girth may be located. 13 See Hoeninger, Medicine, pp. 78–9. 14 See Marjorie O’Rourke Boyle, ‘Gracious Laughter: Marsilio Ficino’s Anthropology’, Renaissance Quarterly, 52 (1999), 712–41. 15 Ibid., p. 722. 16 See Quentin Skinner, ‘Hobbes and the Classical Theory of Laughter’, in Hobbes and Civil Science, Vol. 3 of Visions of Politics, 3 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 142–76. 17 Provine, Laughter, p. 90. 18 See Screech and Calder, ‘Some Renaissance Attitudes to Laughter’, p. 220. 19 Quoted in Bernard Williams, ‘Plato’, in Ray Monk and Frederic Raphael (eds), The Great Philosophers: From Socrates to Turing (London: Phoenix, 2000), p. 49. 20 These thoughts are adumbrated in Philebus, 48–50, quoted in Morreall (ed.), The Philosophy of Laughter and Humor, pp. 10–13. 21 Plato, The Republic, trans. Desmond Lee (1955; London: Penguin, 1987), 388e. 22 Plato, The Republic, 606c. 23 Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics, trans. H. Rackham, The Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994) Bk 4.8, pp. 245–9. 24 Aristotle, Poetics, Bk 5.1449d, p. 45. 25 Andrew Stott, Comedy, The New Critical Idiom (London: Routledge, 2005), p. 5. 26 Lawrence Danson, Shakespeare’s Dramatic Genres, Oxford Shakespeare Topics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 26. 27 Marvin T. Herrick, ‘The Theory of the Laughable in the Sixteenth Century’, The Quarterly Journal of Speech, 35:1 (1949), 1–16. Also see David Galbraith, ‘Theories of Comedy’, in Alexander Leggatt (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Shakespearean Comedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 3–17. 28 Cicero, De oratore, trans. E. W. Sutton (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1942), Vol. 1, Bk 2.58.235. The section on wit comprises Book 2.54.216– 71.289. 29 Ibid., 2.58.236. 30 Ibid., 2.59.240. Not in itself entirely new, this division will be frequently employed by subsequent writers – Joubert, too, distinguishes between the ‘laughable in deed’, i.e. comic events, and the ‘laughable in word’. 31 Ibid., 2.67. 274. 32 Ibid., 2.59.239. 33 The Institutio Oratoria of Quintilian, trans. H. E. Butler (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

88

34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42

43 44 45 46 47

48

49 50 51 52

53 54

55

56 57

Shakespeare and laughter

University Press, 1966), Vol. 2, 6.3.3. Quintilian includes an entire section on laughter, wit, and humour in Book 6, Chapter 3, 1–112. Ibid., 6.3.7. Ibid., 6.3.8. Ibid., 6.3.29. Ibid., 6.3.57. Ibid., 6.3.103–12. Quoted in ibid., 6.3.104. Ibid., 6.3.107. Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, Bk. 4.8, p. 247. See Lodovico Castelvetro, Castelvetro on the Art of Poetry, Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 29 (Binghamton, NY: Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, State University of New York, 1984). See Herrick, ‘The Theory of the Laughable in the Sixteenth Century’, p. 6. See Quentin Skinner, ‘Hobbes and the Classical Theory of Laughter’, pp. 155– 6. Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics, Bk 7.12, p. 439; Bk 1.8, p. 41. Quoted in Glending Olson, Literature as Recreation in the Later Middle Ages (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982), p. 97. See Don Cameron Allen, ‘The Rehabilitation of Epicurus and His Theory of Pleasure in the Early Renaissance’, Studies in Philology, 41:1 (1944), 1–15. Thomas More’s own attitude to Epicureanism (as opposed to the inhabitants of Utopia) remains unclear. Reprinted in Collected Works of Erasmus: Colloquies, Vol. 39, trans. and annotated by Craig R. Thompson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), pp. 571–89. Desiderius Erasmus, Preface, Apophthegmes, trans. Nicholas Udall (1542; Amsterdam: Da Capo Press, 1969) n.p. Ibid. Nicomachean Ethics, Bk 10.6, p. 611. P. M. Zall, Introduction to his edition of A Hundred Merry Tales and Other English Jestbooks of the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1963), pp. 1–10. Wilson, ‘The English Jestbooks of the Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries’, pp. 125–6. See The Complete Works of St Thomas More, Vol. 1, ed. Anthony S. G. Edwards, Katherine Gardiner Rodgers, and Clarence H. Miller (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), pp. 15–29. Thomas More, A Dialogue of Comfort Against Tribulation, Vol. 1.13, The Complete Works of St Thomas More, Vol. 12, ed. Louis L. Martz and Frank Manley (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976), pp. 42–3. More, A Dialogue, Vol. 2.1, pp. 82–4. Provine, Laughter, p. 25.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Laughter and recreation

89

58 See A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, ‘On Joking Relationships’, in Structure and Function in Primitive Society (London: Cohen & West, 1952), pp. 90–104. 59 See Provine, Laughter, pp. 129–51. 60 Experiments demonstrate that canned laughter facilitates laughter. See Anthony Chapman, ‘Social Aspects of Humorous Laughter’, in Anthony Chapman and Hugh C. Foot (eds), Humour and Laughter: Theory, Research and Applications (London: John Wiley, 1976), p. 181. 61 There has been a great deal of valuable research done in the field of early modern popular culture. The pioneering study was Peter Burke’s Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (London: Temple Smith, 1978). I have also drawn on the following works: Natalie Zemon Davis, Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1975), Barry Reay (ed.), Popular Culture in SeventeenthCentury England (London: Croom Helm, 1985), Tim Harris (ed.), Popular Culture in England, c. 1500–1850 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995), Barry Reay, Popular Cultures in England 1550–1750 (London: Longman, 1998), and Ronald Hutton, The Rise and Fall of Merry England: The Ritual Year 1400–1700 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994). 62 Christopher Hill, Society and Puritanism in Pre-Revolutionary England (London: Secker & Warburg, 1964), p. 146. 63 Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World (1965), trans. Helene Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984) pp. 9; 11–12. 64 See Burke, Popular Culture, pp. 178–204. 65 Quoted in ibid., p. 202. 66 Reay, Popular Cultures in England, p. 167. 67 Peter Stallybrass makes a similar point in his essay, ‘The World Turned Upside Down: Inversion, Gender and the State’, in Valerie Wayne (ed.), The Matter of Difference: Materialist Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991), pp. 201–20. 68 See Apte, Humor and Laughter, pp. 151–76. 69 See Reay, Popular Cultures in England, pp. 198–223. 70 See Reay, ‘Introduction: Popular Culture in Early Modern England’, in Popular Culture in Seventeenth-Century England, pp. 1–30. 71 See Hutton, The Rise and Fall of Merry England, pp. 111–52. 72 Martin Ingram, ‘Reformation of Manners in Early Modern England’, in Paul Griffiths et al. (eds), The Experience of Authority in Early Modern England (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996), pp. 47–88. 73 Quoted in Hutton, The Rise and Fall of Merry England, p. 89. 74 See Joan Thirsk, Economic Policy and Projects: The Development of a Consumer Society in Early Modern England (Oxford: Clarendon, 1978). 75 See Keith Thomas, ‘Work and Leisure in Pre-Industrial Society’, Past & Present, 29 (1964), 51–62. Also see Eileeen Yeo and Stephen Yeo (eds), Popular Culture and Class Conflict 1590–1914: Explorations in the History of Labour and Leisure (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1981).

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

90

Shakespeare and laughter

76 Tim Harris, ‘Problematising Popular Culture’, in Popular Culture in England, c. 1500–1850, p. 24. 77 Erich Segal, Roman Laughter: The Comedy of Plautus (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1968). 78 Michael Bristol, Big-Time Shakespeare (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 88. 79 See Bristol, Big-Time Shakespeare, pp. 30–58. 80 See Ann Jennalie Cook, ‘Audiences: Investigation, Interpretation, Invention’, in John D. Cox and David Scott Kastan (eds), A New History of Early English Drama (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), pp. 305–20. The parameters of the debate were staked out by Alfred Harbage’s Shakespeare’s Audience (New York: Columbia University Press, 1941), which posited an inclusionist view of the theatre audience, and Anne Jennalie Cook, who insisted on a more upmarket audience. See her The Privileged Playgoers of Shakespeare’s London: 1576–1642 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981). 81 See Andrew Gurr, Playgoing in Shakespeare’s London, third edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 82 Robert Weimann, Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition in the Theater: Studies in the Social Dimension of Dramatic Form and Function, trans. Robert Schwartz (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), p. 174. 83 See for instance Steven Mullaney, The Place of the Stage: License, Play, and Power in Renaissance England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989). 84 Bristol, Big-Time Shakespeare, pp. 36; 37. 85 Vives, The Passions, p. 58. Contemporary scholars speak of controlled spontaneity. See Mulkay, On Humour, p. 118. 86 See Adages 1.5.69–71, in Collected Works of Erasmus: Adages, Vol. 31, trans. Margaret Mann Phillips; Adage 1.7.46, in Collected Works, Vol. 32; and Adage 2.6.39, in Collected Works, Vol. 33, both trans. R. A. B. Mynors (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1989–91). 87 See Barber, Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy pp. 119–62. 88 All citations from the Arden edition of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, ed. Harold F. Brooks (London: Methuen, 1979). 89 Ben Jonson, Timber, or Discoveries, in The Works of Ben Jonson, ed. C. H. Herford and Percy and Evelyn Simpson, Vol. 8 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1947), p. 643. 90 Ben Jonson, Every Man in His Humour, Volpone and Other Plays, ed. John Pitcher (London: Penguin Books, 1998). 91 Barber, Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy, p. 4. 92 Ibid., p. 137. A useful compendium of further criticism is to be found in Richard Dutton (ed.), A Midsumer Night’s Dream, New Casebooks (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996). 93 See Shirley Nelson Garner, ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream: “Jack shall have Jill; / Nought shall go ill”’, Women’s Studies, 9 (1981), 47–63. Louis Montrose draws an analogy between the patriarchal anxieties articulated in the play and the paradoxical situation of Elizabethan society as a patriarchal order ruled by a woman. See Louis A. Montrose, ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream and the Shaping Fantasies of

Laughter and recreation

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

94

95 96 97 98 99 100

101 102 103

104 105

106 107 108 109 110

111 112

91

Elizabethan Culture: Gender, Power, Form’, in Margaret W. Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan, and Nancy J. Vickers (eds), Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986) pp. 65–87. Carol Thomas Neely, ‘Broken Nuptials in Shakespeare’s Comedies’, in Peter Erickson and Coppélia Kahn (eds), Shakespeare’s ‘Rough Magic’: Renaissance Essays in Honor of C. L. Barber (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1985), pp. 61–72. Richard Wilson, Will Power: Essays on Shakespearean Authority (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993), pp. 22–44. See Annabel Patterson, Shakespeare and the Popular Voice (Cambridge, Mass.: Basil Blackwell, 1989), especially chapter 3: ‘Bottom’s Up: Festive Theory’, pp. 52–70. See Apte, Humour and Laughter, pp. 212–36. See Montrose, ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream and the Shaping Fantasies of Elizabethan Culture’. Quoted in T. G. A. Nelson, Comedy: The Theory of Comedy in Literature, Drama, and Cinema (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 8. See Anne Barton, ‘The Synthesizing Impulse of A Midsummer Night’s Dream’, in Harold Bloom (ed.), William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Modern Critical Interpretations (New York: Chelsea House, 1987), p. 10. Ibid., p. 9. See Louis Montrose, ‘The Purpose of Playing: Reflections on a Shakespearean Anthropology’, Helios, 8 (1980), 51–74. See Peter Womack, ‘Imagining Communities: Theatres and the English Nation in the Sixteenth Century’, in David Aers (ed.), Culture and History 1350–1600: Essays on English Communities, Identities and Writing (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992), pp. 91–145. Montaigne, The Complete Essays, 1:26, ‘On educating children’, p. 199. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, ‘The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception’, in Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), pp. 94–136. Ibid., p. 112. Victor Turner, ‘Liminal to Liminoid, in Play, Flow, and Ritual: An Essay in Comparative Symbology’, Rice University Studies, 60:3 (1974), 53–92. Ibid., p. 120. Emphasis in the original. See Paul Yachnin, Stage-Wrights: Shakespeare, Jonson, Middleton, and the Making of Theatrical Value (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997). See Clifford Davidson, ‘“What hempen home-spuns have we swagg’ring here?” Amateur Actors in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and the Coventry Civic Pageants’, Shakespeare Studies, 19 (1987), 87–99. See Harold F. Brooks’s Introduction to the Arden edition of the play, p. cxix. R. W. Dent, ‘Imagination in A Midsummer Night’s Dream’, in Anthony Price (ed.), Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream: A Casebook (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1983), p. 136.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

92

Shakespeare and laughter

113 See Gregory Bateson, ‘A Theory of Play and Fantasy’, in Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution, and Epistemology (London: Intertext, 1972), pp. 177–93. 114 On early modern conceptions of the imagination see both Dent, ‘Imagination in A Midsummer Night’s Dream’, and David P. Young, Something of Great Constancy: The Art of ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966), pp. 126–41. 115 See Young, Something of Great Constancy, pp. 137–41, for an overview of these arguments. 116 I am indebted to David Hillman for this point. See his ‘Puttenham, Shakespeare, and the Abuse of Rhetoric’, Studies in English Literature, 36 (1996), pp. 83–4.

3

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Early modern humour

H

amlet does not have a high opinion of the type of humour on offer on the early modern stage. He exhorts the players to ‘let those that play your clowns speak no more than is set down for them. For there be of them that will themselves laugh to set on some quantity of barren spectators to laugh too, though in the meantime some necessary question of the play be then to be considered. – That’s villainous and shows a most pitiful ambition in the fool that uses it.’1 Behind the scenes there seems to have been an on-going tussle between the star comedians and the other members of the theatre company. Comedians were thought to dominate the stage with their comic turns and to side-line the plot of the play. However, the early modern stage was in the grip of a continual wave of changing fashions. Andrew Gurr discusses one of the main shifts in taste: the usurpation of the star role of the comedians by leading tragedians like Edward Alleyn and Richard Burbage.2 By 1600 it was Alleyn and Burbage and not famous clowns like Tarlton and Kemp who dominated the theatre. The greater demand for tragic fare was fuelled by a new generation of playwrights such as Christopher Marlowe, whose grandiloquent tragedies took the stage world by storm in the early 1590s. At the same a new style of acting developed that was termed ‘personation’, which implied that gifted players portrayed characters with depth and verisimilitude.3 Playwrights, too, were keen to distance themselves from stage clowning and stake a claim for a more serious form of art. In his prologue to Tamburlaine, Marlowe claims, ‘From jigging veins of rhyming mother-wits, / And such conceits as clownage keeps in pay, / We’ll lead to the stately tent of war . . .’,4 promising to draw the spectator away from the attractions of pedestrian humour to the soaring heights of tragic poetry. They could tap into a hoary tradition with roots in the classical age that elevated tragedy above comedy and equated laughter with vulgarity. A particular object of scorn were jigs, the usually farcical end-pieces that rounded off plays, performed by the comedian. Jigs were a mixture of song and dance and based

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

94

Shakespeare and laughter

on ballads. The humour they proffered was the bawdy knockabout clowning and extemporising that famous clowns such as Tarlton and Will Kemp excelled in. Increasingly theatre companies used jigs or their absence as a marker of audience allegiance and taste. The hall theatres had never staged jigs, and the Globe dropped them from their repertoire once their star comedian Will Kemp left the company in 1599. The amphitheatres in the northern suburbs, the Fortune, Curtain, and Red Bull, continued to provide jigs right until the time when the theatres were closed down in 1642, despite an injunction in 1612 suppressing jigs as a source of disorder and petty crime.5 Fletcher sums up the contemptous attitude of the playwrights of the hall theatres in his prologue to The Fair Maid of the Inn (1625): A worthy story, howsoever writ For Language, modest Mirth, Conceit or Wit, Meets oftentimes with the sweet commendation Of hang’t, ’tis scurvy, when for approbation A Jigg shall be clapt at, and every rhime Prais’d and applauded by a clamorous chime. Let ignorance and laughter dwell together, They are beneath the Muses pity. Hither Come nobler Judgements, and to those the strain Of our inventions is not bent in vain.6

Fletcher appeals pointedly to spectators of a more elevated taste than those who applaud jigs. What he offers in his play are wit and decorum, not bawdy slapstick humour. Laughter is explicitly associated with a lack of taste, with clear overtones of class disdain: ‘Let ignorance and laughter dwell together.’ Hamlet makes similar demands of the theatre. But the play in which he appears, while it does drop the role of a clown, does not quite follow his advice. Indeed, there is a proliferation of comic roles in the play, not least of which is the antic disposition that the Prince himself puts on when he feigns madness. In his other plays Shakespeare never quite adheres to strict neoclassical norms. What is true is that his humour becomes increasingly sophisticated, and his clowns are increasingly disciplined by the plot. The shift in the type of humour he purveyed is best exemplified in his last romantic comedy, Twelfth Night, and in his creation of the wise fool as a stage character. The stage fool The Erasmian notion of Folly may well have been influential in shaping the role of the wise fools in Shakespeare.7 But there are other strands that might have played a part as well. In the following I will briefly sketch the history of

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Early modern humour

95

the stage fool in Shakespeare’s age. Fools as entertainer figures are to be found at all times in many different cultures. But paradoxically it was with the decline of the court fool that the stage fool gained such a prominent position in the early modern theatre. The golden age of the stage fool encompasses only a brief period, from the 1580s to the 1620s.8 This was the age of Tarlton, Will Kemp, and Robert Armin. In point of fact, the fool was the first professional comedian. What he exemplifies is the professionalization of laughter. Both natural fools (with mental or physical deformities) as well as artificial fools (buffoons or jesters) have been kept in large households from time immemorial. Often the two overlapped – dwarfs, for instance, were very popular as domestic entertainers. Their function was mainly that of a lightning rod – they were thought to ward off bad luck. It was the office of fools to mock and abuse their masters and thus deflect any punishment that the gods might have in store for their hubris. The more powerful a ruler, the more abusive the jesters in his pay. Roman emperors regularly had an entire cortège of railing fools accompanying their triumphal processions. Thus from the very beginning, fools were not only licensed to mock their masters – it was a keystone of their professional duties. This is often overlooked in discussions about the subversive power of laughter. There was, however, another strand of thought that associated folly with wisdom and revered the fool as a prophet. This strain of fool lore was particularly widespread in Eastern Europe and the Islamic world, where madmen were often thought to be saints. The conflation of these traditions explains the predominantly ambivalent stance of the public towards fools, who were both a butt of laughter and mockery and feared for their access to hidden truths. This attitude remained prevalent in the case of the mentally ill until the late seventeenth century, when large-scale hospitalization set in. In the stage fool, the various traditions of the fool are reflected in the typical mixture of nonsense and wisdom that the fools deliver. A further tradition that the stage fool draws upon is the folk fool of popular festivity. In England the two most important figures are the Vice and the Lord of Misrule. The Vice appeared in the context of festive plays, and was usually depicted as a comic figure in the retinue of the devil. In morality drama he increasingly emerged as the dominant comic character. He was a blend of the trickster and a detached commentator on the action. The Lord of Misrule, by contrast, was an amateur who was elected within a community to be the leader of festivity during a period such as Christmas or Maying. While the tradition of the Lord of Misrule gradually declined in the countryside, partly owing to the efforts of social reformers and partly to the decrease in traditional hospitality in the course of the sixteenth century, the concept was kept alive in urban

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

96

Shakespeare and laughter

communities (such as the court, or the Inns of Court) and fed into the composition of the stage clown. In the medieval period the ranks of fools were swelled by numbers of wandering minstrels and vagabonds roaming Europe in search of employment at a great household. These groups of so-called goliards were often made up of renegade monks and university scholars interspersed with jongleurs, musicians and criminal elements.9 They were characterized by many of the hallmarks that distinguish later stage fools: as intellectual rebels they were frequently satirical about the established Church, excoriating in particular its greed and corruption. At the same time the goliards themselves were marked by cynicism and opportunism. Anton Zijderveld identifies traits that are characteristically modern: they were quintessential individualists, evading all social responsibility and seeking a position of independence from which to mock all traditional norms. If they exposed the materialism of the social order, they did so from the standpoint of detached scepticism, not reforming zeal. They were above all opportunists, who in the last instant were concerned to look out for themselves. By analogy, a figure like Feste might be portrayed as dependent on the favour of the rich and powerful, but nevertheless as clearly aloof from society in Illyria. No emotional bonds tie him to any other character.10 His is the world of the prototypical outsider. The age of the fool as star comedian began with Dick Tarlton, who seems to have been the first celebrity performer in the early modern age. Richard Tarlton was a playwright, ballad-maker, fencer, tumbler, dancer, impromptu rhymer and improviser. His appearance was that of a natural fool, with a flat nose and a squint, features that he exploited to comic advantage.11 He gained a legendary reputation for clowning that continued to reverberate decades after his death in 1588. In fact, he became a byword for a world that was lost and that was being viewed with increasing nostalgia by the post-Elizabethan generation. In Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair, first performed in 1614, the Stage-Keeper in the Induction mourns the heyday of true comedy: ‘And yet I kept the stage in Master Tarlton’s time, I thank my stars. Ho! an’ that man had lived to have played in Barthol’mew Fair, you should ha’ seen him ha’ come in, and ha’ been cozened i’ the cloth-quarter, so finely!’12 The Stage-Keeper is notoriously antiquated in his tastes, of course, so this paean to a famous jester of a bygone era would have been yet another sly dig by Jonson at the fusty tastes of the playgoing public. Nevertheless, the fact remains that almost twenty years after his death a maker of comedies would feel the need to measure his art against the comic legend of a Tarlton. According to David Wiles, whose study of the different styles of the leading comedians of the Elizabethan stage is invaluable, Tarlton’s success stemmed from

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Early modern humour

97

a canny exploitation of the mood of a specific historic moment.13 Tarlton’s chief act was modelled upon the persona of a rustic transferred to the metropolis. He is credited with inventing the notion of the stage clown – the term clown itself changed its meaning from rustic to comedian owing to his influence.14 In a period marked by an explosion of urban immigration, he tapped into widespread anxieties among an audience that would have consisted largely of firstgeneration Londoners whose countryside roots were barely submerged. Jokes about the country bumpkin in the city were a staple of jestbooks, too – another prototypically urban genre – and little would have afforded more pleasure to newly assimilated Londoners than to jeer at their less sophisticated cousins. His greatest innovation was to appropriate the figure of the Vice but dissociate him from the didacticism of the moralities.15 His talents in improvisation and repartee were also specifically urban skills, indispensable as tools in the bustle and tussle of the metropolis. Laughter, which can reflect anxieties circulating in a given society, would have offered one means of coping with the situation – by laughing at others who were even greater outsiders than oneself, a sense of inclusion was fostered within the audience. For Wiles, Tarlton’s style served to encourage a sense of community in the urban setting. Part of the nostalgic cachet that accrued to his name might be attributed to the cohesive effect of his humour. But he was more than a local celebrity. He bcame a national figure, popular at court, in the playhouses and in provincial towns, contributing to an emerging sense of English nationalism.16 His successor, Will Kemp, was of a different mettle altogether. If Tarlton fostered social cohesion, Kemp stressed social polarities. His main device was that of a plain Englishman, mystified at the doings of his social superiors yet fully capable of holding his own. Wiles identifies all the main comic parts in Shakespeare’s plays until 1599 as Kemp’s roles, from Launce to Dogberry and, above all, Falstaff. An enduring conundrum for Shakespeareans has been the disappearance of Falstaff from the Henriad after Henry IV Part 2 – despite the promise of his reappearance in the Epilogue. Wiles makes a strong case for the solution of the mystery to lie in Kemp’s retirement from the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. Kemp’s removal to the Worcester’s Men at the Curtain marked a radical departure from his style of comic in the plays of the chief playwright of the Chamberlain’s Men, Shakespeare. In Hamlet the main protagonist (probably played by Richard Burbage) now incorporated the fool into his gamut of personae. Hamlet’s fulminations against clowns who speak ‘more than is set down for them’ (3.2.35) might well have been a scathing insider joke, pitting one player against the other. Kemp was billed as a star of the company, along with Burbage, and it is conceivable that his dominant personality caused friction within the troupe. Kemp was known to fill out the stage with his

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

98

Shakespeare and laughter

presence – which was emphatically not the case with his successor, Robert Armin. To profit fully from Kemp’s comic potential and skill in dancing, jigs were added to the plays, designed to highlight Kemp’s specific talents as a solo comedian.17 Once the company moved to the Globe in 1599, it was no longer associated with the performance of jigs. Wiles identifies three main conventions of the stage clown during the Kemp era: the clown plays someone of low social status, he speaks in colloquial prose, and he is clearly marked off from the role he plays. His address to the spectators creates the impression that he is a representative of the common man who hovers at the boundary between the audience and the play world. All these conventions would be radically dismantled with the advent of Armin in the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. Whether Shakespeare was influenced by the style the comedian himself had developed (for instance, in his play The History of the Two Maids of More-Clacke) or whether the roles of the wise fool were tailored to the talents of the new member of the company with a penchant for intellectual quibbles, the fact remains that the wise fool is closely associated with the figure of Robert Armin. Armin was fascinated by the boundary between natural fools and wise fools. In his own jestbook Foole Upon Foole (1600), republished and expanded as A Nest of Ninnies (1608), he demonstrates a predilection for comic devices such as mock catechisms, proverbs, aphorisms, and rhyming moral tags.18 Wiles argues convincingly that the personae of the comics had a shaping influence on the comic roles in the plays. He underlines the fact that the theatre in the early modern period was a collaborative affair, not an author-centred regime. In his roles Armin never projected the figure of the common Englishman. Instead, he presented a fool who cannot be located in terms of social class or origin. This was, of course, an apposite ploy at a time when increasing social mobility was blurring the boundaries between social ranks – at least in the public imagination, where the cases of social climbers would be registered with far greater attention than their numbers might warrant. But the classless, disengaged persona was also the appropriate translation of the Erasmian concept of the wise fool into stage reality. As Wiles points out, Armin does not address his audience as a community to which he belongs. Instead, ‘Armin acknowledges the audience only as a collection of individuals.’19 His language is far too elaborate to be colloquial – he delivers witty set-pieces built around tortuous syllogisms or a dazzling fireworks of double entendres and puns. ‘Armin’s language denotes an individuated mode of perception. His language sets the fool apart from plain ordinary men.’20 While the roles he plays are more integrated into the plot than those of Kemp, he nevertheless straddles the divide between audience and fictive world. But this does not imply that he functions as a mouthpiece for the spectators. The concept of the wise

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Early modern humour

99

fool as developed in collaboration between Shakespeare and Armin was based on the idea of the quintessential outsider, cut off from roots in either the playworld or the world of the audience. He was a radical individualist, who offered a counterperspective to that of the other characters but without having a stake in the business on hand. Like Erasmus’ Folly, he mocked the values the playworld offered as normative – without taking up a decisive stance on any issue. As the paradigmatic outsider, he was also the paradigmatic player, juggling with a variety of perspectives without closer engagement – purely for the pleasure of playing. Critics have argued that the departure of Kemp from the Chamberlain’s Men signals the company’s abandoning of its popular roots. In Forms of Nationhood, Richard Helgerson draws a bleak picture of Shakespeare gradually divesting himself of any popular alignment.21 By analogy with the playwright and several of his fellow actors, including Robert Armin, who strove for and attained a coat of arms at the peak of their career, Shakespeare’s theatre accrued symbolic capital to move resolutely upmarket.22 For Helgerson, the rejection of Falstaff is an allegory for Shakespeare’s rejection of the popular, his denial of the traditions of carnival and his embracing of a new regimen of discipline and hierarchy. By contrast, one might suggest that the key factor in the disappearance of Falstaff from the Henriad may well have been the pressure of market exigencies – the charismatic performer associated with the figure of Falstaff, Kemp, was no longer at the disposal of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. As Wiles has pointed out, a playwright in a joint venture enterprise like the Chamberlain’s Men, Shakespeare had to write to the requirements of the actors, particularly the leading comedians. But Armin, we might asume, did not have the stage presence of Kemp and the imposing physical appearance to pull off a performance like that of Falstaff. Thus with Robert Armin a different comic figure evolved in the plays – that of the wise fool. Furthermore, it might be reductive to equate Kemp with the popular per se. His comic routine may have been different, but he was just as highly professional an entertainer as Armin (and Tarlton, for that matter). In fact, one might see him as tracing an even more individualistic trajectory than Armin. Kemp left the Chamberlain’s Men to strike off on his own and try to launch a solo career with his famous nine-day Morris Dance. In effect, he attempted to become a celebrity solo entertainer. Helgerson himself admits that the self-image Kemp presents in his written account of the venture, Kemp’s Nine Daies Wonder, is anything but carnivalesque. A firm advocate of teetotalism, he proudly boasts of how he manages to turn pick-pockets in the audience in to the authorities.23 Admittedly, when he did join another theatre company, the Worcester’s Men, it was to promote a form of radical Protestanism that was far more politically engaged than anything on offer at the

100

Shakespeare and laughter

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Globe.24 Enid Welsford cautions aginst reading clowns as representatives of popular rebellion: There is nothing essentially immoral or blasphemous or rebellious about clownage. On the contrary it may easily act as a social preservative by providing a corrective to the pretentious vanity of officialdom, a safetyvalve for unruliness . . . It cannot, of course, be denied that fools and clowns have at times been made to serve political ends, but that in no way affects the essential nature of clownage.25

After Shakespeare abandoned the figure of the wise fool in Act 3 of King Lear, he disappeared from the stage entirely. After the Restoration it was the custardpie comedian who was resurrected in popular taste, particularly in the shape of the fairground figure of Jack Pudding.26 With the increasing influx of foreign influences the Harlequin type of comic was imported to England and domesticated in the form of Punch. In the late eighteenth century the circus clown was invented by Grimaldi and began his inexorable rise to fame, spreading all over Europe. A later stage led to the emergence of the music-hall stand-up comedian, who subsequently moved into the media of film and television. But nothing quite like the wise fool has ever dominated the stage since King Lear. In point of fact, fools were out of fashion as early as the middle of the seventeenth century. In verses prefixed to the 1647 Folio edition of Fletcher (who rivaled and even briefly overshadowed Shakespeare in reputation in the era of the Restoration) William Cartwright pokes fun at Shakespeare’s sense of humour: Shakespeare to thee was dull, whose best jest lies In the ladies’ questions and the fools’ replies; Old-fashion’d wit which walk’d from town to town In turn’d hose, which our fathers called the Clown27

Jestbook literature Before we turn to the theatre, it might be interesting to take a brief look at the type of humour circulating in print in early modern culture. Jestbook literature is a genre that exemplifies the developments in taste described above. It stands at the cusp between oral and print culture, and straddles both elite and popular cultural traditions. Indeed, the collection of jests dubbed jestbook by the avid Victorian collector of Elizabethan lore, William Carew Hazlitt, is a distinctly humanist invention. Jests have, of course, existed at all times in the history of human civilization, and there are few more eloquent witnesses to the diffusion of culture throughout human history than the appearance of the same jests in diverse parts of the world. The first collection of jests in ancient civi-

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Early modern humour

101

lization was ‘The Golden Words of Pythagoras’ compiled by Hierocles of Alexandria in the fifth century. Here the favourite butt is the pendant.28 In the twelfth century a collection of Jewish and Arab tales with the title Disciplina clericalis circulated among the clergy to provide them with humorous exempla to liven up their sermons – as was later deplored by the campaigners for a reformation of manners. Many of these humorous stories would re-emerge in medieval culture in the form of fabliaux. Petrarch reintroduced the collection of witty apophthegms modelled on Plutarch.29 But the art of the short, witty tale with its epigrammatic punchline was given a decisive impulse in the mid fifteenth century by the humanist scholar Poggio Bracciolini. His Liber facetiarum was an instant success, disseminated widely first in manuscript copies and then in printed editions. In 1484 his jests made their appearance in English, published by Caxton as a supplement to his translation of Aesop’s fables. The genre of the jestbook in English was born. Poggio was a papal secretary who lifted his stories from the gossip of an insiders’ circle in the secretariat that met regularly in what was satirically termed the bugiale (or Chamber of Lies)30 Jacob Burckhardt reminds us that the refined version of the jest that Poggio introduced did not merely reflect the Renaissance taste for sophisticated intellectual pleasure. He points out that Renaissance Italy ‘had, in fact, become a school for scandal’ where ‘the general culture of the time had educated a poisonous brood of impotent wits, of born critics and railers, whose envy called for hecatombs of victims; and to this was added the envy of the famous men among themselves’.31 Jests were as much a tool of malicious gossip as a source of recreation. In point of fact, Poggio attached name tags to most of his tales and dispensed with the morals that still encumbered the traditional exempla. His jests provide a window on a highly competitive society that deployed humour both as a form of diversion and as a weapon to insult rivals.32 This proved no bar to the subsequent recycling of Poggio’s jokes in the burgeoning industry of jestbooks. The closest we get to a distinctly native English jestbook is the Hundred Merry Tales compiled by the More set and printed by John Rastell in 1526.33 Certainly the genre exemplifies nothing so eloquently as the interweaving of elite and popular culture – many of the tales had their roots in oral tradition. With a veritable boom in cheap print in the seventeenth century, jestbooks became an industry, and humorous tales a source of mass popular recreation – thus feeding back into popular culture.34 Interestingly, a new generation of professional entertainers, often with ties to the theatre, were deeply invested in the supply side of the market for jestbooks – among them London wits such as Thomas Dekker and Anthony Copley and the Water Poet John Taylor. Thomas Dekker and George Wilkins published the extremely

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

102

Shakespeare and laughter

popular collection of Jests to Make You Merry in 1607 and John Taylor his collection of oral tales with the title Wit and Mirth in 1629. The comedian Robert Armin also turned his hand to writing jestbooks and published a collection of jest biographies with the title Foole Upon Foole (1600) and a rhyming jestbook with the title Quips Upon Questions (1600). P. M. Zall points out that a significant change in style can be traced in the history of early modern jest literature – one that reflects the development with regard to humour on the stage. The clowning tradition of Tarlton and Will Kempe had comprised a more custardpie style of comedy, with verbal humour consisting of Tarlton’s impromptu rhyming and Kemp playing figures whose comic effect derived from the abuse of language in malapropisms and the like – characters like Costard and Dogberry. With Armin a shift to wit and sophisticated quibbles took place. Similarly, the jests display a general move towards a shorter, more pithy style with the emphasis on verbal wit rather than on practical jokes. Anthony Copley’s Wit, Fits, and Fancies (1614) was the first jestbook to specialize in puns. Topical allusions became more popular, with traditional butts such as the obtuse Welsh or lascivious friars replaced by jokes about hypocritical Puritans. The focus on sharp wit made jestbook humour particularly suited to early modern urban life.35 A talent for improvisation and extricating oneself from tight spots were techniques that were highly valued in the competitive atmosphere of the metropolis. A perennial favourite were jokes at the expense of rustics who ventured into London for the first time and jokes celebrating rogues who tricked gulls of all stripes. A mainstay of jestbook literature was, of course, humour about women. Women were shown as obstinate, quarrelsome, vain, jealous, shrewish, and, above all, lascivious. Jokes about cuckoldry seem to mirror a cultural obsession. Feminist critics have scrutinized the implications of jestbook writing for early modern views about women. They have pointed to the fact that women’s speech (and by extension, women’s laughter) was regarded as a highly volatile issue.36 Women’s mouths were conflated with sexuality, and showing the teeth and the tongue were frowned upon as signs of exposure. Excessive speech was a sign of excessive sexuality. Thus shrews and scolds were suspected to be as unbridled sexually as they were verbally and in their general behaviour. A lack of control in speech was bound up with a lack of control in sexuality. There was more at stake in the taming of a shrew than the desire for a peaceful marital life. Behind the fear of shrews hovered the fear of cuckoldry. While there is a consensus that it would be misplaced to attempt to draw conclusions about early modern reality from jestbook scenarios, critics generally agree that they provide an index to gender ideology of the age. Scholars such as Linda Woodbridge, who concede that the querelle des femmes was a literary

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Early modern humour

103

debate of long standing that periodically moved in and out of fashion and that bore the traits of a literary game, nevertheless insist that humour was deeply implicated in shaping patriarchal norms: ‘Almost all formal misogynistic attacks of the Renaissance represent themselves as jest; wit and humour loom very large in Western misogyny.’37 Jestbook humour is seen to work as a social corrective, humiliating women who trangressed norms in the fictive context of the jest, and thus serving as a warning to the women who heard or read the joke. Thus the function of jests was to provide women with a fund of knowledge about the mores of society and about the expectations they were supposed to fulfil. Cuckoldry jokes had the serious purpose of teaching women what rules they should beware of breaking to avoid being punished. However, since men were consumers of jestbook literature as well, this raises the question of why men would laugh at the thing they feared. Here the stock response is a recourse to Freud’s concept of laughter. In his book Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (1905) Freud set out a hydraulic theory of laughter, which defined laughter as the relieving of nervous energy. Like dreams, jokes are a key to the unconscious. Joking brings pleasure because it saves the pyschic energy of inhibiting emotions such as aggression or sexuality. The saved energy is expended in laughter, which functions as a safety-valve. This theory has retained its popularity until the present, partly since, in an age when most other ideologies have lost sway, the belief in the power of the unconscious and the large-scale repression that fetters Western civilization remains in effect. Cuckoldry jokes are seen as a way of coming to terms with the anxiety of cuckoldry for men, who release their tension in the form of laughter.38 I wish to suggest that readings of jestbook literature might do well to take the specificity of humour into account. Jokes are a fictive genre – and exist alongside a wide range of other literary genres that cater to different moods and requirements. Thus an attempt to draw conclusions about attitudes to crime from jokes about rogueries might lead us to see early modern society as suffused with a genial, amused tolerance towards criminals. Our stock of knowledge from a variety of other material reveals the absurdity of this view. Barbara Bowen, one of the greatest experts on Renaissance humour, warns against drawing conclusions about early modern society from the jokes they enjoyed. Ninety per cent of the jests were not original but drawn from classical sources or from medieval exempla. They were endlessly recycled in the various collections of jests. Cuckoldry jokes are so frequently to be found because they are a conventional motif of the genre. Together with jokes about lecherous priests and stupid peasants they were the stock in trade of jest literature. They were a cue for laughter.39 This is not to deny that during this era male honour was, indeed, an issue about which men were particularly exercised. However, a closer look at the jests them-

104

Shakespeare and laughter

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

selves reveals that the effect was by no means as simple as that of relieving anxious tension. What, for instance, are we to make of the following jest, taken from Tarlton’s Jests (1611): Tarlton being merrily disposed as his wife and he sat together, he said unto her: ‘Kate, answer me to one question without a lie, and take this crown of gold’ – which she took on condition that if she lost, to restore it back again. Quoth Tarlton, ‘Am I a cuckold or no, Kate?’ Whereat she answered not a word, but stood silent, notwithstanding he urged her many ways. Tarlton, seeing she would not speak, asked his gold again. ‘Why,’ quoth she, ‘have I made any lie?’ ‘No,’ says Tarlton. ‘Why then, goodman fool, I have won the wager.’40

Jestbooks about jesters were one of the subgenres of the literature, and after his death anecdotes accumulated around the famous comedian Tarlton which had probably little to do with the jests he himself might have made. There were jestbooks attributed to other jester personalities such as Skelton and Scoggin.41 Part of the humour lies simply in the verbal pratfall of the comedian. Jests about comedians alternated between celebrating their triumphs and showing the tables turned on them. And the jest certainly feeds into the conventional wisdom that all women were lascivious and unfaithful to their husbands. However, the joke presented above is only one of a large number of jests that are variations on a similar pattern. The main message seems to be that all men are cuckolds. But the joke also presents Tarlton’s wife as a winner, who clearly demonstrates her superiority to her husband both in wit and in practical wisdom. In all the variations of this motif the joke lies in the wife’s cunning admission of her infidelity (thus countering the implicit accusation of lying should she deny it) but in such a devious way as to leave the husband in a double-bind. He remains as ignorant of the truth as before. Tarlton’s wife exposes his bad faith in proposing the wager, one which draws upon the classic device of a riddle where the right answer is rewarded with riches. But Tarlton’s riddle does not allow for the option of his wife winning the wager. Fully aware of her infidelity, he offers her only the choice between telling the truth (and thus confessing her transgressions) or lying (and thus not fulfilling the conditions of the wager). In reality he offers her no choice at all. Her triumph lies in trapping him in the double-bind into which he had tried to trick her. And what she thereby exposes is male cowardice and hypocrisy. In full knowledge of the fact that they are being duped, men wilfully assume a façade of blindness to save their face. The point of interest in this jest lies in the fact that Tarlton’s wife turns silence, not speech, into her greatest trumpcard – giving the proverb ‘silence is golden’ an ironic twist. It is precisely silence, the attribute women were consis-

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Early modern humour

105

tently urged to develop, in which she displays her mastery. But she uses the virtue of silence to undermine the other cardinal virtues – namely those of chastity and obedience. In effect, in this jest Tarlton’s wife wins hands down. She wins the wager – and the gold crown. She salves her conscience by not lying, she saves her face (and perhaps her marriage) by not admitting, and she salvages her virtue by not speaking. In the end it is Tarlton who is silenced while she has the last laugh. This Kate, it appears, is not for taming. One might argue that the jest simply provides an example of the inversion of gender relations – a common trope familiar from all forms of festivity. In a mock reversal of norms the woman gains the upper hand, only to underscore the awareness that this was an exceptional, temporary situation and thus reinforce the power of the patriarchal hierarchy. However, recently scholars have argued that jestbook humour might have worked quite differently for women.42 Women are often displayed as resourceful and skilful at repartee, manifestly in charge of both the situation and the humour of the jest. Rather than norms about submission, these jests would have taught women to take pride in their ingenuity by celebrating women as agents in the fictive framework. Jests about cuckoldry might have had quite a different appeal to women as audiences than to men. Readers appropriate the same literature in different ways to meet their own requirements. Indeed, women were not only avid consumers of jests but active as tellers of jokes.43 Furthermore, there is variety among the diverse sections of readership as well – by no means would all women have reacted in the same way. Even what might appear to us as crudely misogynistic humour may have found approval with many women addressees. A notorious example is the jest A Merry Jest of a Shrewd and Curst Wife Lapped in Morrel’s Skin in Scoggin’s Jests which has been discussed as a possible source for Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew.44 The jest describes the strategem of taming a shrew by whipping her and wrapping her in a horse’s hide soaked with salt. As Suzanne Hull points out, virtuous women would be ready to participate in laughter about other women from whom they might wish to distance themselves.45 What needs to be borne in mind in the case of jests is the distinctive quality of the humorous mode. Humour thrives on ambiguity. For Arthur Koestler humour ‘compels the listener to perceive the situation in two self-consistent but incompatible frames of reference at the same time’.46 The jest both supports the stereotypical view of women as innately unfaithful and demonstrates their wit and skill. In addition, humorous texts contain an inbuilt disclaimer defusing the implications of the humorous situation by announcing that they were meant in jest, not in earnest. Humour plays with norms without being pinned down to one meaning.47 Contradictory meanings are endorsed as simultaneously valid.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

106

Shakespeare and laughter

Jests are fictive narratives, marked by all the typical characteristics of literary texts. A sole focus on the content of the joke might well be misplaced. For humanist thinkers jokes were not trivial but a highly sophisticated genre that explored matters of crucial importance to the Renaissance – above all the question of language.48 Sophistry, logic, paradox – these were the issues at stake, packaged in humorous anecdotes about lascivious priests and unfaithful wives. The jest about Tarlton recounted above reveals itself at a closer look to reflect that perennial early modern obsession with lying, literalism, and the slipperiness of language. The interest in language was a vital concern in an age that saw religious conflict fought along the lines of which side had access to the true Word of God. It gained increased urgency at a time when rulers and churches enjoined oaths of allegiance that could contradict each other, enforcing their demands with draconian penalties – as in the case of the jestbook enthusiast Thomas More. In this context Kate’s decision to remain silent appears as not merely savvy but wise, anticipating Wittgenstein’s tenet to remain silent about matters whereof we cannot speak. Instead of seeking the true meaning of a jest in its content, it might be more productive to look at how the effect of humour is created. Perhaps the most helpful analogy is to a situation of play. Humour depends on the active collusion of the participants in a humorous context. Nothing is inherently funny – it is laughter that defines a situation as comic. Laughter is a social signal that produces a situation as humorous. This is as true for social interaction as for representations of the comic. Humour arises through the interaction of cultural conventions (for example, the appearance of clowns on stage) and audience reception in specific historical contexts. In other words, a sense of the comic is produced through the interplay between what has conventionally been considered funny within a given culture and the collective values shared among a community. In social activity laughter can serve as a sign of a playful relation. Sociologists have shown that in social gatherings most laughter takes place before a joke is made – as a mutual signal that both the purveyor of humour and the addressees are willing to enter a humorous frame. Within this framework the conditions of everyday reality do not hold – with the proviso that it is a temporary situation that is clearly marked as non-serious. ‘Such jokes create their own framework of expectation . . . Participants are surely aware that the events depicted in a joke occur within the special world of humour where, in principle, as long as the speaker sustains the humorous mode, almost anything can happen.’49 Laughter stakes out an area of discourse as a game which follows its own rules. Ludwig Wittgenstein once put it in the following terms:

Early modern humour

107

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

What is it like when people do not have the same sense of humour? They do not react properly to each other. It is as though there were a custom among certain people to throw someone a ball, which he is supposed to catch & throw back; but certain people might not throw it back, but put it in their pocket instead.50

Through laughter people signal that they are willing to enter into the spirit of the game and play by the rules. These rules involve a patent demonstration of the status of play. Thus speakers use laughter ‘to signal the occurrence of humour, to solicit laughter from a partner, to acknowledge a partner’s humorous intent, to conform to a conventional pattern of conduct, and generally to manage the on-going sequence of interaction’.51 It is the members of society who refuse to join the game (like Malvolio) who are accused of lacking a sense of humour. In the case of representations of the comic, be it in the theatre or in jesting literature, generic conventions serve as pointers that a humorous framework is being entered. Humour is only effective within a community that draws on collective, shared meanings. This is the basis for the sense of intimacy that is established through a shared response – the shared sense of being part of ‘a community of amusement’.52 There is no question that the early modern age was a time of social upheaval, where gender relations were in a process of redefinition and the patriarchal system was under pressure. Nevertheless, I suggest that jestbook literature did not primarily serve the function of a normative tool. The overtly didactic purpose was undermined by the inbuilt ambiguity in all humorous discourse which signals that it is a non-serious mode where the codes of reality do not apply. Nor are jests particularly useful for gaining an insight into early modern ideology. All we can conclude with certainty is that certain issues were considered appropriate material for humour. Sometimes jests played on issues fraught with tension in a given society – and sometimes they did not. To be sure, jests may have contributed to reinforcing stereotypes in specific contexts and with certain audiences. Similarly, they may well have been perceived by addressees as undermining these same norms. However, I would propose that the main function of laughter lies elsewhere. Laughter serves to promote social cohesion and to produce social harmony. It is about creating communities, not about content. The distinction between inclusive and exclusive laughter is misplaced – all laughter works to create a community which includes the laughers and marks the non-participants as outsiders.53 Wittgenstein once reflected on the communal effect of laughter: ‘Two people who are laughing together, at a joke perhaps. One of them has said certain somewhat unusual words & now they both break out into a sort of bleating. That might appear very bizarre to someone arriving among us from

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

108

Shakespeare and laughter

quite a different background.’54 For those excluded from the community of laughers the latter appear strange, almost as a different species of humanity, as the analogy between laughter and bleating suggests. The source of amusement seems incomprehensible – simply not funny. The point is, of course, that it is the welding together of a community that produces the effect of humour. What a group of people laughs about is considered funny. Hobbes identified an important principle when he declared laughter to stem from a sense of superiority. However, laughter is not the articulation of a pre-existing sense of dominance – it creates superiority in a community of laughers sharing the same values. Indeed, they produce the very norms they appear to confirm. These norms are geared to reinforcing the identity of the group itself. Thus jokes about cuckoldry, rather than serving as a hydraulic safety-valve for anxieties, can paradoxically serve to create a sense of male bonding. In As You Like It, the Duke’s men sing a hunting song about cuckoldry, transforming a mark of shame into a sign of male solidarity: Take thou no scorn to wear the horn; It was a crest ere thou wast born. Thy father’s father wore it, And thy father bore it. The horn, the horn, the lusty horn Is not a thing to laugh to scorn. (4.2.14–19)

The pertinent point is that laughers always see themselves as winners – and identify with the winners in the game world of humour. In the sphere of the imagination, it is wholly misguided to see identifications working on a rational basis of affinities. However much anxiety the obsession with cuckoldry might arouse in early modern man, in jests about cuckolds he would, of course, be laughing about other cuckolds. Cuckolds are always other people. A second proposition I wish to make about jestbook literature is that it is above all a source of pleasure and recreation. With the emergence of a market economy in the early modern period the commercialization of both mirth and humour is discernible. The commodity being retailed in both cases was pleasure. Indeed what is apparent in both fields is the shift in emphasis from didacticism, which claims to instruct as well as entertain, to entertainment for its own sake. This might explain why the Puritan divine William Perkins included the consumption of jestbooks in his list of common errors made by ignorant people. A common fallacy, he claims, is ‘That merry ballads and books, as Scoggin, Bevis of Southampton. &c. are good to drive away time, and to remove hard qualms’.55 As Perkins recognized, jestbooks were mainly about pleasure, not normative

Early modern humour

109

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

instruction. Instead, there is a proliferation of prologues justifying jestbooks in terms of the therapeutic value of laughter. To take one example, the writer, physician, and disgraced priest Andrew Borde introduces his book The Jests of Scoggin with the following words: There is nothing, beside the goodness of God, that preserves health so much as honest mirth, especially mirth used at dinner and supper, and mirth toward bed . . . Therefore considering this matter, that mirth is so necessary a thing for men, I published this book, named The Jests of Scoggin, to make men merry; for amongst divers other books of grave matters that I have made, my delight hath been to recreate my mind in making something merry.56

Health is put forward as a justification for diversion. Protestations of this kind are a safe sign that the speaker has a stake in the professional purveyance of pleasure. Twelfth Night Twelfth Night offers the summation of Shakespeare’s ideas on laughter in comedy. On the one hand, the play enacts the constraints on laughter circulated in courtesy manuals. Initially eliciting the audience’s delight and complicity in a practical joke played upon a character who clearly deserves having his pomposity punctured, it increasingly evokes a sense of unease at a joke carried too far. As regards humour, the play epitomizes the shift in the early modern stage from the scurrilous humour and comic malapropisms of clowns such as Lance or Dogberry to the intellectual wordplay of a wise fool. Lastly, the play exemplifies the move from popular festivity – nostalgically recalled in its title – to a commercial form of mirth retailed as a product of the emerging entertainment industry. For all its nostalgia for an age of cakes and ale, it reaffirms the ethos of the new brand of professional entertainment: offering a highly sophisticated work of art that provided pleasure by transporting its spectators into golden playworlds, while jettisoning the didactic purpose that marked earlier forms of dramatic art. Long before the appearance of the fool Illyria is revealed as a land where folly holds sway. An array of characters in the grips of self-delusion in varying degrees is paraded before the audience. The ruler of Illyria appears as a melancholy poseur, gratifying an epicurean desire for a surfeit of pleasures. He is in the throes of a narcissistic love-affair that masks itself as love for Olivia: his dreams of the woman he loves consist in how she will love him, not how he might console her in her bereavement or give her pleasure: ‘How will she love,

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

110

Shakespeare and laughter

. . . when liver, brain, and heart, / These sovereign thrones, are all supplied, and fill’d / Her sweet perfections with one self king!’ (1.1.35–9).57 Olivia, on the other hand, seems to be indulging a morbid fascination with grief for a dead brother, vowing to mourn him ‘like a cloistress’ (1.1.28) for seven years. As regards the lesser folk, Sir Toby is introduced as a drunkard and roisterer: ‘That quaffing and drinking will undo you’ (1.3.14), Maria chides him. His sidekick Sir Andrew is explicitly described by Maria as a fool – in addition to being a quarreller, a coward and reveller. Sir Andrew himself proudly advertises his lack of brains: ‘I am a great eater of beef, and I believe that does harm to my wit’ (1.3.84–5). For these dedicated followers of festivity, life consists in one neverending saturnalia: Sir Andrew : . . . Shall we set about some revels? Sir Toby: What shall we do else? (1.3.133–5)

It is Feste’s brief to expose the folly of his fellow Illyrians. His standard device is the implicit query: who is the real fool? His brilliant exchange with Olivia serves to show his method in action: Clown: Good madonna, why mourn’st thou? Olivia: Good fool, for my brother’s death. Clown: I think his soul is in hell, madonna. Olivia: I know his soul is in heaven, fool. Clown: The more fool, madonna, to mourn for your brother’s soul, being in heaven. Take away the fool, gentlemen. (1.5.64–70)

Feste undermines the very foundations of the world of illusion Oliva has carefully constructed for herself. Not by articulating words of wisdom, but by putting her self-image into question by means of an artful catechism, he attempts to incite her to reflect upon her own folly. Slippery logic and sly paradox are Feste’s trade tools. He uses a less subtle argument with Malvolio, who carps about the quality of his fooling, expressing an uncharitable wish that Feste be afflicted by ill fortune to improve his skills: ‘Infirmity, that decays the wise, doth ever make the better fool.’ The fool retorts sharply by turning the tables on him: ‘God send you, sir, a speedy infirmity, for the better increasing your folly!’ (74–7). Malvolio, one of the prize idiots in the play, is marked out as a fool in an early comment by Olivia: ‘O, you are sick of self-love, Malvolio, and taste with a distempered appetite’ (89–90). But his fate as a gull is sealed once we hear his disparaging remark about the jester, ‘I marvel your ladyship takes delight in such a barren rascal’ (81–2). There are few things the audience of a comedy forgives less than a lack of humour.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Early modern humour

111

Throughout the play Feste harps on the theme of universal folly. ‘Foolery . . . does walk about the orb like the sun, it shines everywhere’ (3.1.39) he announces. When asked to look after the drunk Sir Toby, he drily remarks, ‘the fool shall look to the madman’ (1.5.138–9). When he encounters the two revellers, Sir Toby and Sir Andrew, he greets them with the query, ‘Did you never see the picture of “we three”?’ (2.3.16–17). He is alluding to a popular motif, the image of two fools (or asses) with a caption referring to three, thus ironically including the viewer. His caustic comment on the Duke reveals that he has taken his measure: ‘thy mind is a very opal. I would have men of such constancy put to sea, that their business might be everything, and their intent everywhere, for that’s it that always makes a good voyage of nothing’ (2.4.75– 9). He debunks Orsino’s deluded idea of himself as exemplary lover by comparing him first to the shifting hue of an opal and them to the changing moods of the sea. In the very same scene Orsino has vacillated between first declaring his love to be the epitome of constancy, and then reminding Cesario that men were apt to lose interest in women once their looks waned, admitting that women’s affections were more reliable: ‘Our fancies are more giddy and unfirm . . . Than women’s are’ (33–5). Finally, the Duke lectures his page that no woman can ever measure up to his grand passion for Olivia. Feste’s remark scathingly punctures the hubristic opinion Orsino has of himself. What marks Feste as an outsider among the ranks of the other protagonists is that he has a clearly articulated view of his role in the play. His selfdefinition is grounded in the Erasmian concept of a fool as a figure who unsettles the certainties of the other characters. Invoking wit, he remarks in an aside to the audience: ‘Those wits that think they have thee, do very oft prove fools: and I that am sure I lack thee, may pass for a wise man’ (1.5.31–3). In a song he explicitly draws a comparison between himself and the Vice, self-consciously calling attention to his function as successor to the Vice (4.2.125–32). The main metaphor that he spins out is the analogy between identity and language. The folly that has invaded Illyria has shaken the characters’ stable sense of identity to the core – as is literalized in the imagery of disguise and role-playing that pervades the play. Feste plays on another analogue to the effects of madness: that of language spinning out of control. ‘To see this age! A sentence is but a chev’ril glove to a good wit – how quickly the wrong side may be turned outward!’ he exclaims (3.1.11–13). He articulates a wide spread Renaissance malaise about the loss of secure relations between words and their signification. But his endless quibbling plays havoc with a nostalgic notion of language as moored to fixed meanings. In Feste’s world ‘Nothing that is so, is so’ (4.1.8–9). His business is to be a ‘corrupter of words’ (3.1.37). He himself personifies an age where social bonds are increasingly being replaced by contractual relations. Viola addresses him as a

112

Shakespeare and laughter

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

‘merry fellow’ who ‘car’st for nothing’ (26–7). Feste displays a marked indifference to the other characters. His detachment and independent spirit are demonstrated by his unexcused and unexplained absence from the household of his employer, Olivia, for which he is reproached by Maria. He seems to regard himself above all as a professional. Viola pays tribute to his skill in her words of praise: This fellow is wise enough to play the fool, And to do that well, craves a kind of wit: He must observe their moods on whom he jests, The quality of persons, and the time, And like the haggard, check at every feather That comes before his eye. This is a practice As full of labour as a wise man’s art (61–7)

Only a man in full possession of his wits is able to play the role of a fool. Like a professional comedian his quips are carefully crafted and adapted to his audience. In other words, what appears as effortless wit is grounded in hardwon expertise. Ironically, the man with the sanest mind in Illyria is not taken seriously. Olivia defends him from the cavils of Malvolio by magnanimously pointing out, ‘There is no slander in an allowed fool’ (1.5.93). Nobody in Illyria listens to what Feste is saying. As a corollary, he is busy taking care of his own concerns. He importunes the aristocratic characters with requests for money, and on receiving a tip shamelessly demands more: ‘Would not a pair of these have bred?’ (3.1.50). Significantly, in his first performance for Orsino he reacts to the Duke’s offers of a tip with an assertion of professional pride: Duke: There’s for thy pains. [Giving him money.] Clown: No pains, sir, I take pleasure in singing, sir. (2.4.67–8)

There is a hint of self-mockery in the way he reacts to the Duke’s arrogant dismissal by harrying him mercilessly for gold when he sees him next, triggering the latter’s exasperated remark, ‘O, you give me ill counsel’ (5.1.29). But in the meantime we have observed that, whatever good counsel Feste dispenses, his advice is ignored. The wisest thing he can do in Illyria is to look to his own interests. Interestingly, the fool is only tangentially involved in the scheme to gull Malvolio. He disappears during the scene when the plot is hatched and is absent from the eavesdropping scene, although Maria originally plans him in: ‘I will plant you two, and let the fool make a third’, she tells Sir Toby and Sir Andrew (2.3.173–4). In the prison scene he plays a characteristically ambiguous part. First he adds a further comic twist to the humiliation of Malvolio by acting

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Early modern humour

113

the role of a curate, Sir Topas, whose sole function is to needle the distraught steward and gain further comic mileage from the gulling plot. The episode displays Feste’s sheer pleasure in playacting. Then he reverts back to his position as household fool and offers to help Malvolio escape his confinement. Clearly he is playing it safe and hedging his bets. He has no commitment to either side: to him, ‘that’s all one’ (5.1.406). Moreover, the comedy involved in the gulling device is not quite his brand of humour. In the heart of his last comedy Shakespeare presents a set-piece comic device of the type that is usually associated with Ben Jonson, whose success in creating satirical comedies of humour eventually supplanted Shakespearean romantic comedy in the popularity of the fin-de-siècle theatre audiences. In the gulling plot of Twelfth Night Shakespeare beats his rival at his own game. The humour lies partly in the caricature it presents of the Puritans, known for their attacks on festivity and on the theatre. Malvolio – along with Angelo in Measure for Measure – is seen as Shakespeare’s main contribution to the stage Puritan. The figure of the Illyrian steward has shaped our view of Puritans to the very present: lean, mean, and a killjoy. But in comparison with Jonson’s parody of a Puritan in the character with the ludicrous name-tag Zeal-of-the-Land Busy in Bartholomew Fair, there are few characteristics about Malvolio that contemporary audiences would automatically associate with a Puritan. He is not distinguished either by excessive greed, lechery, or the spouting of cant. Nor is it pious hypocrisy in itself that his enemies accuse him of – instead, as Maria explains, ‘The devil a Puritan that he is, or anything constantly, but a time-pleaser, an affectioned ass, that cons state without book, and utters it by great swarths: the best persuaded of himself, so crammed (as he thinks) with excellencies, that it is his grounds of faith that all that look on him love him’ (2.3.146–52). Malvolio is not a fervent religious fundamentalist, eager to reform his fallen fellow-beings through ‘prophesy’. The texts he cons are probably self-help manuals for would-be courtiers and social climbers. He is defined as a timeserver, a flatterer who was willing to go to any lengths to rise in the social scale. His real religion is self-love: he is characterized by a boundless egotism and narcissism that makes him blind to what others might think of him. In this regard Malvolio is in good company. Illyria is populated with characters afflicted with self-love, from the Duke all the way down the social ladder. Why then is the gulling Malvolio is subjected to of a far less benign quality than the treatment meted out to the other self-deluded characters? Critics have pointed to the on-going battle between the forces of festivity and Lenten restraint in the play, represented by Sir Toby and his gang and Malvolio respectively. ‘Dost thou think because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?’, Toby demands, seeming to sum up the issue in a nutshell (2.3.114–15).

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

114

Shakespeare and laughter

C. L. Barber points out that the title of the play itself, Twelfth Night, traditionally presided over in large households by a Lord of Misrule figure like Sir Toby, signals the end of a period of festive revelry. Malvolio is punished for his discourtesy and intolerance towards the tradition of festive misrule, Barber argues. By attacking the time-honoured excesses associated with festive licence, Malvolio reveals his lack of breeding. ‘His secret wish is to violate decorum himself, then relish to the full its power over others.’58 Malvolio seems to stand for the new self-made man in the nascent market economy of the early modern period, characterized by a Puritan work ethic which emphasized self-discipline and castigated indulgence in holiday licence.59 He is less interested in questions of moral reform than in gaining the maximum profit for his own interests. This view is confirmed by a number of recent critics, who argue that it is Malvolio’s blatant desire for social advancement for which he is humiliated. Significantly, cross-gender transgression in the play is laughingly tolerated while cross-class ambitions are severely penalized.60 Although the play is careful to keep her real status indeterminate, the relationship between Viola and Orsino is in many ways analogous to that between Malvolio and Olivia.61 But whereas Viola succeeds in overcoming the hurdles of disguise and status, Malvolio is mocked for his fantasies of social climbing. A close look at the gulling scene might shed further light on how the play evokes laughter. What is remarkable about the scene is the fact that it presents two comic sites of action operating one embedded within the other. Every remark by Malvolio is commented upon by the trio hidden in the box-tree, Fabian, Sir Toby, and Sir Andrew. To give a brief example: Malvolio: To be Count Malvolio! Sir Toby: Ah, rogue! Sir Andrew: Pistol him, pistol him! Sir Toby: Peace, peace! Malvolio: There is example for’t. The Lady of the Strachy married the yeoman of the wardrobe. Sir Andrew: Fie on him, Jezebel! Fabian: O peace! now he’s deeply in: look how imagination blows him. (2.5.34–43)

Not only does the laughter of the pranksters serve to reinforce our own amusement, but they themselves are a further source of humour. They keep up a constant stream of comic patter that underlines the hilarity of what we observe on stage. In addition, of course, the presence of Sir Andrew guarantees merriment. His remark labelling the Puritan a ‘Jezebel’ adds a second layer of humour to the joke, mocking both the straight-laced Malvolio and the ignorant knight. This becomes particularly hilarious when Sir Andrew reacts to Malvolio’s

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Early modern humour

115

mention of ‘a foolish knight’ by excitedly laying claim to celebrity status: ‘That’s me, I warrant you’, adding proudly, ‘I knew ’twas I, for many do call me fool’ (79–81). As far as Malvolio is concerned, it is clear that he produces himself as an ideal dupe long before the gulling device, the letter allegedly written by Olivia, is planted on him. Maria describes him as ‘practising behaviour to his own shadow this half hour’ prior to the eavesdropping scenario (17–18). He fantasizes about being Count Malvolio, about his rich garments, and about bullying those soon to be under his authority (such as Sir Toby) – all quite independently of the letter that fans his hopes. In what follows he falls into the trap laid for him chiefly through his wilful inability to see himself with a sense of perspective. He is so blinkered by his desires that he misses the bawdy joke that leaps off the page: ‘this is my lady’s hand: these be her very C’s, her U’s, and her T’s, and thus makes she her great P’s’ (87–9). The joke is compounded by the mirroring of Malvolio’s blindness in the fatuousness of Andrew, who misses exactly the same joke, echoing Malvolio: ‘Her C’s, her U’s, and her T’s: why that?’ (91) The way Malvolio attempts to make the nonsense letters M.O.A.I. fit into a preconceived meaning (‘to crush this a little’) (140) and construes the abstruse words of the letter into a declaration of love is a further sly dig at the Puritanical obsession with literalist readings of the Bible. What makes Malvolio such a laughing-stock, I wish to suggest, is above all his solipsism – his inability to interact with other members of the community. He is really punished for being what Meredith (drawing on Rabelais) termed an agelast, a non-laugher, a spoilsport who refuses to join the social game.62 This becomes apparent in the very first glimpse we get of him, when he pours scorn on the fool’s professional skills in front of his mistress, jeering, ‘Look you now, he’s out of his guard already: unless you laugh and minister occasion to him, he is gagged’ (1.5.81–5). His lack of generosity and communality are heavily resented by the jester, who flings these words back in his teeth at the end of the play. Laughter is above all a social practice that serves to create a community of laughers. From the very beginning, Malvolio refuses to play ball with the other members of the Illyrian community. As Anne Barton puts it, ‘We make common cause with Sir Toby and the Fool against Malvolio because we do not want him to spoil fun which in a sense is ours as well as that of characters actually on stage. By means of laughter, we too cast Malvolio out.’63 The eavesdropping scene ends with the promise of more sport to come with Malvolio determined to implement the ridiculous injunctions of the letter and make a public ass of himself. But at some point in the play the joke sours. This is partly because Illyria itself appears to be caught up in a whirl of accelerating madness and excess. Things seem to be galloping towards a head – Olivia is in

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

116

Shakespeare and laughter

the grip of a wild passion, a ‘most extracting frenzy’ (5.1.279), as she later admits. Sebastian is constantly harping on about the madness surrounding him. Orsino dismisses Antonio’s painful tale of betrayal with the comment, ‘thy words are madness’ (96). His own mood turns ugly, and a ‘savage jealousy’ (117) urges him to kill the thing he loves. It is only the intrusion of wonder and the miraculous into the world of Illyria that calls a halt to the sense of folly spiralling out of control. Furthermore, the gulling device grows tedious for the plotters themselves: ‘I would we were well rid of this knavery’, Sir Toby complains (4.2.69–70). The pranksters have lost interest in Malvolio and are busy planning a second gulling plot – to pit the arrant coward Sir Andrew against the timid Cesario in a duel. The prison scene contains a brief comic highlight with Feste’s cameo appearance as a pedantic curate, Sir Topas, quizzing Malvolio about abstruse questions of doctrine. The curate pretends to depart in a huff at Malvolio’s heretical answers, though ironically it is the steward who maintains the orthodox view, not the fake curate. The jest itself is framed by allusions to bear-baiting – immediately before the eavesdropping scene Fabian mentions to his fellow-plotters that Malvolio has earned his ire for denouncing the bear-baiting he had staged on Olivia’s grounds. Sir Toby vows revenge: ‘To anger him we’ll have the bear again, and we will fool him black and blue’ (2.5.9–10). The reference is to a real baiting, but the words seem to include the trick played on Malvolio. In his final words Malvolio once again evokes the analogy to bear-baiting, comparing his tormentors to a pack of hounds: ‘I’ll be reveng’d on the whole pack of you!’ (5.1.377). For Ralph Berry, the allusions conjure up an image of the ‘theatre as blood sport . . . That, too, is “festive” comedy’.64 Berry argues that, from the viewpoint of the audience, the play precipitates a reversal of opinion about the characters in the course of the gulling plot. Sir Toby, originally shown as a fun-loving roisterer, becomes increasingly less appealing as the play proceeds. Indeed, a decidedly unpleasant impression is left by his last appearance, when he reveals his true thoughts about the inane but harmless Sir Andrew: ‘An ass-head, and a coxcomb, and a knave, a thin-faced knave, a gull’ (5.1.204–5). He shows a distinct lack of humour in his reaction to the surgeon’s proclivity for what is, after all, his own favourite pastime: ‘I hate a drunken rogue’ (199). Conversely, Malvolio, who is clearly relegated to a lower status earlier in the play by foregrounding his role as steward – ‘Art any more than a steward?’ Toby demands contemptuously – is elevated to the rank of a gentleman by the end of the play. Not only does Malvolio himself stress his gentlemanly status in the encounter with Sir Topas but both Viola and Olivia draw attention to the fact in the final scene. Viola describes Malvolio as ‘A gentleman and follower of my lady’s’ (5.1.275) while Olivia refers to her steward

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Early modern humour

117

with the words, ‘poor gentleman, he’s much distract’ (278). As Berry points out, Malvolio’s last speech in the play is in verse.65 In Twelfth Night Shakespeare proves he can out-Jonson Jonson if he so wishes. However, he puts the Jonsonian concept of laughter as a social corrective in question. Malvolio is not reformed and emphatically refuses to undergo a change of heart. Nor are Sir Toby and his gang changed for the better. They do not take part in the final reconciliation of the play. The expulsion of the comic scapegoat does not redeem the harmony of the Illyrian community. Nor does it become clear what lesson the spectators are supposed to learn from the play. Not even the target of the satire is unambiguous: if Puritans are sent up, so are haters of Puritans such as Sir Andrew. The main insight that the play impresses on its audience is that certain types of jokes are no longer acceptable. The aristocratic Illyrians unanimously reject the type of humour shared by the roisterers Sir Toby, Andrew Aguecheek, and Fabian. Laughter is an index of style, not morals. It determines whether you belong to the magic circle of Illyrian society or to its fringes. What the play does, however, is continually draw attention to the artifice of the fiction it is presenting. ‘If this were played upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction’ (3.4.128–9), Fabian remarks. The world of Illyria is suffused with a sense of play. ‘Role-playing, deceptions, disguises, and comic manipulations provide the fabric of the entire action . . . Illyria is a world of deceptive surface, where appearances constantly fluctuate between what is real and what is illusory.’66 It is an artificial universe which, by analogy with a perspective painting, flaunts the artist’s skill in producing the illusion: ‘A natural perspective, that is, and is not!’ (5.1.215). Optical illusion was an obsession with the Renaissance, and Shakespeare consistently reveals a fascination with visual perspective.67 In the hands of the wise fool, verbal wit is the analogue of visual games, playing mocking games with stable audience viewpoints. Paradoxically, the play seems to enact the ideas on laughter expounded by the courtier, poet, and literary critic Sir Philip Sidney. In The Defence of Poesy he laments the decline of the arts in England, castigating English comedies for their crude sense of humour, in a passage that bears quoting in full: But our comedians think there is no delight without laughter; which is very wrong, for though laughter may come with delight, yet cometh it not of delight, as though delight should be the cause of laughter; but well may one thing breed both together. Nay, rather in themselves they have, as it were, a kind of contrariety: for delight we scarcely do but in things that have a conveniency to ourselves or to the general nature; laughter almost ever cometh of things most disproportioned to ourselves and nature. Delight hath a joy in it, either permanent or present. Laughter hath only a scornful tickling.68

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

118

Shakespeare and laughter

Sidney presents the standard arguments that pleasure can be of various kinds and that laughter gratifies only a lower type of pleasure. He draws on classical ideas of laughter as an inferior emotion, an expression of malice (as posited by Plato) or triggered by qualities such as ugliness or deformity (as put forward by Aristotle). Pleasure of a superior kind Sidney terms delight. He proceeds to list examples for both delight and laughter to clarify the distinction between the two – thus the type of pleasure elicited by the sight of a beautiful woman is categorized as delight, while deformity, the misfortune of others, or surprise generate laughter (112). Delight is linked to harmony: ‘things that have a conveniency to ourselves or to the general nature’. Pleasure at positive events, at one’s own good luck, or at the good fortune of others, belongs to delight, not laughter – they would not stimulate laughter, he declares. Laughter, by contrast, is caused by the disharmonious, the incongruous, the grotesque. Indeed, he goes on to explain precisely ‘the great fault’ inherent in laughter – the fact that it is often evoked by ‘sinful things’, which ought to be condemned, or pitiful sights, which deserve our sympathy rather than our scorn (113). The difference in status is signalled by the terms he uses – delight is associated with joy, laughter only with tickling. Thus laughter is degraded to the level of a trivial, purely physiological reflex, triggered by a temporary titillation. What aesthetic pleasure calls forth, he implies, is delight. To be sure, it is the vulgarity of contemporary theatre about which he is primarily concerned. In a famous passage he deplores the lack of decorum in a theatre which, ‘mingling kings and clowns . . . thrust in the clown by head and shoulders, to play a part in majestical matters, with neither decency nor discretion’. In this type of ‘mongrel tragi-comedy’ all classical norms about what is suitable for the various genres are thrown overboard: the plays ‘match hornpipes and funerals’ and purvey a type of humour rooted in scurrility or ‘doltishness . . . fit to lift up a loud laughter’ (112). Transgressing rules of decorum is deplorable in itself, but it appears that it is above all the grossness of obscene or custard-pie humour that Sidney finds so abhorrent. For in a dazzling somersault he admits that laughter and delight are compatible after all: ‘Yet deny I not but that they may go well together’ (112). Great art (or poesy, to use the term Sidney favours) can elicit both delight and laughter. He expands on this idea: ‘a busy loving courtier; a heartless threatening Thraso; a self-wise-seeming schoolmaster; an awry-transformed traveller: these if we saw walk in stage names, which we play naturally, therein were delightful laughter, and teaching delightfulness’ (113). All the examples Sidney gives are stock roles in classical drama. What elevates laughter to the level of delight in the case of art is the fact that art mingles edification with the pleasure it proffers. This is the argument Sidney’s entire defence of art is built upon – the Horatian maxim that the function of art is to teach and to delight simultaneously.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Early modern humour

119

As I will argue below, Sidney’s defence of art puts forward a moral framework that it undercuts from within. What Sidney really does is posit the realm of the aesthetic as a separate world where the rules of reality do not apply – a golden world, not the brazen world of reality, a self-consciously artificial realm where the poet ‘nothing affirms’ (103). As regards laughter, the central insight that Sidney delivers is that laughter in reality and laughter spurred by representations are two different things. Indeed, we often laugh at precisely the figures on stage that we would not consider funny in real life. Fools and clowns in the theatre are a staple source of laughter, while few of us suffer fools gladly in our immediate vicinity. We laugh in complicity with rogues and applaud their criminal machinations, while most of us would disapprove of their actions in real life. We have no qualms roaring with laughter about events on stage that would move most of us to pity in real life (or at least jog our conscience). Few aspects demonstrate the specificity of art more clearly than the question of what causes laughter. The theatre encompasses an independent world which has only an oblique relation to material reality. This is particularly true in the case of comedy, which traditionally aims to arouse laughter through the presentation of two-dimensional caricatures, not reflections of real people. Plautine comedy abounds with witty slaves, heartily applauded by the audience, whereas there was no evidence that slaves ever behaved as outrageously, even during the Roman Saturnalia, the festival celebrating the inversion of hierarchies.69 Most laughter in a comedy is triggered by comic devices shaped by generic conventions – cues that tap into the audience’s expectation that something is funny. Tarlton was so famous a comedian that his mere appearance on stage would provoke gales of laughter.70 Sidney puts his finger on what will emerge as one of the cornerstones of Shakespeare’s art – the fact that laughter on stage is different from laughter in real life. In contrast to Sidney, however, Shakespeare drops edification out of the picture altogether. To this extent the theatre might be seen as staging a theoretical debate that gained momentum during the Renaissance – a critical perception among poets and literary theorists about the independent nature of human fictions. Ronald Levao speaks of the ‘aesthetic and philosophical dilemma that confronted Renaissance writers throughout the period: an increasing awareness of the mind’s power and freedom to create fictional worlds that outstrips its ability to justify them’.71 To be sure, debates about the function of the aesthetic reach back to Plato and his censure of the arts. The creation of illusion was equated with lying and duplicity. Augustine admitted that not all lies aimed to deceive, but that some fictions merely wished to entertain: ‘What I call feigned is created by fabricators, who differ thus from deceivers: every deceiver tries to trick, but not everyone who fabricates wishes to trick. For mimes, comedies, and many

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

120

Shakespeare and laughter

poems are full of lies in the desire to please rather than to trick, and almost anyone who makes jokes fabricates.’72 But in an age when religious reformers attacked images and fictions as duplicitous or signs of human hubris, artists were hard-pressed to find justifications for art that evaded the shackles of didacticism or literalism. One solution mooted in the Renaissance was the concept of a second world – the idea that the imaginary world created in fictions was an invention in its own right.73 It was explicitly not an imitation of this world but the product of an imaginative activity that was analogous to God’s creation. The influence of Neoplatonic thought is patent: God shaped us in his likeness precisely to encourage us to use our creative powers, Neoplatonists argued. By fashioning works of art people revealed God’s true nature – for art did not reflect the fallen world but partook of the ideal world in all its pristine beauty. If hitherto art had always striven to do justice to the original work of art – the world that God had created – now the artist’s artefacts saw a significant rise in status. The imaginary universe was seen as superior to the real world: it presented a vision of the world as it had once been and a model for humanity to to emulate. It made no claims to verisimilitude – instead, it explicitly drew attention to its status as artefact. It is this concept that inspired Sidney’s famous conceit of a golden world produced by poetry – in contrast to the brazen world of nature (85). Poetry could not be pinned down as to its fulfilment of truth claims – it made no such claims at all. Fiction could not be accused of lying – because the artist ‘nothing affirms’. Art created a self-contained world that had only a tangential relation to reality. It is at this point that the striking affinities between the phenomenon of laughter and the world of the aesthetic become apparent. Laughter is a device that signals that one is temporarily entering a play frame, a distinct realm in which the rules that govern everyday reality are suspended. Play has been defined as ‘a free activity standing quite consciously outside “ordinary” life as being “not serious”, but at the same time absorbing the player intensely and utterly . . . It proceeds within its own proper boundaries of time and space according to fixed rules and in an orderly manner.’74 A marker of the play situation is the player’s awareness of being in two worlds simultaneously, the domain of play and the real world. This is precisely what a recognition of art as a social practice in its own right implied: the perception of a work of art as a consciously crafted artefact and not a magical object with sacred power. In the case of the theatre, a sense of the aesthetic as an independent realm implied viewing a theatrical performance as a representation and not the ritual enactment of a sacred occurrence. It was the Elizabethan drama that revived the classical idea of of the self-contained play as a world apart, Ann Righter argues.75 In Roman

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Early modern humour

121

New Comedy, the stage presented fictive constructs that were clearly set off from everyday reality. Medieval drama, on the other hand, re-enacted Biblical scenes in a way that involved the audience as participants in a shared ritual world. Religious events were not merely depicted but ritually invoked and celebrated in a community rite. Even in morality drama the audience was still involved as an actor in the events represented on stage – as Mankind. But, with the banning of religious drama and the emergence of a professional theatre, plays became works of art that pointed to their status as illusions. A further property of play, according to Huizinga, is the fact that it serves no clearly defined function. ‘It is an activity connected with no material interest, and no profit can be gained by it.’76 Works of art are inherently marked by ambiguity, producing a range of possible meanings for the reader or spectator to choose from. To be sure, Renaissance art was inclined to avow its serious affiliations and disclaim the idea of gratuitous art as frivolous. At the same time, humanist ideals drawn from Ciceronian precepts of rhetoric enjoined arguing both sides of an issue (in utramque partem), which, added to the Renaissance fondness for paradox and play, implied that dialogue and ambiguity were valued as aesthetic qualities. In the case of the public theatre, these factors were compounded by the imperatives to please a mass audience comprising viewers from the entire spectrum of early modern social life, as well as the need to evade censorship of topics that were explicitly proscribed (affairs of state and religious issues) while simultaneously gratifying the audience demand for racy topical allusions. As a result the aim to entertain takes precedence over didacticism. What the audience at the public theatre had in common with the participants in a play situation was the shared sense of a community of players. The audience was bound to the presenters of the fiction by a mutual stake in the make-believe. Both spectators and actors colluded in producing a successful second world of illusion. The realm of humour operates according to similar principles: by adopting a non-serious mode of discourse all participants actively signal their collaboration in the production of humour. Metatheatrical signals in the early modern theatre do not serve a didactic purpose (as Brechtians would have it), rapping the audience over the knuckles to break the spell of illusionism. Instead, they only increase the pleasure of the spectator by drawing attention to the artfulness of the staged fiction.77 They gratify both the audience’s pleasure of absorbtion into the fictive world and the pleasure of detached awareness of the mechanics of the performance. Metatheatrical pointers are a canny device to call attention to the skill of the performers while indulging the desire of the spectators to be in control of the vision staged for their delight. They resemble the ploy of a conjuror who fleetingly reveals his bag of tricks to the

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

122

Shakespeare and laughter

audience – flattering their vanity in seeing through the deception only to inveigle them into greater admiration of his artfulness. A similar conjunction of selfadvertisement and self-mockery can be located in the metatheatrical moments in early modern drama. Shakespearean comedies in particular are ceaselessly involved in demonstrating the constructed nature of the pleasurable illusion they are presenting. What they do not do, however, is gesture toward a greater truth elsewhere. The comedies are not a reflection of an ideal reality. Instead, they point to the fact that the game is all there is. And this is where the Shakespearean comedies diverge from the ideas about art outlined by Sidney. They, too, offered a vision of a world on stage that had no pretensions to verisimilitude. Reality was a raw material that the plays exploited for their purposes, but not the benchmark against which to measure the success of their fictive creations. But neither did the plays strive to present an ideal version of reality, a golden world which would point the way for us to emulate. They create new worlds, but not necessarily better ones. They proffer fantasy realms that feed our craving for stories and captivate our imaginative faculties. But it is never clear what didactic import they carry. This does not mean that they stake out escapist spaces which have no truck with the real world. The comedies explore issues with which early modern society was preoccupied, probing a range of perspectives in imaginary scenarios. They present a diversity of viewpoints on concerns that affected the lives of their audiences. They enact conflicts that impinged upon the real world. But they also playfully stage a series of games that serve only to divert, not to engage with reality. What they celebrated was not an ideal world elsewhere, but our ability to take control of reality through art. They provide pleasure through reshaping the world and imposing a formal order on the random and amorphous multiplicity of life. In Twelfth Night it is Feste who embodies the spirit of both distance and involvement that the play evokes in the audience. As a detached observer of events in Illyria, he moves between the world of the play and that of the audience. He comments ironically on Illyrian mores, but not by taking an unequivocally moral stance. Instead, he unsettles the other characters’ self-complacent certainties by holding up a mirror to them and implicitly posing the question: who is the real fool? In a similar fashion Feste destabilizes the position of the audience, too. What all the Illyrians share in common is the fact that they are living in illusory worlds of their own device. We laugh at their folly, but the figure of Feste serves to tinge our laughter with a hint of unease. The implications of his ironic exposure of Illyrian delusions spill over to the audience and remind us that we, too, are incessantly inventing illusions to give meaning to our lives. We too are playing, trying to fashion identities to fit to imaginary

Early modern humour

123

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

scripts. But Feste immediately defuses the impact of this insight by a quibble or two to make us laugh. Don’t take this all too seriously, he suggests, it is just a game. Twelfth Night was a festival that marked the end of festivity. The play is shot through with a suggestion of jaded pleasure and tedium. The action is rounded off with a song sung by Feste, culminating in the stanza: A great while ago the world begun, With hey, ho, the wind and the rain, But that’s all one, our play is done, And we’ll strive to please you every day. (5.1.404–7)

In contrast to the exuberant figure of Puck, Feste the jester does not flaunt the pleasure of producing illusion and the power of provoking laughter. He displays the detached, self-mocking pride of a professional entertainer. Despite the strain of melancholy that shadows the play, it is clear that the show must go on. The world outside might be one of wind and rain, but inside the theatre it is show time. Indeed, the triste reminder of the passage of time does not serve to stifle the laughter elicited by the play. The delight induced by Shakespeare’s comedies is not grounded in a denial of death but rather its obverse – the awareness of decay and impermanence in the midst of the imaginary world is what spurs their laughter. Et in Arcadia ego: it is a recognition of the transience of life that allows a celebration of its pleasure. And it is the knowledge of the fragility of illusion that generates our pleasure in fictions. Notes 1 William Shakespeare, Hamlet, ed. Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor, The Arden Shakespeare (London: Thomson Learning, 2006), 3.2.36–42. 2 Gurr, The Shakespearean Stage 1574–1642, third edition, pp. 84–9. 3 Ibid., pp. 99–100. 4 Christopher Marlowe, Tamburlaine the Great I, The Complete Plays, ed. J. B. Steane (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2003), Prologue, 1–3. 5 Gurr, The Shakespearean Stage, pp. 173–6. 6 Quoted in Andrew Gurr, Playgoing in Shakespeare’s London, p. 281. 7 See R. A. Foakes, Introduction, King Lear, The Arden Shakespeare (London: Thomson Learning, 1997), pp. 105–6. 8 Sandra Billington, A Social History of the Fool (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1984), p. 42. There is a rich vein of literature on the fool. I have drawn upon the following: Enid Welsford, The Fool: His Social and Literary History (London: Faber and Faber, 1935), Barbara Swain, Fools and Folly During the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (New

124

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22

23

24 25 26 27 28

29

Shakespeare and laughter

York: Columbia University Press, 1932), Robert Hillis Goldsmith, Wise Fools in Shakespeare (East Lansing, Mich.: Michigan State University Press, 1955), William Willeford, The Fool and His Scepter: A Study in Clowns and Jesters and Their Audience (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1969), and David Wiles, Shakespeare’s Clown: Actor and Text in the Elizabethan Playhouse (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). See A. C. Zijderveld, Reality in a Looking-Glass: Rationality through an Analysis of Traditional Folly (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982), pp. 41–91. See A. C. Bradley, ‘Feste the Jester’ (1916)’, in D. J. Palmer (ed.), Shakespeare, Twelfth Night: A Casebook (London: Macmillan, 1972), pp. 63–71. Billington, A Social History of the Fool, p. 43. Ben Jonson, Bartholomew Fair, inThree Comedies, ed. Michael Jamieson (London: Penguin, 1966), Induction, 33–6. See Wiles, Shakespeare’s Clowns, pp. 11–23. Andrew Gurr, Playgoing in Shakespeare’s London, p. 156. See Robert Weimann, Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition, p. 187. See Gurr, Playgoing in Shakespeare’s London, pp. 150–8. See Wiles, Shakespeare’s Clowns, pp. 43–60. See P. M. Zall, ed., A Nest of Ninnies and Other English Jestbooks of the Seventeenth Century (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1970). Wiles, Shakespeare’s Clowns, p. 103. Ibid., p. 161. Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), pp. 228–40. Wiles makes a similar point. For a similar argument see Richard Wilson, ‘The Management of Mirth: Shakespeare via Bourdieu’, in Jean Howard and Scott Cutler Shershaw (eds), Marxist Shakespeares (London: Routledge, 2001), pp. 159–77. Kemps Nine Daies Wonder: Performed in a Daunce from London to Norwich (1600), with an Introduction and Notes by the Rev. Alexander Dyce (New York: Johnson Reprint Corperation, 1968). Wiles, Shakespeare’s Clowns, p. 25. Welsford, The Fool, p. 317. Billington, A Social History of the Fool, pp. 52ff. Quoted in Bradbrook, ‘Robert Armin and Twelfth Night’ (1969), in D. J. Palmer (ed.), Shakespeare, Twelfth Night: A Casebook (London: Macmillan, 1972), p. 236. See P. M. Zall, ‘A Natural History of Jestbooks: An Introduction’, in A Hundred Merry Tales, pp. 1–10. For the history of jestbooks I have drawn on the expert knowledge of both Zall and John Wardroper, both of whom have compiled useful selections from early modern jestbooks. See John Wardroper, ‘Introduction’, in his edited volume Jest upon Jest: A Selection from the Jestbooks and Collections of Merry Tales Published from the Reign of Richard III to George III (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970), pp. 1–25. Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, trans. S. G. C. Middlemore (London: Penguin, 1990), p. 111. See his section on ‘Ridicule and Wit’ in Part 2, pp. 110–19.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Early modern humour

125

30 Ibid., pp. 114–15. 31 Ibid., p. 114. 32 See Peter Burke, ‘Frontiers of the Comic in Early Modern Italy, c. 1350–1750’, in Jan Bremmer and Herman Roodenburg (eds), A Cultural History of Humour: From Antiquity to the Present Day (Cambridge: Polity, 1997), pp. 61–75. 33 Zall, ‘A Natural History of Jestbooks’, p. 8. 34 See P. M. Zall, ‘Introduction: The Blending of Wit and Jest’, in A Nest of Ninnies, p. ix. 35 See Lawrence Manley, ‘London in Jest: From the Jestbooks’, in Lawrence Manley (ed.), London in the Age of Shakespeare: An Anthology (London: Croom Helm, 1986), pp. 119–22. 36 See Newman, Fashioning Femininity, pp. 3–12. Also see Anthony Fletcher, Gender, Sex and Subordination in England 1500–1800 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), and Linda Woodbridge, Women and the English Renaissance: Literature and the Nature of Womankind, 1540–1620 (Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1984). 37 Woodbridge, Women and the English Renaissance, p. 31. 38 See for instance Roger Thompson, ‘Popular Reading and Humour in Restoration England’, Journal of Popular Culture, 9:3 (1975), 653–71, and Elizabeth Foyster, ‘A Laughing Matter? Marital Discord and Gender Control in Seventeenth-Century England’, Rural History, 4:1 (1993), 5–21. 39 See Barbara Bowen, ‘Introduction’, in One Hundred Renaissance Jokes: An Anthology (Birmingham, Ala.: Summa Publications, 1988), pp. xiii–xxx. 40 Wardroper (ed.), Jest Upon Jest, pp. 44–5. 41 Wilson, ‘The English Jestbooks of the Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries’, pp. 133–8. 42 See Pamela Allen Brown, Better a Shrew than a Sheep: Women, Drama, and the Culture of Jest in Early Modern England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003). 43 See Patricia Crawford and Sara Mendelson, Women in Early Modern England 1550– 1720 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), p. 217. 44 See Frances E. Dolan, ‘Introduction’, in William Shakespeare, The Taming of the Shrew: Texts and Contexts (Boston: Bedford Books, 1996), pp. 1–38. 45 Hull, Chaste, Silent and Obedient, p. 111. 46 Koestler, ‘Humour and Wit’, p. 5. 47 See Anton C. Zijderveld, ‘The Sociology of Humour and Laughter’, Current Sociology/La sociologie contemporaine: The Journal of the International Sociological Association/Association Internationale de Sociologie, 32:3 (Winter 1983), 1–103. 48 See Anne Lake Prescott, ‘Humanism in the Tudor Jestbook’, Moreana XXIV, 95–6 (Nov. 1987), 5–16. 49 Mulkay, On Humour, p. 19. Emphasis in the original. 50 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value: A Selection from the Posthumous Remains, ed. G. H. von Wright, trans. Peter Winch (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), 95e. 51 Mulkay, On Humour, pp. 116–17. 52 Ted Cohen, Jokes: Philosophical Thoughts on Joking Matters (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), p. 29.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

126

Shakespeare and laughter

53 Also see Derek Brewer, ‘Prose Jest-Books Mainly in the Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries in England’, in Bremmer and Roodenburg (eds), A Cultural History of Humour, p. 90. 54 Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, 88e. Emphasis in the original. 55 William Perkins, The Foundation of Christian Religion: Gathered into Sixe Principles (1595), A2. 56 Quoted in Wardroper (ed.), Jest Upon Jest, p. 6. 57 All references to the Arden edtion of Twelfth Night, ed. J. M. Lothian and T. W. Craik (London: Routledge, 1975). 58 C. L. Barber, ‘Testing Courtesy and Humanity in Twelfth Night’, in Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy, p. 255. 59 Paul N. Siegel, ‘Malvolio: Comic Puritan Automaton’, in Maurice Charney (ed.), Shakespearean Comedy (New York: New York Literary Forum, 1980), p. 220. 60 See Dympna Callaghan, ‘“And all is semblative a woman’s part”: Body Politics and Twelfth Night’, in R. S. White (ed.), Twelfth Night, New Casebooks (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996), pp. 129–59, and Christina Malcolmson, ‘“What You Will”: Social Mobility and Gender in Twelfth Night’, in Valerie Wayne (ed.), The Matter of Difference: Materialist Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991), pp. 29–58. 61 See Graham, Holderness, Nick Potter, and John Turner, ‘Twelfth Night: The Court in Transition (II)’, in Shakespeare: Out of Court: Dramatizations of Court Society (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1990), pp. 105–21. 62 George Meredith, ‘An Essay on Comedy’, in Sypher (ed.), Comedy, p. 4. 63 Anne Barton, ‘“As You Like It” and “Twelfth Night”: Shakespeare’s Sense of an Ending’, in Malcolm Bradbury and David Palmer (eds), Shakespearian Comedy, Stradford-upon-Avon Studies, 14 (London: Edward Arnold, 1972), p. 173. 64 Ralph Berry, ‘Twelfth Night: The Experience of the Audience’, in Shakespeare and the Awareness of the Audience (London: Macmillan, 1985), p. 74. 65 Ibid., pp. 70–2. 66 See Karen Greif, ‘Plays and Playing in Twelfth Night’, in Harold Bloom (ed.), William Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night: Modern Critical Interpretations (New York: Chelsea House, 1987), pp. 48–9. 67 See Ernest B. Gilman, The Curious Perspective: Literary and Pictorial Wit in the Seventeenth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978). 68 Sir Philip Sidney, An Apology for Poetry, or The Defence of Poesy, ed. R. W. Maslen (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), pp. 112–13. Subsequent references to be given in parentheses. 69 Segal, Roman Laughter; p. 103. 70 Billington, A Social History of the Fool, p. 43. 71 Ronald Levao, Renaissance Minds and Their Fictions: Cusanus, Sidney, Shakespeare (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), p. 132. 72 Quoted in Olson, Literature as Recreation in the Later Middle Ages, pp. 25–6.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Early modern humour

127

73 See Harry Berger, Jr, Second World and Green World: Studies in Renaissance Fiction-Making (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), pp. 3–40. 74 Huizinga, Homo Ludens, p. 13. 75 See Ann Righter, Shakespeare and the Idea of the Play. 76 Huizinga, Homo Ludens, p. 13. 77 See the astute analysis of metatheatricality in Anthony B. Dawson and Paul Yachnin, The Culture of Playgoing in Shakespeare’s England: A Collaborative Debate (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

4

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

The Puritans and laughter

Religion and laughter

R

eligion had a problem with laughter. The Church trembled at the very thought. Mad medieval monks were willing to go to any lengths – including inventing breathtakingly ingenious deaths for their brethren – to prevent a book on laughter from falling into the wrong hands. Not just any book, of course, but the lost treatise on comedy by Aristotle. Laughter was dynamite – it would have blown away the entire edifice of the Church. The Puritans, true heirs of mad monk Jorge, gave a further twist to the screw and did everything in their power to proscribe laughter. Alas, the book that would have changed the world was destroyed, and it would take centuries until the Enlightenment finally freed humanity – for Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Laughter. All this is conventional wisdom, of course, at the very latest since the blockbuster film version of Umberto Eco’s bestseller The Name of the Rose.1 The preposterous plot has been swallowed without demur by millions of consumers partly because it feeds into a cherished Enlightenment myth, namely that laughter is subversive. For all its layers of postmodern irony, there is little indication that Eco is putting this idea in question in the book (never mind the film). There are few things the postmodern West is more serious about than its belief in the power of laughter to free humankind from the shackles of superstition. There is no question that there was a strand of Christianity hostile to laughter. The Bible itself is reticent on the subject. However, the proponents of this school of thought had recourse to a few salient passages to bolster their arguments.2 Firstly, there are the words of Christ in the Sermon on the Mount, ‘Blessed are ye that weep now: for ye shall laugh’ as well as his exhortation, ‘Woe unto you that laugh now! for ye shall mourn and weep’ (Luke 6: 21; 25). These passages were continually rehearsed in support of the notion that life on earth was a vale of tears and that this was no world for Christians to be merry in. A similar point is made in Ecclesiates: ‘I said of laughter, It is mad: and of mirth, What doeth it?’ (Eccles. 2: 2). Similarly: ‘There is a time to weep: and a time to laugh’ (Eccles. 3: 4). St Paul is explicit about the practices associated

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

The Puritans and laughter

129

with laughter: ‘Neither filthiness, nor foolish talking, nor jesting, which are not convenient’ (Eph. 5: 4).3 References to laughter in the Old Testament are generally bleak: Sarah, who laughs at hearing that she will conceive at an advanced age, is rebuked, Ham, who laughs at the sight of his drunken father Noah, is punished, and the little boys who jeer at the prophet Elisha are torn to pieces. However, when Elijah jeers at the priests of Baal he is rewarded by God; they are subsequently lynched. God, too, displays a caustic sense of humour in Psalm 2: 2–4: ‘He that sitteth in the heavens shall laugh: the Lord shall have them in derision.’ The ambivalent position of religious-minded thinkers towards laughter had its roots in scriptural sources: laughter in the Bible is generally derision. It is frowned upon as a sign of the sin of pride, of a lack of humility towards the divine order. At the same time laughter is too powerful a rhetorical tool to renounce. Laughter at the enemies of (right) religion has always been applauded. A case in point is Calvin’s support for the Swiss reformer Viret when he proposed to deploy humour in his major work Disputations chrestiennes (1544), at a time when the borders around laughter were being drawn more rigidly. Calvin offered to write an epistle prefacing the tome, in which he had recourse to the Horatian injunction to delight and instruct, and came to the conclusion that ‘it is permissible to laugh at error, but good doctrine must be expounded with great seriousness’.4 Viret himself justified his strategy by drawing an analogy to the Book of Kings, enlisting Elijah’s laughter in support of the use of satire and mockery in defence of the faith. The trump card in the hands of the anti-laughter faction was the assertion that Christ never laughed. This view, usually attributed to the Church Father Chrysostom, was summed up by the Puritan William Prynne as follows, ‘So verily thou mayest oft-times find him weeping, but never laughing, no nor yet so much as slightly rejoycing with a smile. Truely no Evangelist hath made mention of any such thing.’5 Religious arguments against laughter were mainly grounded in a silence in the Scriptures rather than on explicit tenets. This was different in the case of the defenders of laughter, who had precise, authoritative injunctions to bolster their case – taken from the classics. From the very beginning of the debate, Aristotle’s thesis that laughter is a distinctive feature of humanity was cited to support the idea of laughter. The influential Puritan divine William Perkins put the case for laughter in his guidelines on proper speech, A Direction for the Government of the Tongue According to God’s Word (1593): ‘As for laughter, it may be used: otherwise God would never have given that power and faculty unto man: but the use of it must be both moderate and seldom, as sorrow for our sins is to be plentiful and often.’6 The encouragement to use laughter was hedged about with a strict catalogue of

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

130

Shakespeare and laughter

conditions: ‘Now this mirth must be joined with the fear of God . . . Secondly with compassion, and sorrow for God’s people in affliction and misery . . . Thirdly, it must be sparing and moderate . . . Fourthly, it must be void of the practice of sin.’7 In other words: irreverent laughter, scoffing at the weak, excessive laughter, and immoral laughter were to be avoided. Perkins summed up the standard position on laughter that has its roots in classical precepts. Since Aristotle and Plato had been lifted into the pantheon of Christian legislators and were accorded the honorary status of Church Fathers, it was their pronouncements on laughter that were the most influential and that breached the boundaries between humanists and reformers, Anglicans and Puritans. For the key virtue that governed behavioural norms for Puritans like Perkins was moderation – that most classical of values.8 William Perkins’s widely read guidelines on godly behaviour bear a further imprint of humanist thought: ‘Urbanity’, he claims, is ‘grace of speech’. Godliness would encourage occasions when ‘men in seemly manner use pleasantness in talk for recreation, or for such delight as is joined with profit to themselves and others’.9 Recreation was not only permissible, but enjoined by Christian thought. In his highly popular work The Whole Treatise of the Cases of Conscience (1606), Perkins uses the form of catechism to clarify questions of faith, including the query: ‘Whether recreation be lawful for a Christian man?’ The answer is an unequivocal ‘yea’ and lists two main reasons. Firstly, rest from labour and the refreshing of body and mind are admitted to be necessary. Subsequently Perkins takes issue directly with the position of hardliners such as Chrysostom. ‘Secondly, by Christian liberty, we are allowed to use the creatures of God, not only for our necessity, but also for meet and convenient delight.’ He reprimands the Church Fathers Chrysostom and Ambrose by quoting the Scriptures: ‘be not too righteous, be not too wise. Eccl. 7: 18’.10 One might sum up religious positions on laughter by concluding that neither position would deny mirthful laughter altogether. For moderate Puritans such as Perkins, recreation is not only permissible but worthy of encouragement. It is excessive laughter that is proscribed. But neither would Chrysostom banish laughter: ‘I speak not to take away laughter altogether’, he claims, but to call for a different, reformed type of laughter: ‘Let us laugh I pray you and be merry so we sin not.’11 While jeering at the weak is deplored as a sign of pride and a lack of Christian charity, both sides are eager to harness the satirical power of mockery. As Perkins puts it with regard to jesting, ‘two kinds of jesting are tolerable: the one is moderate and sparing mirth, in the use of things indifferent . . . The second is that which the Prophets used, when they jested against wicked persons, yet so, as withall they sharply reproved their sins.’12 The key difference between the two positions lies in the phrase ‘things indifferent’. Here

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

The Puritans and laughter

131

a brief digression into defining the term Puritan might be helpful. Despite the later misuse of the term to denote a circumscribed group of people, for Elizabethans the term Puritan (or precisian) simply denoted ‘the hotter sort of protestants’.13 The difference between Anglicans (an anachronistic term) and Puritans was not doctrinal. Puritanism was a movement with the aim of reforming the Church from within and improving social discipline, which laid particular emphasis on the notion of predestination. The main disagreement lay in attitudes to ‘indifferent’ matters. Conformists accepted matters not expressly prohibited in the Scriptures (adiaphora) as permissible so long as they were not repugnant to the Bible. For extreme Puritans, the Bible was the only authority acceptable.14 This would later lead to friction between the monarchy and the godly, when James I published his Book of Sports in 1618 to encourage the revival of rural festivity. An outcry ensued – religious reformers saw this as a direct undermining of their efforts at reforming social manners. But the borderline between the different positions taken up at different points remains blurred throughout this period. The difference was one of degree, not of kind. What the moderate Perkins might tolerate as indifferent would no longer be acceptable for a hardliner such as Prynne. Whatever the precepts governing laughter, the reality of religion as a social practice was quite different. In the medieval period religious practice was suffused with laughter. Carnival forms of mirth flourished during religious festivals. During the French Feast of Fools, for instance, lower clergy usurped the roles of bishops and, dressed with vestments worn backwards and armed with bread and sausages (or sometimes excrement) performed a parody of the Holy Supper and a liturgy punctuated by the braying of asses. During Easter the so-called Easter laughter (risus pascalis) was evoked to celebrate the resurrection of Christ. To this end the clergy would regularly crack obscene jokes and tell funny stories. Even monks were not immune. The Rule of St Benedict, from the ninth century onwards almost universally accepted as the set of norms regulating monastic life, expressly warns against the dangers of laughter and idleness. Nevertheless, collections of jokes were compiled by monks (including jokes about monks), known as joca monacorum.15 And religious drama was unimaginable without comic interludes (Mrs Noah chastising her husband and the like). It was Erasmus who led the crusade for the reformation of manners on the continent, taking up arms against a sea of superstition and vice. In addition to pride, mirthful laughter had always been targeted for fostering the sins of idleness or sloth as well as lust. It is significant that most attacks on laughter are to be found in connection with antitheatrical critique. This is true as much for Chrysostom and Tertullian as for Elizabethan critics of the the theatre. While the arguments are not new, what is augmented is the virulence of the attacks.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

132

Shakespeare and laughter

The renewed assault on theatrical mirth is intimately bound up with the emergence of a commercial theatre in the 1570s. In England the Reformation had been a political fact ever since the Act of Supremacy of 1534, but it was only in the 1570s, with the second Reformation (which began with the restoration of Protestantism under Elizabeth I) well under way, that what Patrick Collinson has called the cultural revolution of the Reformation took place. This was marked by what he terms a shift from iconoclasm to iconophobia.16 While campaigns to smash idols had been orchestrated at regular intervals in the past, local communities were often careful to whitewash their religious murals only lightly (as in the church at Stratford) and to preserve their roods and ornate vestments secretly – to be ready for the next policy switch in religious affairs.17 What now took place was the wholesale invasion of popular culture by the spectre of idolatry. Religious drama was forbidden, popular music was treated with suspicion, and the pictorial arts were increasingly scrutinized for idolatrous implications. While the Protestant standard work, Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, had been copiously illustrated in mid-century, ‘by 1600 to be found in possession of a picture (almost any picture) was to be a suspected papist’.18 For Michael O’Connell, what is at stake is the trickle-down effect of the Eucharist controversy into popular culture. The Eucharist debate had raged about whether the sacred, the Real Presence, could inhere in indifferent material objects like bread and wine, as the old faith had claimed, or whether the ritual of transubstantiation was merely memorialist, a reminder of that original moment of the divine but in itself without divine power (as in the most radical reformist position). As is well known, the Anglican Church adopted the Calvinist solution, which combined the elements of memorialism with the belief in an actual divine emanation. But the general law propounded by Calvin and thundered from the pulpits was that the physical portrayal of the sacred was idolatry – the finite cannot contain the infinite (finitum non est capax infiniti). ‘The real issue’, O’Connell sums up, ‘is representation’.19 For if it is impossible to portray the sacred, any attempt to do so would be seen as lying. Feigning or counterfeiting became the keywords in attacks on the arts in general and the theatre in particular. The well-known roster of sins followed: through its appeal to the senses, the theatre distracted the viewer from bending his or her thoughts to contemplate God. The theatre fostered carnal pleasure and idleness, drawing people (particularly apprentices, avid theatregoers) away from their work. Acting itself was an unlawful vocation, and boy actors transgressed the Deuteronomic injunction against cross-dressing. What complicates any easy binary between Puritanism and the theatre is the fact that it is facile to equate hostility to the arts with Protestantism per se. Zwingli, the man who banished organs from the churches in Zurich (they were

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

The Puritans and laughter

133

replaced only in the nineteenth century), was a gifted musician who thoroughly approved of music for secular purposes.20 In fact, only someone exceptionally sensitive to the sensuous appeal of the arts would fear their power to distract humanity from contemplating the divine. Similarly, it is reductive to see antitheatricalism as a Protestant or even a Puritan characteristic. Early Tudor Protestants were eager to recruit the power of the theatre for propaganda purposes. Calvin himself was not averse to playing and approved the performance of numerous secular and religious plays. The leading reformer John Bale was both a prolific playwright and a performer – as was Theodor Beza, Calvin’s successor in Geneva. Eminent aristocratic patrons in the early Elizabethan era supported both prominent preachers and troupes of players – among them the Earls of Leicester and Warwick.21 Even certain playing companies were characterized by a militant Protestant stance, such as the rivals to the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, the Admiral’s Men. Will Kemp, the star clown in Shakespeare’s company, was known for his populist Protestantism.22 For Collinson, three stages in the vexed relation between Protestantism and the arts are discernible. In the first phase the Reformation aimed to appropriate the power of cultural practices for its own purpose. This was the stage that saw strong Protestant support for theatre companies. In the second phase (which he dates from the late 1570s) cultural forms were radically rejected as idolatrous, a distraction from God. In the third phase a Protestant aesthetic emerges, exemplified in a rich Protestant literary culture. The relation to laughter in this period takes a somewhat different trajectory. Strictures on laughter were neither a novel phenomenon nor significantly new in substance. What is new is the volume of the assault on theatrical mirth. The large-scale rejection of cultural practices by reformed religion led to an early form of separation of the secular from the sacred. This was emphatically fostered by Elizabethan injunctions that threatened punishment for the treatment of religious or political matters on stage. Laughter was displaced from the serious realms of religion and politics. Henceforth the sacred would be separated from the profane.23 William Perkins is emphatic on this point: ‘It is no safe course to play with holy things . . . it is not meet, convenient, or laudable for men to move occasion of laughter in Sermons.24 And Francis Bacon sums up the new norms with the words, ‘As for jest, there be certain things, which ought to be privileged from it; namely, religion, matters of state, great persons, any man’s present business of importance, and any case that deserveth pity.’25 Nor did this remain a Protestant feature. The Counter-Reformation was anxious to adopt many of the precepts of reformed religion. Gian Matteo Giberti, Bishop of Verona, condemned preachers who told ‘ridiculous stories and old wives’ tales in the manner of buffoons’ and made their congregation roar with laughter.26 It was not until the twentieth

134

Shakespeare and laughter

century and the triumph of American cultural norms of humour that this changed, and humour reinvaded the realms of politics and religion. But that is another story altogether.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Antitheatrical attacks on mirth and laughter I shall focus on only a few selected examples from the body of antitheatrical literature. One of the best-known works was Anatomy of the Abuses in England by Philip Stubbes (or Stubbs), which was first published in 1583 and went through four editions in two years. Stubbes was a Puritan, and was slandered as a lascivious hypocrite by Thomas Nashe in his satirical Almond for a Parrat (1589).27 Another well-known antitheatrical critic was Stephen Gosson, who later made a career in the established Church and a name for himself as a critic of Puritans. However, their arguments vary only in a few details. In their writings both Stubbes and Gosson reflect the shift towards a more dogmatic position, as in the move from iconoclasm to iconophobia. From a call for reform of the theatre both turn to a rejection of the theatre as too corrupt to redeem. In the Preface to the Reader in the first edition of Anatomy of Abuses, Stubbes insists: ‘I would not have thee so to take me, as though my speeches tended to the overthrow and utter disliking of all kind of exercises in general: that is nothing my simple meaning. But the particular abuses which are crept into every one of these several exercises is the only thing which I think worthy of reprehension.’28 He is anxious to point out that it is only the abuses of cultural practices that he attacks, not the practices themselves. He goes on to laud certain ‘honest & chaste plays’ as well as tragedies of great antiquity that are ‘very commendable exercises’. These plays fulfil the classical brief to aid instruction by displaying a good example. They serve the proper ends: ‘for the godly recreation of the mind, for the good example of life, for the avoiding of that which is evil, and learning of that which is good’ (xi). In sum, ‘take away the abuses, the things in themselves are not evil, being used as instruments to godliness, not made as spurs unto vice. There is nothing so good but it may be abused; yet because of the abuses, I am not so strict that I would have the things themselves removed, no more that I would meat and drink, because it is abused, utterly be taken away’ (xii). What might appear at first sight as a liberal position is actually a thoroughly orthodox Calvinist stance. Charles Taylor has drawn attention to the shift in ethical ideals initiated by the reform of religion. 29Aristotelian ideas of higher activities (contemplation of the order of things, participation in the polity) are gradually displaced from notions of the good life, which is increasingly

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

The Puritans and laughter

135

associated with what he terms the affirmation of ordinary life. Aspects of human life such as labour, production, marriage and family life are now elevated to the position of ethical goods. Thus asceticism was not only frowned upon but an insult to God, a presumptuous scorning of his gifts. And to assume that we could affect election in any way through good works was the epitome of presumption. Not works but faith (sola fides) determined human salvation; God’s ways were inscrutable. In other words: by rejecting all worldly pleasure we succumbed to the heinous sin of pride. ‘God hath given us Temporals to enjoy’, as Puritan preachers enjoined their flock repeatedly. But it was equally pernicious to become absorbed in the pleasures of life for their own sake. A detached enjoyment of God’s gifts was what was called for, linked to a constant awareness of God’s order behind material things. It was not the use of things in itself which was evil but the deviant purpose in using them. As the Puritan divine Joseph Hall exhorted his listeners, ‘God loveth adverbs; and cares not how good, but how well.’30 At this point it becomes clear why the music-lover Zwingli banished church music – it was not the thing in itself, but its wrong use (distraction from God) which was reprehensible. Similarly, it becomes clear why Perkins would condemn scornful laughter but endorse biting satire (say, of papists). In the reformed position on mirthful laughter, the same principles are endlessly reiterated. Recreational activities were acceptable if they were instructive and conducive to the glory of God. The Elizabethan bishop Gervase Babington defended jesting with the words: ‘if it increase our knowledge, increase our zeal and increase good graces in us, then like it, and spare not, and cherish such an one’. On playing and games in general, he rejects the authorities that condemn all play. Instead, he argues, to cut us off from all recreation by any play (be it without offence of any spoken) indeed they cannot. For we are men, and no Angels, and as men in this world we must walk our course, subject to dullness, and weariness, even in good things, and we must refresh that feeble weakness of ours by lawful and allowed comforts. Which I so term, because I am assured that the word of God condemneth not all our play, and the corrupt constitution of our bodies, together with the dullness of our minds, require some play. 31

Recreation was a human exigency. By his creation of humankind, God implicitly condoned our need for recreation. Angels, of course, were known never to laugh. Laughter was a sign of our fallen state, but also a mark of our unique position in God’s creation. Accordingly, laughter was permissible if it served the right end. Still, the bishop urges moderation: ‘We must play but little.’ However, some forms of play were simply beyond the pale. In his second

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

136

Shakespeare and laughter

edition Stubbes tosses out the Preface entirely. His book, which is framed in the form of a dialogue between one Spudeus and one Philoponus, relates the travels of the former in the land of Ailgna (a thinly veiled allusion to Anglia or England). It is a scathing report on what is foul in the state of England. Manners and morals are entirely corrupt. His special venom is reserved for gorgeous apparel, especially if it violated the sumptuary laws. This was increasingly the case with the rise of a class of merchants and tradesmen who had prospered in the burgeoning Elizabethan market economy. Other abuses that Stubbes singles out are gluttony, drunkenness, covetousness, usury, swearing, Lords of Misrule, May games, church ales, Sabbath-breaking, bear-baiting, plays, fairs, cockfighting, dicing, and football (a ‘murthering game’, ungodly) (184). Dancing and music, he admits, are approved of in Biblical and classical authorities, but at present in Ailgna they are an abomination, an incitement to wantonness and uncleanness. Religious drama is savaged for its intermingling of comic matter with the sacred: ‘For at no hand it is not lawful to mix scurrility with divinity’ (141). But plays on profane matters are no better. Using a metaphor of which he appears to be particularly fond, Stubbes claims all plays ‘are quite contrary to the Word of grace, and sucked out of the Devils teats to nourish us in idolatry, heathenry, and sin’ (142). Stubbes goes on to declaim: There is no mischief which these plays maintain not. For do they not nourish idleness? and otia dant vitia, idleness is the Mother of vice . . . Do they not maintain bawdry, infinite foolery, & renew the remembrance of heathen idolatry? Do they not induce whoredom and uncleanness? Nay, are they not rather plain devourers of maidenly virginity and chastity? For proof whereof, but mark the flocking and running to theatres & curtains, daily and hourly, night and day, time and tide, to see plays and interludes; where such wanton gestures, such bawdy speeches, such laughing and fleering, such kissing and bussing, such clipping and culling, such winking and glancing of wanton eyes, and the like, is used, as is wonderful to behold.

It is not merely the content of plays that corrupts morals. As a site of mirth, the theatre is a hotbed of iniquity and depravity, as Stubbes spells out with relish. It foments sexual licentiousness among the audience and even breeds unspeakable vices, as he hints darkly: ‘Then, these godly pageants being done, every mate sorts to his mate, every one brings another homeward of their way very friendly, and in their secret conclaves (covertly) they play the sodomites, or worse.’ Stubbes pours scorn on the classical defence of the theatre as a medium that fulfils the Horatian injunction to combine delight with instruction. With grim irony, he advises that ‘if you will learn to deceive; . . . if you will learn to jest,

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

The Puritans and laughter

137

laugh, and fleer, to grin, to nod, . . . to blaspheme both Heaven and Earth’, the theatre is just the right place to learn these arts (144–5). The question of edification and the purpose served by the theatre will become a focal point in the antitheatrical debate. In the meantime the shift from an appeal for reform to a call to banish plays altogether is clearly perceptible. Writing at the tail-end of the period at issue, in 1633, William Prynne sets out to prove in a bloated polemic of over a thousand pages that effeminate mixed dancing, dicing, stage plays, lascivious pictures, wanton fashions, face-painting, health-drinking, long hair, lovelocks, periwigs, women’s curling, powdering, and cutting of their hair, bonfires, New Year’s gifts, Maygames, amorous pastorals, lascivious effeminate music, excessive laughter, luxurious disorderly Christmas-keeping, mummeries, with sundry suchlike vanities which the world now dotes on, as laudable, good, and Christian are mere sinful, wicked, unChristian pastimes, vanities, cultures . . .32

Among the unlawful concomitants of plays that he lists, ‘profuse, lascivious laughter’ is included. By this time it was a commonplace that the kind of laughter that the theatre evoked was not precisely what Perkins had in mind when he encouraged recreation ‘for meet and convenient delight’. Prynne shrewdly notes the collaborative relationship between stage and audience when he includes applause in the list of sins fostered by the theatre: ‘the public theatrical applauses which attend these interludes are evil’. Applause is a mark of approval by the audience for the performance and encourages the players in their depraved ways. Applause defiles people’s hands and hearts, which should be employed in prayer to God. Both applause and laughter reveal the complicity of the audience in the crimes committed on stage: ‘this profuse theatrical laughter doth give a public approbation to all the ribaldry and profaneness that is either personated or perpetrated on the stage, and so makes these laughers deeply guilty of it’.33 The audience colludes with the players in perpetrating the sins of the theatre. It is interesting to note that before the Reformation the Church had sought to harness dancing, music and popular mirth within the framework of religious festivity. The attack on manners and morals by reformers implied not only an assault on the old faith but also a way of setting the godly apart from the old way of life.34 But a new note is also discernible. Dancing and music were, of course, essential skills for courtiers. By the time Prynne launched his offensive on the theatre, attacks against courtly forms of mirth were political dynamite. Prynne accordingly had his ears cropped, mainly for implicitly impugning the character of the queen, who was known for her fondness for acting in court masques.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

138

Shakespeare and laughter

Antitheatricalist writers had often dabbled in the theatre business themselves – Gosson was both a playwright and a player. Rather than seeing the flood of invective let loose on the theatre as the venting of emotions of outrage and indignation at the corrupt state of the stage, the historian Peter Lake has argued recently that the antitheatrical polemic needs to be seen in terms of the eruption of fierce competition for the same popular audiences. The pulpit, the press and the theatre might be regarded as incipient mass media fighting for a share of the same market. He sees Gosson and his kind as hack writers in a protoGrub Street world of cheap print. ‘Feeding off the same nascent mass market for cheap print and cheap thrills, for entertainment and edification, the denizens of the popular stage and of Grub Street were engaged in a struggle with the godly clergy both for the same audience or at least for massively overlapping audiences and for great swathes of the same cultural, moral and intellectual terrain.’35 It is certainly true that many writers set the Church and the theatre in diametrical opposition to each other. ‘Do they not draw the people from hearing the word of God, from godly lectures and sermons? For you shall have them flock thither, thick & threefold, when the church of God shall be bare & empty’, Stubbes points out indignantly (144). Puritan preachers and players competed for the same audience. Accordingly, preachers were not averse to picking up a trick of the trade or two from the theatre. Bryan Crockett points out that ‘like the playwrights, the preachers employ a whole arsenal of rhetorical devices in the service of effective performance’.36 For all their inveighing against theatricality, the Puritans were heavily invested in producing a convincing show. There were star preachers who could be depended upon to draw a crowd, and printed tracts that were bestsellers. Puritan rituals were often mocked as theatrical (by implication, fraudulent) by critics, particularly the public rituals of confession and exhibitions of self-scrutiny. Even their patently inconspicuous demeanour and plain clothing bore the marks of a performative staging of antitheatricality. What this implies is that not only do we have to be careful about the alleged motivations of the antitheatrical polemicists, we also need to take their descriptions of the corrupt morals of the playgoers with a grain of salt. Certainly they seem to assume that respectable citizens were among the audience of the theatre – why else would they try so hard to dissuade the godly from going to plays? Even after decades of antitheatrical propaganda, in 1633, William Prynne admits, ‘some godly Christians do commonly resort to playhouses, (which I cannot believe) yet these are few in number’ and goes on to deride them as naive (‘babes in years, as well as in grace’).37 A closer look at the contents of the antitheatrical pamphlets reveals that they circulate incessently around anxieties linked to the rise of a market economy:

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

The Puritans and laughter

139

conspicuous display, greed, pride in material goods, the gratification of desires, and social mobility. They continually warn against the dangers of rising above one’s station, of gratifying one’s vanity through the purchase of commodities. These anxieties focused on the metropolis, which increasingly took on the attributes of a cesspool of sin – an image that was picked up and continued to circulate in theatrical discourse, particularly in the genre of the city comedy. But it was above all the theatre that exemplified the changes that an emerging market culture brought in its wake. ‘In these years, the theatre became a laboratory of and for the new social relations of agricultural and commercial capitalism’, JeanChristophe Agnew has claimed. He concludes: ‘Without an appreciation of the theatre’s constitutive and exploratory powers in this regard, it is correspondingly difficult to understand the violence and antipathy visited on the stage.’38 For antitheatrical writers, the theatre epitomized the fatal attractions of conspicuous consumption, the sway of commodities and of commercialized sex.39 The stage did more than simply reflect the changes – it shaped these new exchange relations. The practice of theatre going was grounded on the basis of commercial exchange relations, not on customary bonds of obligation or on a stable hierarchical order. The community that was constituted in the theatre was a community of pleasure. And the main commodity purveyed was mirth. The purpose of playing The conflict between Puritan pamphleteers and preachers and the theatre were exacerbated by the conditions of a market economy. The Puritans were both responding to economic change and themselves bound up in the emerging economic culture. A key issue that divided both sides was the question of the function of the theatre. Their rivalry is played out over the ideal of edification. A look at the influential texts by Stephen Gosson might help clarify the matters at stake. Gosson was a poor scholar, the son of a joiner, who went up to Oxford but left without graduating. He joined the army of University wits (Marlowe, Lyly, Greene, Nashe, and others) ekeing out a precarious living in London, writing plays, pamphlets, and occasional literature – and in fierce competition for preferment by a patron. Gosson dedicated his Schoole of Abuse (1578) to Sidney, who reacted with scorn. It is unlikely that Sidney will have written his famous treatise in direct response to a hack like Gosson. Nevertheless, Gosson’s screed might well have precipitated Sidney’s The Defence of Poesy, circulating in manuscript long before its posthumous publication in 1595. In Gosson’s An Apology of the Schoole of Abuse, in which he takes issue with his detractors, above all Lodge, a shift to a more hardline stand is already visible.40 But it is in his Playes Confuted

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

140

Shakespeare and laughter

in Five Actions (1582) that the change is clearly articulated. This work was dedicated to Walsingham, a well-known supporter of Puritan sentiments, and no longer calls for reform of the theatre, but for wholesale abolition of plays, for ‘Plays are the inventions of the devil, the offerings of idolatry, the pomp of worldlings, the blossoms of vanity, the root of apostasy, the food of iniquity, riot, and adultery, detest them’.41 Incredible as it might appear, Playes Confuted in Five Actions marks a decisive improvement in style from his earlier Schoole of Abuse. He has (largely) jettisoned laboured euphuism for a clearer mode, setting forth his arguments with Ramist logic. Significantly, he also abandons most of the classical authorities of Schoole of Abuse in favour of patristic sources, drawing mainly on the antitheatrical invective of Tertullian and Augustine. In Schoole of Abuse his basic premise is that, while good art instructs us in virtue, bad art corrupts. The danger lies in the fact that art always appeals to the senses, not to reason – and the seductive appeal of the senses might well subjugate reason. For this argument, of course, he finds ample support in Plato’s suspicion of poetry and banishment of poets from the ideal republic. In a letter to the Lord Mayor he recommends specific laws to curb the abuses of the theatre, and in a letter addressed to the Gentlewomen Citizens of London he urges voluntary self-control in going to plays. However, at this point he still admits that there are good plays to be seen. His account is laced with the nostalgic evocation of a golden age, when men and women pursued manly sports such as shooting and darting, running and wrestling, instead of indulging in effeminate leisure activities (plays, music, dancing, and the like).42 It is in Playes Confuted in Five Actions that he hardens his stance. Here the proposition is ‘that stage plays are not to be suffered in a Christian commonweal’ (150). This is based on the assertion that plays are creations of the devil. They result in idolatry because they were begun in pagan rites, consecrated to the honour of heathen gods. But most of his energy is expended in refuting the idea that the theatre can instruct. All it can teach us is pointless and immoderate laughter. ‘Comedies so tickle our senses with a pleasanter vein, that they make us lovers of laughter, and pleasure, without any mean, both foes to temperance, what schooling is this?’ (160–1). Here direct echoes of Sidney’s definition of laughter as consisting in ‘only a scornful tickling’ (113) are to be heard. Indeed, Gosson’s entire argument is designed to refute The Defence of Poesy. He proceeds to punctuate his text with the rhetorical question, ‘What learn you by that?’ and sums up, ‘no manner of goodness can be learned at a play, partly because the best is a mixture of good and evil . . . where both are proffered, the hereditary corruption of our nature taketh the worst and leaveth the best’ (162).

The Puritans and laughter

141

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Clearly, his argument is sound, and is grounded on impeccable classical and religious authorities. Plato’s distrust of our reason when faced with the seduction of the senses is as decisive for Gosson’s case as is the patristic stress (renewed in the Reformation) on our fallen nature which draws us towards lower instincts rather than higher. Irrefutable is his reasoning that, if the theatre teaches you virtue, could anyone please explain why the players were such corrupt specimens? If any goodness were to be learned at plays it is likely that the players themselves which commit every syllable to memory should profit most, because that as every man learneth so he liveth; and as his study is, such are his manners; but the daily experience of their behaviour, sheweth, that they reap no profit by the discipline themselves; how then can they put us in any good hope to be instructed thereby when we have the sight of such lessons, but an hour or two as they study and practise every day, yet are never the better. (163)

Players were exposed to the salutary effects of plays every day. Theirs was a test case to prove or disprove the instructive value of plays. But one look at their depraved state would serve to dismantle the belief that the theatre teaches virtue. The classical view of comedy posited its function as imitatio vitae, speculum consuetudinis, imago veritatis (the schoolmistress of life, the looking glass of manners, the image of truth), a definition attributed to Cicero and echoed by Hamlet: ‘the purpose of playing is . . . to hold as ’twere the mirror up to Nature, to show Virtue her feature, Scorn her image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure’ (3.2.20–4). This idea is hard to uphold in face of the lethal arguments Gosson delivers, as he notes triumphantly. Plays are a tissue of lies, and acting is counterfeiting, a parody of God’s creation of man. Beyond the pale are boy actors who dress up as women and thus transgress the Deuteronomic injunction against wearing the garments of the opposite sex. Gosson pontificates on the two sorts of delight, carnal and spiritual. The former is bound up with sensual appetite, the latter consists in meditating on the life to come. The laughter that the theatre evokes is directly associated with the use of the senses and detrimental to the sway of reason: But comedies make our delight exceed, for at them many times we laugh so extremely, that striving to bridle ourselves, we cannot, therefore Plato affirmeth that great laughter breedeth a great change, & the old proverb peradventure rose of this, much laughter is the cognisance of a fool: where such excess of laughter bursteth out that we cannot hold it, there is no temperance, for the time; where no temperance is, there is no wisdom, nor use of reason; when we show ourselves void both of reason, and wisdom, what are we then to be thought but fools? (186)

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

142

Shakespeare and laughter

Excessive laughter is a sign of intemperance and folly. And precisely this is what the theatre engenders. For, as the former playwright correctly notes, laughter is a social affair, and nothing is so infectious as the laughter of a community whose only raison d’être is to indulge in mirth: ‘in the theaters they generally take up a wonderful laughter, and shout altogether with one voice, when they see some notable cozenage practised, or some sly conveyance of bawdry brought out of Italy’ (164). By laughing the audience signals its complicity in the depravity presented on stage. We come closer to the nub of the issue when we look at Sidney’s arguments in favour of poesy (by which he refers to art in general). Without explicitly referring to Gosson, Sidney lists the four main charges made against poetry and refutes them one by one. The first complaint relates to idleness – poetry is a waste of time. In reply, Sidney points to his general thesis that poetry instructs as well as delights. The second accusation is the common one of lying, a point that Gosson, too, raises. Here Sidney makes his famous slippery refutation, one that has led to endless speculation as to the true meaning of his words: ‘Now, for the poet, he nothing affirms, and therefore never lieth’ (103). The poet deals with the realms of fiction, not reality, and thus cannot be accused of being a liar. The third charge is concerned with the allegation of seduction. Here Sidney’s rejoinder is clearly aimed at the hack pamphleteer (to whom he airily alludes with the phrase ‘they say’). With aristocratic disdain he refuses to deny this charge, claiming that little minds can construe everything in an unsavoury sense: it is not poetry that ‘abuseth man’s wit, but that man’s wit abuseth poetry’ (104). For dirty minds, he hints, love of beauty can be a ‘beastly fault’, and the name of Love be besmirched by association with lust, vanity, and scurrility. But: ‘shall the abuse of a thing make the right use odious?’ (104). It is undeniable that there are abuses of art, but as a medicine abused might prove poisonous, or the abuse of law lead to the incitement of crime, the abuse of a practice is not in itself a valid ground to attack it. As for Gosson’s nostalgic vision of a world of masculine action, not imagination, Sidney ironically wonders when the golden age is supposed to have taken place: ‘I think scarcely Sphinx can tell, since no memory is so ancient that hath the precedence of poetry’ (105). There has always been poetry; indeed, we are shaped by the stories we read and hear. Alexander the Great might not have been the hero he was had he not been inspired by the tales of Homer that always accompanied him on his travels (106). And with reference to the last indictment brought against poetry, namely Plato’s strictures on poets, after some dazzling rhetorical pirouetting (including a sly dig at Plato’s homosexuality) Sidney coolly recruits him for his cause, claiming that it was the abuse of poetry, not poetry itself, that Plato opposed. Thus Sidney brilliantly devastates the ‘low-creeping objections’ of

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

The Puritans and laughter

143

‘wrong-speakers’, alluding to hacks like Gosson only in passing when he deplores the fallen state of the arts in England (108). Affairs have come to such a pass that ‘base men with servile wits . . . think it enough if they can be rewarded of the printer’ (109). The only purpose these mediocre writers serve is to provide a target for Sidney’s sparkling wit. Accordingly, he excoriates their pathetic style, with its foreign terms, strained alliterations and weak metaphors. Their writing is riddled with ‘so far-fetched words, they may seem monsters, but must seem strangers, to any poor Englishman; another time with coursing of a letter, as if they were bound to follow the method of a dictionary; another time, with figures and flowers extremely winter-starved’ (113). True poets would rather ‘suppress the outflowing of their wit, than, by publishing them, to be accounted knights of the same order’ (109). Sidney, that ideal courtier of his age, the very model of grace and wit, would scarcely wish to be associated with unsavoury Grub Street denizens like Gosson. He makes one last wry self-mocking sally at the very end of his treatise, when he gestures towards Gosson’s dedication of School of Abuse to himself. In a mockserious peroration he urges that poetry should be taken more seriously in England – and so, too, should poets. ‘Thus doing, your name shall flourish in the printers’ shops; thus doing, you shall be of kin to many a poetical preface . . .’ Yet for poetry-haters, those who ‘have so earth-creeping a mind that it cannot lift itself up to look to the sky of Poetry’ he has only the poets’ curse: ‘when you die, your memory die from the earth for want of an epitaph’ (116–17). It is Sidney we remember today, and not Gosson (although New Historicism has given the latter a new lease of fame), but the fact remains that Gosson has the better arguments. Sidney never actually gets around to answering the charge that if poetry can teach virtue, might it not also teach vice? Defences of the theatre were all built on the precarious foundation of the edifying power of art – as was, indeed, Sidney’s Defence of Poesy. Theatrical mirth did not merely incite frivolous laughter as an end in itself. There was always a purpose to the mirth – in the case of laughter, that of a social corrective, an indispensable weapon to combat folly. Sidney rehearses the standard line of argument: ‘the Comedy is an imitation of the common errors of our life, which he representeth in the most ridiculous and scornful sort that may be, so as it is impossible that any beholder can be content to be such a one’ (98). As we have seen, according to reformed thought it was not the thing in itself, but the right use that was at stake – the awareness that even trivial objects and pleasures had their purpose in glorifying God. It was the cause, it was the cause that counted. By dismantling the instructive function of theatrical mirth, all that remained was delight – pleasure for its own sake. In other words: laughter – and by extension the theatre – served no serious purpose at all. It taught you no useful

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

144

Shakespeare and laughter

lessons for reality. And this is precisely what the antitheatrical critics were implying. Sidney ignores the ramifications of their invective – for the simple reason that he is not really concerned with reality. It is not fortuitous that Sidney’s Defence has been seen as laying the (admittedly equivocal) foundation for a radically new concept of aesthetics.43 To be sure, the definition of art that he proffers is as hackneyed as it gets, a gallimaufry of Aristotle, Plutarch, and Horace: ‘Poesy therefore is an art of imitation, . . . to speak metaphorically, a speaking picture – with this end, to teach and delight’ (86). But the key aesthetic insight that Sidney elaborates in his treatise fundamentally undermines the didactic legitimation of art that he propounds. For what is radically new is Sidney’s claim that the poet ‘goeth hand in hand with nature, not enclosed within the narrow warrant of her gift, but freely ranging only within the zodiac of his own wit . . . Her world is brazen, the poets only deliver a golden’ (85). With these words Sidney lays bare his Neoplatonic credo. Art bore only a tangential link to mundane reality. It was a means of creating new worlds, of stretching our creativity to the utmost reaches of our ‘zodiac’. By creating art, humanity partook of the Neoplatonic God of emanation, the source of all creative power. The artist had the vocation not to reflect reality as it was, but to reveal the ideals (the Platonic Ideas) behind things. For Sidney, the creative potency of the poet served as evidence for the power of the divine. In Neoplatonic thought, the human being is a kind of god. Pico della Mirandola’s famous Oration De dignitate hominis (‘On the Dignity of Man’) delivers the manifesto for this conception. God addresses Adam as follows: Neither a fixed abode nor a form that is thine alone nor any function peculiar to thyself have we given thee, Adam, to the end that according to thy longing and according to thy judgement thou mayest have and possess what abode, what form, what functions thou thyself shalt desire . . . Thou, constrained by no limits, in accordance with thine own free will, in whose hand We have placed thee, shalt ordain for thyself the limits of thy nature . . . as though the maker and molder of thyself, thou mayest fashion thyself in whatever shape thou shalt prefer. 44

Humanity has not only unlimited creative powers, but owing to our free will the ability to fashion our own destiny. It was precisely this idea of humanity’s exalted creative skill that so troubled reformed thought and that lay at the core of the accusations of idolatry levelled at all forms of art (including the theatre). As Calvin realized, in images people created their own fantasies about God. They did not ‘apprehend God as he offers himself, but imagine him as they have fashioned him in their own presumption . . . they are not worshiping God but a figment and dream of their own heart’.45 As Calvin noted, Neoplatonic

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

The Puritans and laughter

145

humans were competing with God. It was not merely rivalry in the emerging leisure industry that fuelled the virulence of the antitheatrical critique. At its heart lay rival world-views. The reformed view of humanity stressed our depraved state and our natural propensity towards evil. Humanity’s task was self-discovery, not self-creation.46 By contrast, in every single performance and in every single play, the theatre celebrated our powers of creation. Despite the rhetoric of its defenders, the theatre was not primarily about didacticism. Instead, it was in the business of creating illusions, of fashioning new worlds. And in the last analysis, the theatrical plot always circled around the efficacy of humanity’s imaginative skills. The competition between religious reformers and the stage was rooted in a competition for control of our imagination. No longer willing to harness the stage for religious purposes, antitheatrical reformers sought to discredit the instructive function of the theatre that classical authorities had propounded. In similar fashion, all forms of art were now no longer accepted as conducive to worship, but termed a distraction from contemplation of the divine. Ironically, as a result the groundwork for the notion of the autonomy of art was laid – a notion based on Sidney’s theory of art, however much he might stress the didactic function of art. By rejecting art as a conduit for religion, the reformers precipitated the idea of the aesthetic as an independent realm. To be sure, after an iconophobic phase a Protestant style of art flourished in the Protestant part of the continent. But there also emerged a sphere of secular cultural practices – secular music or visual arts that focused on human individuality.47 The birth of the idea of the aesthetic as a value in itself can be traced back to the war about representation in the early modern period, a war that left its traces in the Shakespearean theatre. The theatre fights back By 1588 the Elizabethan Puritan movement had reached a crisis, induced by its increasingly vocal demand for the introduction of Presbyterianism in ecclesiastical governance.48 With Archbishop Grindal’s fall from grace in 1577 radical tendencies among the Puritans gained in influence. In 1586 the ‘grand design’ of a secret Presbyterian movement was initiated which rejected wordly authority altogether. It met with aggressive resistance on the part of an anti-Puritan alliance comprising Archbiship Whitgift, Sir Christopher Hatton, and the queen. On the theological front Richard Hooker began the project of outlining the via media of the Anglican Church in his Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity (which appeared in 1594–7). The establishment launched a crackdown against Puritan dissent, leading to a censorship of Puritan presses. It was a time when agents provocateurs ‘haunted the booksellers’ stalls in St Paul’s church yard, engaging the clergy who

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

146

Shakespeare and laughter

came to buy books in conversation, and pretending a sympathy for the cause’.49 It was against this backdrop that an underground movement of pamphlet warfare began, signed by one Martin Marprelate. Seven tracts appeared between October 1588 and June 1589 and they precipitated an unprecedented hunt for the pamphleteer on the part of the state. Marprelate was never conclusively identified, although Collinson attributes the authorship of the texts to a consortium of radicals, including the radical parliamentarians George Carleton and Job Throckmorton.50 But before the underground presses were detected and smashed and the suspects tortured, an interesting development from the point of view of literary historians took place: the anti-Martin backlash in pamphlets and plays that was funded by the state and which dominated the scene in London for the next few months. This flood of satirical invective in the form of mutual abuse (based on the traditional custom of flyting or railing) between Marprelate supporters and detractors would have decisive implications for Elizabethan culture. One of them was the emergence of a public sphere created by the press, where incipient polemic journalism made an appeal to a newly constituted public opinion.51 Another was the invention of the stage Puritan.52 The Marprelate tracts were an attack on episocal greed, hypocrisy, and tyranny in the form of the satirical pamphlet and the libel. There was nothing new in the attacks, which recycled critique of the Church establishment that had been current among Puritan groups for decades. New about Marprelate was the fact that he was funny. His vitriol was larded with ribald, libellous humour. ‘What was different about Marprelate, however, was the playful, scurrilous, anecdotal and intensely personal way in which he attacked the establishment – in short, very funny pamphlets, clearly aimed at a popular (i.e. socially mixed and at least partly – though one clearly did not need to be a member of the lower orders to find Marprelate funny – plebeian audience).’53 In a programmatic apologia Martin defends his rhetorical strategy with the following words: Perceiving the humours of men in these times (especially of those that are in any place) to be given to mirth, I took that course. I might lawfully do it. Ay, for jesting is lawful by circumstances, even in the greatest matters. The circumstances of time, place and persons urged me thereunto. I never profaned the word in any jest. Other mirth I used as a covert, wherein I would bring the truth into light. The Lord being the author both of mirth and gravity, is it not lawful, in itself, for the truth to use either of these ways when the circumstances do make it lawful?54

His argument is based on unimpeachable doctrinal grounds – laughter has always been justified when pressed into the service of a higher cause, as in the case of the satire of religious opponents. He takes care to note that in his scurrilous

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

The Puritans and laughter

147

type of humour he has never indulged in blasphemy. It is the first statement in his defence that is of particular interest. What Marprelate says, in effect, is that he has cashed in on the demand for laughter in a market for entertainment, and that he has appropriated this demand for his own purposes. If his defence was grounded on patristic approval of satire, his immediate role model was Tarlton, the legendary comedian who was the first actor to achieve celebrity status. Tarlton himself had died a few weeks before the appearance of the first Marprelate pamphlet. Collinson speculates that Tarlton’s influence was formative in shaping the style of the tracts: ‘Without Tarleton, it seems there would have been no Martin Marprelate.’55 It is certainly true that Marprelate set the tone for the new mode of public discourse that emerged in the wake of his tracts. The London wits (among them Lyly, Nashe, and Munday) who were employed to retaliate in print entered the fray with relish, determined to out-Martin Martin. Their own pamphlets, some of which were converted into plays and staged, fuelled a demand for libellous invective in the market for cheap print. The Marprelate controversy opened up a new area – satirical journalism, whose leading exponent was Nashe.56 Nashe cultivated a specific style that drew on traditional festive strategies of baiting, verbal abuse, and comic violence, focusing in particular on a physical mode of the grotesque. The Puritan Marprelate was attacked by using carnivalesque images of gluttony and lechery – images that Martin himself had first put to use in excoriating the corruption of bishops. The Martinist style gained momentum and exploded into a fireworks of coarse, sensationalist texts, both in print and on stage. Increasingly, the authorities began to express unease about the forces they had unleashed. Members of the elite who had imbibed the new aesthetic norms of neoclassicism such as Francis Bacon complained bitterly, ‘it is more than time that there were an end and surseance made of this immodest and deformed manner of writing lately entertained, whereby matters of religion are handled in the style of the stage’.57 But attempts to restrain the satirists backfired. What the establishment had not considered was that there was a third player in the field – the market. There was a voracious demand for scathing, scurrilous satire, and the hacks who churned it out were no longer solely dependent on assignments from the authorities. The anti-Martinist plays were a roaring success, thriving with scenes such as the following: Martin assaulted a character named Divinity and tried to rape her. Unsuccessful in this attempt, he then poisoned her with his own vomit.58 After a particularly offensive performance the boys of St Paul’s were shut down. In 1589 the exasperated Church authorities felt compelled to put an end to this contest of wits and forbade any further antiMarprelate satires. A decade later the Bishop’s Injunction of 1599 banned satire altogether as disruptive of social order. The immediate result was an influx of

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

148

Shakespeare and laughter

writers into the world of the theatre, where they would promptly start off a War of the Theatres.59 But the immediate effect of the Marprelate drama was creation of the caricature of the Puritan on stage. Ironically, the libellous epithets with which the Martinists had smeared the episcopacy stuck – but they remained indelibly etched on the public mind as associated with the Puritans themselves. This was the birth of the Puritan as hypocrite.60 The attack on episcopal corruption ricocheted to hit the godly critics themselves. The idea of self-interest and lechery sugared over with a veneer of piety was firmly attached to the Puritans and continually recycled in print and on stage. If Martin used laughter as a weapon to attack his enemies, the theatre did no less. The theatre reacted to antitheatrical critique by absorbing some of its premises, as reflected in its preoccupation with the question of illusion and reality.61 But it responded to the critics by turning them into laughingstocks. This strategy was so successful that it still determines our view of the Puritan today. What have got lost, however, are the connotations of a carnivalesque lifestyle of gluttony and lechery associated with outward professions of pious virtue. Our image of the stage Puritan is Malvolio. But Falstaff a Puritan? Kristen Poole has argued recently that this opposition is based upon a false premise: ‘in the wake of the Marprelate controversy the predominant image of the stage Puritan was that of a grotesque, carnivalesque figure’. While the Puritan killjoy was certainly one of the stock Puritan caricatures in circulation, the glutton was far more common – as embodied by Jonson’s Zeal-of-the-Land Busy. ‘Falstaff, more so than Malvolio, epitomizes the predominant late Elizabethan expectations for a stage Puritan.’62 Falstaff as a Puritan Admittedly critics have long remarked upon the Puritan connotations of the figure, particularly in connection with the Oldcastle controversy. Sir John Oldcastle was the leader of a Lollard insurrection against the historical Henry V. He was hanged and burnt at the stake as a heretic and traitor. This version of the story remained the orthodox narrative found in the historical sources Shakespeare drew upon, Holinshed’s Chronicles and Stowe’s Annales of England. It was John Bale who first offered an alternative account, attempting to recuperate Oldcastle as an early Protestant martyr. This was enthusiastically endorsed by Bale’s friend John Foxe, who incorporated the new version of events in his influential Actes and Monuments (1563). How controversial it remained to rehabilitate a former traitorous rebel is apparent when we note that Foxe added a thirty-page ‘Defence of Lord Cobham’ to his 1570 edition to justify his

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

The Puritans and laughter

149

decision.63 In the anonymous play The Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth, stemming from the 1580s, from which Shakespeare borrowed the youthful exploits of Prince Hal as a prodigal, Oldcastle appears in his old role as rebel. As is well known, the descendents of Oldcastle, in particular Lord Cobham, Master of the Revels at the time, exerted a measure of pressure on the Lord Chamberlain’s Men to have the name Oldcastle changed to Falstaff – although traces of the older name remain, for instance in Hal’s reference to his boon companion as ‘my old lad of the castle’ (1HIV, 1.2.40).64 Indeed, the Oxford editors Gary Taylor and Stanley Wells justified their decision to reinstate the name Oldcastle on the grounds of reversing early modern censorship, although most other editions (including the 1997 Norton Shakespeare, which leans heavily on the Oxford edition) have not followed them in doing so. Gary Taylor insists that continuing to use the name Falstaff ‘fictionalizes, depoliticizes, secularizes, and in the process trivializes the play’s most memorable character’.65 While he concedes that Shakespeare probably did not aim to insult the Cobham family, Taylor argues that the playwright set out to deliberately mock the Protestant martyr Oldcastle. However, other critics assert that the politics at stake would by no means have been clear. In the light of the government campaign against radical Puritans, ‘most members of his audience in 1596 would most likely have viewed the travesty of a Lollard martyr not as a crypto-Catholic gesture but an entirely orthodox commitment’.66 What is certain is that the parody of a Puritan would have guaranteed an enthusiastic response among playgoers. At the same time, it is undeniable that the play bears traces of a carnivalesque world of festivity. Falstaff evokes memories of a Lord of Misrule, whose world circles around gluttony and lechery and the inversion of all norms (‘What is honour? A word’) (1HIV, 5.1.133–4). Allusions to Falstaff as ‘that roasted Manningtree ox’ (1HIV, 2.4.440) or the ‘Bartholomew boar-pig’ (2HIV, 2.4.206) as well as Falstaff ’s own puns on ‘gravy’ (sweat or grease), turning the Lord Chief Justice’s injunction to display more gravity on its head (2HIV, 1.2.161), could be seen as a reference to carnival roasts – festive events were typically marked by the overeating of fatty meats. Hal and Falstaff indulge in games of comic flyting: Hal calls Falstaff ‘this sanguine coward, this bed-presser, this horse-back-breaker, this huge hill of flesh’ and Falstaff retaliates with ‘you starveling, you elfe-skin, you dried neat’s tongue, you bull’s pizzle, you stockfish’ (1HIV, 2.4.235–9). The entire play is structured around the opposition between holiday and work, carnival and Lent: ‘If all the year were playing holidays, / To sport would be as tedious as to work; / But when they seldom come, they wished-for come’ (1HIV, 1.2.194–6). In Part 2, a lenten spirit prevails, any sense of holiday ending with the banishment of Falstaff.67 However, seeing these images as echoes of the recent carnivalesque flyting

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

150

Shakespeare and laughter

between Martinists and anti-Martinists puts them into context as continuing in the tradition of the parody of Puritans on stage. Falstaff ’s speech is larded with parodic references to Puritanism: at first lamenting that Hal’s pernicious influence has corrupted his virtue (‘thou . . . art indeed able to corrupt a saint’ – saint being a common denomination for Puritans), in a breathtaking volteface he justifies crime as his vocation, another Puritan keyword (‘’tis no sin for a man to labour in his vocation’) (1HIV, 1.2.86–7; 100–1). He quotes extensively from the Bible – twenty-six references by Falstaff to the Scriptures can be identified in Part 1 alone.68 His speech is punctuated by sanctimonious resolutions to turn over a new leaf: ‘I must give over this life, and I will give it over. By the Lord, an I do not, I am a villain. I’ll be damned for never a king’s son in Christendom’ (1HIV, 1.2.92–4). In fact, his last words in Part 1 are a (never redeemed) resolve to repent: ‘I’ll purge and leave sack and live cleanly, as a nobleman should do’ (1HIV, 5.4.164–5). The hilarious effect is created by his obvious hypocrisy – we have seen too much of Falstaff to believe a single word. At its most brilliant, Falstaff ’s rhetoric spins out a series of sophistical quibbles reminiscent of the style of skilled Puritan preachers. A case in point is his soliloquy on honour. ‘Can honour set to a leg? No. Or an arm? No . . . What is honour? A word. What is in that word “honour”? What is that “honour”? Air. A trim reckoning!’ (1HIV, 5.1.131–5). A hypocritical windbag, a cowardly braggart, greedy, lazy, lecherous, but skilled in sophistry – for a contemporary audience Falstaff would immediately have been identified as the spitting image of a Puritan. But this raises the question: if Falstaff is an outrageous parody of a Puritan, why is he so appealing a character? Falstaff was one of the most endearing comic creations of all times, and his immediate popularity with the public even at the time is well documented. In the seventeenth century the play was as likely to be called Falstaff as Henry IV.69 When does aggressive laughter at an object of mockery change into laughing with an engaging comic figure? Perhaps a closer look at the dynamics of laughter in the theatre might help solve the riddle. Kristen Poole notes a similar phenomenon in connection with the Marprelate tracts: ‘as in the anti-Martinist tracts themselves, the legacy of Martin’s popular appeal overwhelms the pressure of satire, and the audience finds itself in the position of laughing with the target of the attack’.70 However, her only explanation is to fall back on one of the rather more bizarre insights of Bakhtin: the satirist, he claims, ‘places himself above the object of his mockery . . . The people’s ambivalent laughter, on the other hand, expresses the point of view of the whole world; he who is laughing also belongs to it.’71 For Grace Tiffany, ‘the Falstaff image probably softened the anti-Puritan attitudes of mainstream playgoers’.72 Indeed, she claims that the audience leaves the theatre with a greater sympathy

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

The Puritans and laughter

151

for Puritans in general thanks to Falstaff ’s attractive character. This seems to me to misread fundamentally the way laughter worked on the Elizabethan stage. In point of fact, the opposition between laughing at and laughing with is one that urgently requires dismantling. In real life there might exist a pure form of mockery, of laughing at a person for the purposes of humiliation, deflation, and so on. In the theatre, however, what we have is laughter with an entertainer figure – a sense of empathy with and gratitude towards the comedian who creates moments of pleasurable mirth. The audience feels a sense of complicity with the entertainer – the sense of sharing a game. This is all the more the case in a theatre marked by the interplay of illusionism and distance. The Elizabethan audience was fully aware of the difference between the comedian and his role. Thus the audience laughs with the actor (in this case, Will Kemp) – and with him at the Puritans. As David Wiles points out, Kemp never submerges his persona into the role he played.73 What Falstaff represents above all is the paradigmatic player figure,74 the type of the professional entertainer. We admire the player playing Falstaff, and we laugh at the parody of the Puritan. And it is precisely the discrepancy between actor and role that intensifies comic pleasure: the comedian lets us into the game, and thus gives us the feeling of being in control, at the same time as we sit back and enjoy the hilarious show put on for our benefit. Once again, it might be helpful to note the analogies between laughter and the notion of play. The idea of play would imply the existence of different worlds, each of them a Wittgensteinian game following its own rules. Laughter results from a temporary shift in perception, a momentary feeling of straddling both sides of a divide.75 It involves a heightened sense of awareness of being in two separate worlds simultaneously, the comic domain and the actual world. The audience and the entertainer are joined together as members of the same play community. To conflate the world of the imagination with everyday reality is to fall into the trap of literalism – a fallacy to which antitheatrical critics tended to succumb. When we laugh at a caricature on stage we are laughing at a fictive construct – one that bears an uncanny resemblance to real-life persons, but a transference to reality need not necessarily take place. As soon as we identify with the satiric butt, however, we no longer find the parody funny. Distance is a key factor in evoking laughter – distance between the comedian and the role, and distance between the audience and the comic butt. Laughter always requires a momentary sense of distance from the object of laughter – this is true for laughing at oneself as well. This works even in the case of Puritan sympathizers in the audience. If they laughed at Falstaff, they would always exclude themselves from the specific type of Puritan being targeted. No one identifies with the butt of satiric humour and still finds the satire funny. Comic butts are always other people.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

152

Shakespeare and laughter

Falstaff never lets us forget that it is a play that we are watching, one that figures a star entertainer showing off his skills. ‘The brain of this foolishcompounded clay, man, is not able to invent anything that intends to laughter more that I invent, or is invented on me’, he boasts (2HIV, 1.2.5–8). He is both the butt that inspires others to flights of comic inventiveness, and as he proudly notes, a comedian in his own right. The parody of a Puritan is only one of the roles he plays. As paradigmatic actor, Falstaff embodies theatricality at its most playful. His main motivation lies in the sheer pleasure in playing. ‘Shall we have a play extempore?’ he suggests (1HIV, 2.4.271). When Hal mocks him, ‘Thy state is taken for a joint-stool, thy golden sceptre for a leaden dagger, and thy precious rich crown for a pitiful bald crown’, on one level this is a sneer at a pretentious braggart (1HIV, 2.4.370–2). But of course the real humour lies in the fact that Hal is no better equipped – they are all actors, the baseless fabric of visions, the stuff dreams are made on. What appears to incite the audience’s mocking laughter spills over into admiring laughter in collusion with professional entertainers who conjure up pleasurable illusions at the drop of a jointstool. Falstaff proceeds to produce a dazzling performance, one that sweeps his audience off its feet, both on stage and in the auditorium. The hostess chortles, ‘O Jesu, he doth it as like one of these harlotry players as ever I see!’ (385–6). Only Hal sneers, ‘Dost thou speak like a king?’ (421). But the performance he himself lays on is inferior by far to Falstaff ’s, conspiciously lacking in humour. For what Falstaff offers is a brilliant parody of the king, of Hal himself, of the notion of kingship and of the idea of historical truth all in the same breath – wrapped up in a burlesque of euphuistic theatrical bombast and Puritan cant: Harry, I do not only marvel where thou spendest thy time but also how thou art accompanied. For though the camomile, the more it is trodden on the faster it grows, so youth, the more it is wasted the sooner it wears. That thou art my son I have partly thy mother’s word, partly my own opinion, but chiefly a villainous trick of thine eye and a foolish hanging of thy nether lip that doth warrant me. If then thou be son to me – here lies the point – why, being son to me, art thou so pointed at? Shall the blessed sun of heaven prove a micher and eat blackberries? A question not to be asked. Shall the son of England prove a thief and take purses? A question to be asked. There is a thing, Harry, which thou hast often heard of, and it is known to many in our land by the name of pitch. This pitch, as ancient writers do report, doth defile . . . (2.4.387–403)

I shall only briefly touch upon the different layers of meaning embedded in Falstaff ’s impersonation of the king within this play-within-a-play. On one level Falstaff scoffs at a singularly humourless, endlessly pontificating king, and slips in a sly cuckoldry joke (very popular with Elizabethans) by listing the reasons

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

The Puritans and laughter

153

which convince the king that Hal is his son: ‘partly thy mother’s word, partly my own opinion, but chiefly a villainous trick of thine eye, and a foolish hanging of thy nether lip, that doth warrant me’ (392–5). To be sure, kinship that is based solely on mutual ugliness is not the most solid base from which to proceed. The deflation of kingship goes deeper than mere mockery of unprepossessing external attributes, however, glancing at the issue of the legitimacy of kings in a more scathing sense than the question of being born in wedlock. Falstaff continues with the petulant queries, ‘why, being son to me, art thou so pointed at? Shall the blessed sun of heaven prove a micher and eat blackberries?’ (396– 8). Quite apart from the bathetic effect of the juxtaposition of the sun (analogies between royalty and the sun were commonplace) and blackberries, of the son of a king and a schoolboy playing truant (micher), the lines ironically conjure up a memory of Hal’s programmatic soliloquy: I know you all, and will awhile uphold The unyoked humour of your idleness. Yet herein will I imitate the sun, Who doth permit the base contagious clouds To smother up his beauty from the world . . . (1HIV, 1.2.185–9)

It is above all the next line, the mock-king’s peremptory ‘A question not to be asked’ that raises precisely the questions it claims to quash. Without warning, the parody of king Henry slips into a devastating comment on Hal himself. Hal’s glamorous trajectory from prodigal to ideal king – figured by himself as a narrative of resurrection and redemption (‘Redeeming time when men think least I will’) (1HIV, 1.2.207) begins to look somewhat tawdry.76 ‘Shall the son of England prove a thief and take purses? A question to be asked’, the counterfeit king continues. This is precisely the question that the Gadshill episode raises, serving as a foil to highlight the similarity between the crooks and the court.77 If the qualities of kingship are innate, and were held in abeyance by Hal only for strategic reasons, the query briefly emerges as to what precisely these qualities are in Hal which destine him for kingship. There are many questions not to be asked in this play, not least of all the question of Falstaff ’s rejection – less in substance, perhaps, than in style: I know thee not, old man . . . ... I have long dreamt of such a kind of man, ... But being awak’d I do despise my dream. (2HIV, 5.5.47–51)

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

154

Shakespeare and laughter

Although I believe sentimentality at the banishment of Falstaff is misplaced, it is undeniable that the gratuitously contemptuous tone Hal employs creates a chilling moment in the play. We may well be aware of the fact that ‘History to the defeated / May say Alas but cannot help or pardon.’78 Nevertheless, one of the effects of Falstaff ’s travesty of kingship is that it debunks the entire project of making history. It draws attention to the fact that history is a matter of representations, that the received version of events might be only one of a multiplicity of possible narratives.79 The story of Hal’s reformation can be seen in quite different terms, as a narrative of criminals great and small, as a tale of deception and betrayal. It is the questions not asked that determine the myths that are established and passed down to future generations. But humour always works to defuse the implications of the points it raises. As in the parody of the euphuistic camomile simile at the beginning of Falstaff ’s act, the rest of the passage returns to the comic, burlesquing the sententious idiom of godly preachers (‘This pitch . . . doth defile’) (2.4.402–3) as well as the absurdly ornate style of an earlier generation of plays with its rigid antithetical syntax and alliterative contrasts: ‘now I do not speak to thee in drink but in tears, not in pleasure but in passion, not in words only but in woes also’ (404–6). The comic effect is ratcheted up by immediately deflating the highflown rhetoric – to contrast speaking in sorrow with speaking when in one’s cups is pure bathos. A couple of further instances might serve to underline the point that Falstaff explores themes at the heart of the play in a comic vein. Falstaff ’s soliloquy on counterfeiting at Shrewsbury, after he has just played a corpse to escape the fiery Douglas, contains a number of riffs on the theme of illusion and representation, embedded in a farcical scene of a corpse resurrecting itself – a perennial favourite with audiences. ‘Counterfeit? I lie; I am no counterfeit’ (1HIV, 5.4.114–15) is in itself a variation on the Cretan paradox – if Falstaff is lying, the statement asserting that he is no counterfeit (lie) is itself a lie! Buried within this riddle is are further quibbles – on lie as lying down and on counterfeit as actor. He proceeds to announce, ‘But to counterfeit dying when a man thereby liveth is to be no counterfeit but the true and perfect image of life indeed’ (116–18). This is a defence of the theatre in a nutshell, denying the validity of the antitheatrical argument (acting is deception) by pointing to representation as a self-contained world ruled by its own laws. Indeed, the world of makebelieve might offer a more ‘true and perfect’ vision of life, a heightened experience of greater intensity than ‘real’ life itself. By expressing his fear that ‘this gunpowder Percy’ might himself pop back into life and thus ‘prove the better counterfeit’ (121–2) the actor Kemp pokes fun at a mock competitive spirit among actors. But the joke on counterfeits also contains an oblique allusion to more serious

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

The Puritans and laughter

155

issues. In a battle riddled with counterfeit kings (‘The king hath many marching in his coats’) (5.3.25) the theatricality of kingship is radically laid bare. Power, it emerges, is only a role, one that one assumes much as Hal acquires strange tongues. But if kingship is only a performance, where does that leave the question of legitimacy and authority? What distinguishes the real king from the host of counterfeiters?80 A further question the play repeatedly raises is the issue of history-making itself. At the dramatic climax of Part 1, the duel between Hal and Hotspur, Falstaff punctures a moment of heroic illusionism by reminding the viewers that all they are watching is a play: ‘Nay, you shall find no boy’s play here, I can tell you’ (1HIV, 5.4.74–5) he gaily announces – just in case we had momentarily forgotten that what we would get was play, not reality. When Hal insists that he was the one who killed Hotspur, Falstaff sighs, ‘Lord, Lord, how this world is given to lying!’ (145–6). The joke lies in Falstaff ’s sheer audacity, inviting the delight and pleasure an audience always finds in a trickster. But on a further level he is right, of course: Hal, Hotspur, the king, as well as Falstaff himself – they are all actors, a pack of cards, whose vocation is lying. In addition, it is the genre of the patriotic history play itself that is compromised by the theatricality of Falstaff. He constantly threatens to expose the illusion of the play as a fraud. By implication, the historical truth they are witnessing is just one possible version of history, just one possible game to play. Historical truth itself is demystified.81 If the metadramatic moments created by Falstaff spill over to all the other characters on stage, the main effect is to display the clear distance between the comic actor and his role. Almost at the end of the play Hal demands to know the truth about Falstaff: ‘Thou art not what thou seem’st’ (1HIV, 5.4.137). He echoes a line that reverberates in a number of Shakespearean plays – spoken by characters who play games with identity. There is the Machiavellian villain Iago, who announces gleefully, ‘I am not what I am’ (Othello, 1.1.65) or the boy actor playing a girl playing a boy, Viola, who echoes the same line (Twelfth Night, 3.1.132). They are all figures who actively explore the implications of acting and make-believe. In reply, Falstaff announces, ‘if I be not Jack Falstaff, then am I a Jack’ (139–40). Of course, he is both Jack Falstaff and not Jack Falstaff (but just an actor playing Jack Falstaff) – and he is both a jack (knave) and not a jack (or rather, a knave in whom we take pleasure). Once again, he pulls our leg by blandly asserting, ‘I am not a double man’ (138), with the double meanings spiralling off into space: he is not literally a double man (in the sense of a man returning to life), nor is he double (even though he carries Hotspur on his back), nor is he two men (though large enough for two), nor is he really two men, although there is a sharp divide between the actor and his role. In

156

Shakespeare and laughter

point of fact, he is a world of men, a vast repertoire of roles that he is delighted to play whenever the urge takes him.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

The purpose of Falstaff By now it might have become apparent that ideas of Falstaff as the embodiment of the demotic are grotesquely misplaced. It is absurd to see the fat knight as representing the popular voice – a knight who disdains the tapsters (they call him ‘a proud jack’) (1HIV, 2.4.10), who exploits the commons where he can, and who prides himself on his status (his pompous epistolary address to Hal, ‘Sir John Falstaff, Knight, to the son of the King nearest his father, Harry Prince of Wales, greeting’ is mocked by Poins with the words, ‘Why this is a certificate!’) (2HIV, 2.2.112–15). Instead, in his single-minded pursuit of pleasure he is the personification of rampant individualism. To be sure, in creating his monumental figure Shakespeare draws on the style of the Elizabethan grotesque that Nashe popularized. Images of inversion and levelling were common tropes to deploy, still familar to a metropolitan audience whose lives were no longer regulated by seasonal cycles so much as by the everyday regimen of work and leisure. But he also tapped into the collective memory of the first star comedian Dick Tarleton and his form of extemporal wit.82 Above all, he drew upon the tradition of the Vice character in morality plays.83 The secret of the Vice as a source of humour lay precisely in his being ‘not only witty in [him]self, but the cause that wit is in other men’ (2HIV, 1.2.8–9). In Everyman the Vice is a character noted mainly for his talent at deception and his laughter: ‘I must needs laugh; I cannot be sad.’84 As Bernard Spivak points out, the Vice is not a person, only a formula. It is his vocation to deceive. He is wholly free from any sense of responsibility or sympathy for his victims. But he is also devoid of emotions such as hate. His is not really the laughter of malice, but is ‘a limitless, amoral merriment’.85 His only motivation is the pursuit of pleasure. The analogies to Falstaff are too obvious to require labouring. Falstaff, too, was not merely a butt of laughter, but in dramatic control of the greater part of the humour of the play. He was a variety of roles, not a real person. The sentimentality that overwhelmed the audience at his banishment was the invention of a Romantic sensibility that transformed its hesitance in matters revolutionary into a maudlin sympathy for the oppressed.86 The stage exit of the Vice is always a dramatic highlight. Sometimes he bids the audience goodbye in order to pursue further exploits. Occasionally he is punished or banished – but the audience knows that he is indestructible. A true comedian never dies. And precisely these expectations would be associated with

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

The Puritans and laughter

157

Falstaff – who has already demonstrated his invulnerability by being resurrected from death. True to form, he bounces back in the Epilogue to Part 2, as throughout straddling the parts of actor and character.87 Attention has focused on the disclaimer, ‘for Oldcastle died martyr, and this is not the man’ (2HIV, Epil., 31–2). But surely just as significant is the promise that ‘our humble author will continue the story, with Sir John in it’ (2HIV, Epil., 27–8). The playwright promises the return of the rambunctious rogue. The epilogue is riddled with allusions to the caricature of Puritans noted above: the character formerly known as Oldcastle promises to reform and redeem his debts (the play itself ends with a reference to the thousand pounds Falstaff has scrounged from Shallow), and in true Falstaffian style he alludes to his conscience and leers at the women in the audience in the same breath: ‘But a good conscience will make any possible satisfaction, and so would I. All the gentlewomen here have forgiven me . . .’ (2HIV, Epil., 20–3). But there are also playful allusions to Will Kemp, known for his ‘plays extempore’ as well as for his skill in dancing: ‘for what I have to say is of mine own making; and what indeed I should say will, I doubt, prove mine own marring’ (2HIV, Epil., 4–6). The last word might well pun on the Marprelate plays that, as many in the audience would doubtless remember, featured Kemp as Marprelate. Finally, he promises one last dance (at this time jigs were still performed to round off plays), after informing us that Falstaff himself ‘shall die of a sweat’ (a term for both veneral disease and the plague) (2HIV, Epil., 30). The Vice is dead, long live the Vice. What Falstaff embodies above all is the theatre itself – in its relationship to laughter. For him life is a game, and his hedonism is the pleasure of playing. In what is still one of the most perceptive critical studies of Falstaff, Bradley explores the riddle of Falstaff, pointing out that ‘The main reason why he makes us so happy and puts us so entirely at our ease is that he himself is happy and entirely at his ease’.88 He denies that life is serious – and thus infects us with the spirit of a world of pure play. In a play that circles obsessively around the notions of power and performance, of power as performance, what he represents is the essence of theatricality as play. Thus there is a vital difference between Hal and Henry on the one hand and Falstaff on the other. Hal absorbs the lessons Falstaff can teach him to become the personification of the idea of kingship as performance. In the second tetralogy authority is no longer given but earned by the ruler.89 Performing is closely bound up with a purpose – that of acquiring power and retaining power. But for Falstaff, playing has no deeper purpose. The purpose is playing. His make-believe serves no other purpose than to create pleasurable worlds for himself. Even his outrageous lies are designed to entertain – both himself and others. He delights in his own creative fictions as much as his audience does. All that counts for him is play. His parody of a

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

158

Shakespeare and laughter

Puritan demonstrates the danger inherent in any satire – that of spilling over into sheer entertainment. He sends up kings, Lord Chief Justices and princes – but merely for the pleasure of doing so. As in the case of the Vice, play is the thing. He personifies the principle of laughter purely as an end in itself. Falstaff figures a theatre whose raison d’être had shifted from didacticism to purveying entertainment. With the invention of professional theatres there emerged the idea of the theatre as a major supplier of pleasure and diversion. If early modern politics was obsessed with the performance of power, the theatre itself staged the power of performance. The Elizabethan public was clearly fascinated by the idea of theatricality. The theatrum mundi metaphor was continually recycled, the dark implications of Protean shifts of identity were explored in plays about Machiavellian overreachers and warned against in homiletic writing. But it is above all the Shakespearean comedies, shot through with sparkling moments of metatheatricality, that flaunt the pleasure of illusion. By foregrounding artifice they celebrate the power of the theatre to fashion makebelieve worlds that take a hold on the audience’s imagination. They present a world peopled with aspiring courtiers, fools, sprightly heroines, fairies, and crossdressed boy actors, a world of sophisticated wordplay, erotic banter, and happy endings. There is no attempt to palm this off on us as a slice of reality. Instead, the comedies incessantly point to the fact that it is just a mutual game shared between audience and players. As the endings show, the plays are at pains to point out that with the end of the play the members of the audience are discharged into the world from which they came: ‘You that way, we this way’ (Love’s Labour’s Lost, 5.2.904). But during the span of the two hours of entertainment, the main purpose of the theatre is to provide pleasure. And this pleasure no longer serves a didactic purpose. This is not to deny that the plays could fulfil other roles: they explored the complexity of life, they provided scripts that could be appropriated for everyday life, and they created a sense of communality through shared acts of imagination. But they offered no instruction and no answers. Instead, what they paid tribute to was the theatre’s capacity to reshape the world in narrative – and to create realms of delight. However, what Shakespeare dramatizes in Henry IV is the potential risk that inheres in the idea of play. At the beginning of the play, Hal and Falstaff share a world of playful abandon that leaves its trace on their speech. They live in a world where hours are cups of sack, minutes capons, clocks the tongues of bawds, and dials the signs of leaping-houses (1HIV, 1.2.4–8). Not literally, of course, but in an fantasy world where each understands the other perfectly. Both revel in the creative freedom of the imagination. Falstaff sees himself not as a petty crook but as a ‘squire of the night’s body’, one of ‘Diana’s foresters, gentlemen of the shade, minions of the moon’ (24–5). But the danger inherent

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

The Puritans and laughter

159

in play is that of losing the ability to differentiate between reality and fantasy. Falstaff loses track of the real world. Absorbed in his play-within-a-play, he demands of Hal, ‘Play out the play’ (1HIV, 2.4.471) even while the sheriff is hammering at the door to arrest him. At Shrewsbury in the thick of the battle he promises Hal a pistol, only to reveal it to be a bottle of sack. ‘What, is it a time to jest and dally now?’ the prince asks, revolted in the face of such frivolity (1HIV, 5.3.56). One reason why Hal may have rejected Falstaff is because at the end of the play their attitudes to play diverge. The prince puts play behind him altogether, banishing the entire world of play as he has promised. He rejects illusion entirely, relegating Falstaff to a fantasy world: ‘being awak’d I do despise my dream’ (2HIV, 5.5.51). For Falstaff, play is all there is. And herein lies the difference between the Shakespearean theatre and the version of play that Falstaff personifies. For all its delight in make-believe, the theatre makes a point of stressing the disparity between the illusion presented on stage and the reality of the theatrical space. Metadramatic moments serve precisely to highlight this discrepancy. In point of fact, they fulfil a number of functions. By refusing to create seamless illusionistic worlds, the theatre flaunts its power over illusion. It draws attention to the distance between the imaginative worlds created in the play and the limited resources at the disposal of the players. Furthermore, the audience gains a sense of power over the spectacle they are being offered, which heightens their enjoyment. But one of the main effects created by playfully pointing to the distance between fiction and reality, role and actor, is to show off the professional skill of the players. Our pleasure in Falstaff is partly based on laughter shared between the actor and the audience about the antics of the stage figure. It is in Part 2 that Falstaff increasingly succumbs to his own self-image. Significantly, moments of metadramatic self-awareness are largely missing in Part 2 – one last instance is Falstaff ’s self-mocking remark, ‘Lord, how subject we old men are to this vice of lying!’ (2HIV, 3.2.297). He is referring to Justice Shallow, but of course the comment continues the quibbles on lying and acting in which Part 1 abounds – apart from the running gag on the Vice and his dagger of lath. By and large, however, Falstaff becomes a somewhat tedious figure in Part 2. It is undoubtedly the case that death and decay permeate the entire play, affecting a striking number of the main protagonists apart from Falstaff – Northumberland, Henry IV, even Shallow make continual references to old age.90 It is also true that, in contrast to Part 1, Falstaff ’s less savoury characteristics are actually staged in front of the audience – we don’t just hear him bragging, his debauched lifestyle unfolds before our eyes, we actually watch him gull army recruits and swindle Mistress Quickly. The main problem with Falstaff in Part 2, I would suggest, is that he falls for his own myth. If a main

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

160

Shakespeare and laughter

element in the pleasure we take in Falstaff is the fact that he debunks everything, including himself – this changes in Part 2. He begins to take himself seriously. He is well on the way to becoming a realistic character.91 By absorbing reality into his game, he loses awareness of the fact that he is playing. For Falstaff, the game is all there is. Significantly, this state of mind is a mirror image of the fallacy of literalism to which antitheatrical critics succumb. Fastaff collapses the boundaries between the worlds of ‘as if ’ and reality. He misses the signposts on the way to Hal’s reformation, self-absorbed with his own play. Similarly, antitheatrical critics do not differentiate between the fictive world presented on stage and the reality of the playgoer (or the actor, for that matter). Their critique of comedies is based on the assumption that the folly represented on the theatre is a direct invitation to the audience to act in similar manner. Their attack on players is premised on the notion that you are what you act. Portraying licentiousness and other debauched behaviour on stage spills over into the life of the players. In the case of tragedies, it is the incitement to crime that is usually alleged – although for Tertullian, for one, the representation of a deed was no different from the deed itself. To represent a murder was as wicked as to commit one.92 There is more in common between Falstaff, for whom life was a game, and antitheatrical critics, who refused to distinguish between life and art, than might appear at first sight. Taking nothing seriously was simply the obverse of taking everything seriously. Both refused to recognize the realm of play (or art) as a self-contained world that followed its own rules. In effect, both deny the workings of fantasy. The old Falstaff makes a brief reappearance in the Epilogue. Parodying Puritan exhortations to see the error of one’s ways, he promises to reform himself, deploying the rhetoric of the marketplace: ‘I meant indeed to pay you with this; which if like an ill venture it come unluckily home, I break, and you, my gentle creditors, lose’ (2HIV, Epil., 10–13). The capital he has invested is the play itself, which could be seen as a successful venture only if it accrued profit – profit in the form of theatrical pleasure for the audience. A key accusation that the Puritans levelled at the theatre was that of commodification. This was closely bound up with a critique of the theatre as a form of idolatry. If acting for academic purposes was sometimes grudgingly accepted, moral reformers invariably expressed their contempt for the commercialism of the theatre. The theatre was accused of encouraging the deleterious effects of the market economy, including boundless acquisitiveness, social restlessness, and the rise of a consumer culture. The commodity that the theatre itself offered for sale was laughter and mirth – as ends in themselves. As always, Prynne can be relied upon to put things in a succinct manner. Acting for profit was unlawful, he states categorically. ‘Stage plays in their very

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

The Puritans and laughter

161

best acception are but vanities or idle recreations, which have no price, no worth or value in them: they cannot therefore be vendible because they are not valuable.’93 What is sometimes overlooked is that Puritan social critique was directed as much at the rise of a market culture as at the theatre and forms of social recreation.94 At the core of Puritan attacks on the market was the idea of the market as an abuse of the natural teleology of things. This was first articulated by Aristotle in Nicomachean Ethics. A market economy was unnatural because it confused means with ends – the exchange value of a commodity as expressed in money was to be clearly distinguished from the natural use value of the object itself. Thus in the case of shoes the final end (telos) was to serve the purpose of walking, whereas the price of the shoes was simply a subordinate end. The Aristotelian tenet of the four fold division of causes into final, formal, material, and efficient causes became fully integrated into Christian thought at the latest by the time of Thomas of Aquinas. And it was this idea of the final cause (or purpose) of all things which underpinned the charge of idolatry levelled at the arts. When the visual arts were accused of fostering idolatry, what this implied was that the natural teleology of artefacts was being undermined. The product of merely human labour was being valued more than the purpose which it was to serve – to glorify God. All that counted was the surface, not the true value of an object, namely its purpose within the divine order. In other words, idolatry involved a materialistic attitude to things – an attitude that would later become familiar to us under the term commodity fetishism. For Tertullian idolatry was the sin of sins: ‘All sins are found in idolatry and idolatry in all sins.’95 In the case of the theatre it was the abuse of art for the purpose of making money that was the focus of attacks. As David Hawkes points out, antitheatricalists mingle ‘an attack on idolatry with a critique of commercialization to produce a sophisticated diagnosis of the psychological tendency we know as “commodity fetishism”’.96 In flatly denying that the theatre served any didactic purpose (its natural telos), antitheatrical critics denounced it as serving no real purpose at all. All the theatre did was purvey frivolous laughter as an end in itself. This was regarded as a confusion of means with ends. Purely otiose laughter was the mark of idleness – one of the deadly sins and a central obsession of Puritan thought. As we have seen throughout, it was not laughter in itself that was castigated: it was gratuitous laughter that provoked their fury. Antitheatrical critics may well have put a finger on a point for which they have rarely been given credit. Ironically, however, in their literalist reading of the action on stage they too succumb to the dangers of conflating surface with essence – which is precisely the hallmark of idolatry. The war against idolatry articulated the anxiety that man might place a higher value on his own, material creations than on the spiritual realm. Religious

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

162

Shakespeare and laughter

reformers were particularly suspicious of the Neoplatonic celebration of humanity’s creative powers. Calvin identified the danger unerringly: ‘God is provoked to jealousy as often as we substitute our inventions in place of him. This is like a shameless woman who brings in an adulterer before her husband’s very eyes only to vex his mind the more.’97 What reformers feared was that by acclaiming artificial creations humans placed themselves in direct competition with God. By aggrandizing themselves humans were attempting to bring God down to their own level. The ultimate danger to religion was that humans would displace God. What they could barely forsee was a threat to religious thought that lay elsewhere entirely. This threat has been clearly articulated by a latterday cultural critic, Neil Postman, in his jeremiad with the progammatic title Amusing Ourselves to Death. Postman briefly reviews the most imporant twentiethcentury versions of apocalyptic polemic, George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Orwell foresaw the end of civilization in a totalitarian system that would enslave humankind and stultify human thought. His vision has often been seen as an uncanny prediction of the workings of the totalitarian systems that dominated large parts of the world during the twentieth century. Huxley offered a different vision for the end of humanity. He saw a world where indulgence and sloth would deprive humanity of its capacity to think and act autonomously. Postman sums up the difference: ‘In 1984 . . . people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us.’ 98 It is clear whose vision Postman endorses. In his own version of the end of civilization, he sees the world taken over by the entertainment industry. All forms of public discourse, politics, education, religion, and the media themselves have been invaded by the precepts of entertainment. As he demonstrates, in the television age public discourse has been coopted into becoming a branch of show business. The result has been a wholesale trivialization of culture. Serious discourse is banished from a world of mass media whose main purpose is to purvey mirth as an end in itself. Even religious thought has been converted to a wholehearted endorsement of laughter. No longer is Chrysostom held in high esteem among religious thinkers. As Postman points out, the new orthodoxy was expressed by the star evangelical preacher Billy Graham. ‘Although the Bible makes no mention of it, the Reverend Graham assured the audience that God loves those who make people laugh.’ Postman comments caustically: ‘It was an honest mistake. He merely mistook NBC for God.’99 Postman conjures up an image of a world where perpetual gratuitous laughter has swamped society. He portrays a situation which is the radical reverse of the development traced above that began in the early modern period – the banish-

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

The Puritans and laughter

163

ment of laughter from the realms of serious discourse, above all religion and politics. The converse is now the case – both religion and politics deploy laughter for their own strategic purposes. In the meantime the Falstaff principle – life as infinite play – has infiltrated large swathes of Western culture. We live in a world where triviality is commodified and fetishized. We have moved from a society where certain forms of laughter were proscribed to a society where laughter is prescribed. Postman’s theory is supported by a trenchant proof for the dominance of show business: for the younger generations the term ‘Big Brother’ evokes no longer the thought of surveillance by a terrifying dictatorship but one of the more inane forms of popular entertainment. The principle of laughter as an end in itself formed the foundation on which the entertainment industry was erected. Perhaps the Puritans who attacked the theatre for commodifying laughter as entertainment were haunted by a suspicion of the potential powers unleashed by laughter. For the danger in boundless, gratuitous laughter lay in the fact that it displaced a world of serious issues entirely. It paved the way for a world where final causes were no longer valid. All that counted was the surface impression – and the pleasure of endless play. If the celebration of art bore the seeds of our displacement of God, the rejection of final causes led to a world where, in the final analysis, God became simply irrelevant. As regards laughter perhaps it was not pride but idleness that was the most heinous of sins. To what extent the Puritans saw the triumph of the entertainment industry foreshadowed in their attack on gratuitous laughter remains a moot point. Certainly one religious thinker does seem to have suspected the power of laughter all along. Mad monk Jorge, Postman’s forerunner, might not have been wide of the mark to see the greatest threat to a religious worldview to inhere in laughter. The danger might not lie in the subversive power of laughter at all, but in laughter as an end in itself. Burning the book (or eating it, for that matter) did not, however, succeed in turning the tide. Notes 1 Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose, trans William Weaver (1980; New York: Harcourt, 1983). 2 See M. A. Screech, Laughter at the Foot of the Cross (London: Allen Lane The Penguin Press, 1997). 3 A later generation would debate whether the term St Paul uses in the Greek, eutrapelia, might not refer only to scurrility and not include wit – anxious as they were to redeem the newly valorized skill from scriptural proscription. An exemplary case was the famous sermon by Isaac Barrow seeking to justify the use of witty laughter in social and religious contexts, discussed by Raymond A. Anselment in ‘Betwixt Jest

164

4 5

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15

16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27

Shakespeare and laughter

and Earnest’: Marprelate, Milton, Marvell, Swift and The Decorum of Religious Ridicule (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979), pp. 8–32. Quoted in Screech and Calder, ‘Some Renaissance Attitudes to Laughter’, p. 226. William Prynne, Histriomastix, ed. Arthur Freeman (New York: Garland, 1974), pp. 402–3. William Perkins, A Direction for the Government of the Tongue According to Gods Word (London, 1593), p. 47. Ibid., pp. 44–5. See Richard L. Greaves, Society and Religion in Elizabethan England (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1980), pp. 3–29. Perkins, A Direction, p. 44. William Perkins, The Whole Treatise of the Cases of Conscience (London, 1606), Bk 3, Sect. 4, pp. 583–4. Quoted in Prynne, Histriomastix, pp. 402 and 527r–v. Perkins, A Direction, p. 47. An Elizabethan pamphlet quoted in Patrick Collinson, The Elizabethan Puritan Movement (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), p. 27. See Greaves, Society and Religion in Elizabethan England, p. 9. See Jacques Le Goff, ‘Laughter in the Middle Ages’, in Bremner and Roodenburg (eds), A Cultural History of Humour, pp. 40–53. Also see V. A. Kolve, The Play Called Corpus Christi (London: Edward Arnold, 1966), esp. chapter 6, ‘Religious Laughter’, pp. 124–44; Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953), pp. 417–35; as well as Burke, Popular Culture. See Patrick Collinson, The Birthpangs of Protestant England: Religious and Cultural Change in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988). See Christopher Haigh, English Reformations: Religion, Politics, and Society under the Tudors (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993). Patrick Collinson, The Reformation (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2003), p. 118. Michael O’Connell, ‘The Idolatrous Eye: Iconoclasm, Anti-Theatricalism, and the Image of the Elizabethan Theatre’, English Literary History, 52:2 (1985), 285. See Collinson, The Reformation, pp. 158–9. See Paul Whitfield White, ‘Calvinist and Puritan Attitudes Towards the Stage in Renaissance England’, Explorations in Renaissance Culture, 14 (1988), 41–56. Wiles, Shakespeare’s Clown, p. 25. See Keith Thomas, ‘The Place of Laughter in Tudor and Stuart England’, Times Literary Supplement, 21 January 1977, 77–81. Perkins, The Whole Treatise, p. 585. Francis Bacon, ‘Of Discourse’, The Essays (London: Penguin, 1985), p. 160. Quoted in Burke, Popular Culture, p. 211. See Foreword by Frederick J. Furnivall in his edition of Philip Stubbs, Anatomy of the Abuses in England, The New Shakespere Society Publications (1877–79) (Vaduz: Kraus Reprint, 1965), pp. 37–9.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

The Puritans and laughter

165

28 Stubbs, A Preface to the Reader, Anatomy p. x. Subsequent references to be given in parentheses. 29 Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 211–33. 30 Quoted in Taylor, Sources, pp. 222–4. 31 Gervase Babington, extracts from A Very Fruitful Exposition of the Commandements by way of Questions and Answers (1583), Appendix to Forewords, Stubbs, Anatomy, p. 88. 32 Prynne, Histriomastix, pp. 2–3. 33 Prynne, Histriomastix, pp. 295–7. Prynne discusses laughter and applause in Actus 5, Scena Undecima of his polemic, pp. 290–301. 34 See Greaves, Society and Religion in Elizabethan England, p. 431. 35 Peter Lake with Michael Questier, The Antichrist’s Lewd Hat: Protestants, Papists and Players in Post-Reformation England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), p. xxxi. 36 Bryan Crockett, The Play of Paradox: Stage and Sermon in Renaissance England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995), p. 18. 37 Prynne, Histriomastix, p. 152. 38 Jean-Christophe Agnew, Worlds Apart: The Market and the Theatre in Anglo-American Thought, 1550–1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. xi. 39 Lake and Questier, The Antichrist’s Lewd Hat, p. 468. 40 For biographical information see Arthur Falstaff Kinney’s Introduction to his edition of Markets of Bawdrie: The Dramatic Criticism of Stephen Gosson, Elizabethan and Renaissance Studies (Salzburg: Institut für Englische Sprache, 1974), pp. 1–67. Thomas Lodge’s Reply to Gosson’s ‘Schoole of Abuse’ appeared in 1579–80. 41 Stephen Gosson, Playes Confuted in Fiue Actions (1582), reprinted in Kinney, Markets of Bawdrie, p. 197. Subsequent references to be given in parentheses. 42 Stephen Gosson, The Schoole of Abuse, conteining a plesaunt invective against Poets, Pipers, Plaiers, Jesters, and such like Caterpillers of a Commonwelth; Setting up the Flagge of Defiance to their mischievous exercise, & overthrowing their Bulwarkes, by Prophane Writers, Naturall reason, and common experience (1578), reprinted in Kinney, Markets of Bawdrie, pp. 90–1. 43 Sidney’s aesthetic is foreshadowed by Renaissance critics such as Castelvetro and Mazzoni, as Ronald Levao shows in his Renaissance Minds and Their Fictions, pp. 103–33. 44 Pico della Mirandola, ‘Oration On the Dignity of Man’, in Ernst Cassirer, Paul Oskar Kristeller, and John Herman Randall, Jr (eds), The Renaissance Philosophy of Man (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1950), pp. 224–5. 45 Jean Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion (1559), quoted in Carlos M. N. Eire, War Against the Idols: The Reformation of Worship from Erasmus to Calvin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 214. 46 See Jonas Barish, The Antitheatrical Prejudice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), esp. chapter 4, ‘Puritans and Proteans’, pp. 80–131. 47 Collinson, The Reformation, p. 170. 48 For an overview of this development see Collinson, The Elizabethan Puritan Movement. 49 Ibid., p. 405. 50 Patrick Collinson, ‘Ecclesiastical Vitriol: Religious Satire in the 1590s and the

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

166

51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63

64

65 66 67

68 69

70 71 72

Shakespeare and laughter

Invention of Puritanism’, in John Guy (ed.), The Reign of Elizabeth I: Court and Culture in the Past Decade (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 157–8. See Lake and Questier, The Antichrist’s Lewd Hat, esp. chapters 12 and 13. Collinson, ‘Ecclesiastical Vitriol’, p. 154. Lake and Questier, The Antichrist’s Lewd Hat, p. 510. Martin Marprelate, Hay any Work for Cooper, quoted in ibid., p. 510. Collinson, ‘Ecclesiastical Vitriol’, p. 159. On the role of Nashe as the first satirical journalist see Neil Rhodes, Elizabethan Grotesque (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980). Francis Bacon, An Advertisement Touching Controversies of the Church of England, quoted in ibid., pp. 37–8. See Kristen Poole, Radical Religion from Shakespeare to Milton: Figures of Nonconformity in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 28. See Rhodes, Elizabethan Grotesque, pp. 63–9. See Lake and Questier, The Antichrist’s Lewd Hat, pp. 524–30. See Huston Diehl, Staging Reform, Reforming the Stage: Protestantism and Popular Theater in Early Modern England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997). Poole, Radical Religion, p. 37. See Poole, Radical Religion, for background information on Oldcastle, esp. chap. 1, ‘The Puritan in the Alehouse: Falstaff and the Drama of Martin Marprelate’, pp. 16–44. All quotations from the plays are taken from the Arden editions of King Henry IV Part 1, ed. David Scott Kastan (London: Thomson Learning, 2002) and Part 2, ed. A. R. Humphreys (London: Methuen, 1966). Gary Taylor, ‘The Fortunes of Oldcastle’, Shakespeare Survey, 38 (1985), 64. David Scott Kastan, Introduction to the Arden edition of King Henry IV Part 1, p. 61. Useful criticism of the plays is provided in Graham Holderness (ed.), Shakespeare’s History Plays: Richard II to Henry V, New Casebooks (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992); Barbara Hodgdon, The End Crowns All: Closure and Contradiction in Shakespeare’s History Plays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991); and G. K. Hunter (ed.), Shakespeare: Henry IV Parts I and II: A Casebook (London: Macmillan, 1970). Classic studies include E. M. W. Tillyard, Shakespeare’s History Plays (1944; London: Penguin, 1969) and Norman Rabkin, ‘Rabbits, Ducks, and Henry V’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 28:3 (1977), 279–96. Poole, Radical Religion, p. 35. See David Scott Kastan, ‘“Killed with hard Opinions”: Oldcastle and Falstaff and the Reformed Text of 1 Henry IV ’, in Shakespeare After Theory (New York: Routledge, 1999), pp. 93–106. Poole, Radical Religion, p. 41. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, quoted in Poole, Radical Religion, p. 39. Grace Tiffany, ‘Puritanism in Comic History; Exposing Royalty in the Henry Plays’, Shakespeare Studies, 26 (1998), 279.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

The Puritans and laughter

167

73 Wiles, Shakespeare’s Clowns, p. 113. 74 See Graham Holderness, ‘Carnival and History: Henry IV’, in Shakespeare Recycled: The Making of Historical Drama (Hemel Hempstead: Harvest Wheatsheaf, 1992), pp. 130–77. 75 See Morreall, ‘A New Theory of Laughter’, pp. 128–38. 76 See Graham Holderness for an incisive discussion of this soliloquy in his Shakespeare: The Histories (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), pp. 163–4. 77 For an illuminating reading of the play see Kiernan Ryan, ‘The Future of History in Henry IV ’, in Nigel Wood (ed.), Henry IV Part One and Two (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1995), pp. 92–125. Also see Catherine Belsey, ‘Making Histories’, in Graham Holderness (ed.), Shakespeare’s History Plays: Richard II to Henry V, New Casebooks (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992), pp. 103–20. 78 W. H. Auden, ‘Spain 1937’ (lines 91–2), in Margaret Ferguson, Mary Jo Salter, and Jon Stallworthy (eds), The Norton Anthology of Poetry, fourth edition (New York: Norton, 1996), p. 1367. 79 See Phyllis Rackin, Stages of History: Shakespeare’s English Chronicles (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), for a discussion of the issue of historiography in the play. 80 See David Scott Kastan, ‘“Proud Majesty Made a Subject”: Representing Authority on the Early Modern Stage’, in Shakespeare After Theory, pp. 109–27. 81 See Ryan, ‘The Future of History’, as well as Rackin, The Stages of History, to whose insights I am indebted. 82 See John D. Cox, Shakespeare and the Dramaturgy of Power (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), pp. 121–4. 83 See John Dover Wilson, ‘Riot and the Prodigal Prince’, in Hunter (ed.), Shakespeare, Henry IV Parts I and II: A Casebook, pp. 92–101. Also see C. L. Barber, ‘Rule and Misrule in Henry IV ’, in ibid., pp. 212–30. 84 Quoted in Bernard Spivak, Shakespeare and the Allegory of Evil: The History of a Metaphor in Relation to His Major Villains (New York: Columbia University Press, 1958), p. 194. 85 Spivak, Shakespeare and the Allegory of Evil, p. 195. 86 See Gary Taylor, Reinventing Shakespeare: A Cultural History from the Restoration to the Present (London: The Hogarth Press, 1990), pp. 100–61. 87 The Epilogue consists of different parts, not all of which would have been staged at the same time. 88 A. C. Bradley, ‘The Rejection of Falstaff ’, in Hunter (ed.), Shakespeare, Henry IV Parts I and II: A Casebook, pp. 67–8. 89 See Jean E. Howard and Phyllis Rackin: Engendering a Nation: A Feminist Account of Shakespeare’s English Histories (London: Routledge, 1997). 90 See L. C. Knights, ‘Time’s Subjects: The Second Part of Henry IV’, in Hunter (ed.), Shakespeare, Henry IV Parts I and II: A Casebook, pp. 174–86. 91 See Calderwood, Metadrama. pp. 88–104. 92 See Barish, The Antitheatrical Prejudice, pp. 38–65. 93 Prynne, Histriomastix, p. 905. Emphasis in the original. 94 A brilliant recent study to point to this connection is David Hawkes, Idols of the

168

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

95 96 97 98 99

Shakespeare and laughter

Marketplace: Idolatry and Commodity Fetishism in English Literature, 1580–1680 (New York: Palgrave, 2001). I exploit his findings in the following. Quoted in Hawkes, Idols of the Marketplace, p. 59. Ibid., p. 83. Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, quoted in Eire, War Against the Idols, p. 216. Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (New York: Penguin Books, 1985), p. viii. Ibid., p. 5.

5

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Lear’s Fool

For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives In the valley of its making where executives Would never want to tamper, flows on south From ranches of isolation and busy griefs, Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives, A way of happening, a mouth. W. H. Auden, ‘In Memory of W. B. Yeats’1

he myth of the inherently subversive power of laughter was put paid to by one of the leading cultural critics of our age – Umberto Eco himself. In a climactic scene in The Name of the Rose set in the labyrinthine library, where the proto-Sherlock Holmes character William of Baskerville confronts the villain, Jorge of Burgos, with his crimes, the latter admits that he committed murder to prevent a book that justified carnivalesque laughter from becoming available to other readers. Hitherto carnival had merely been ‘the peasant’s entertainment, the drunkard’s license’2 – but saturnalian inversion would gain enormous power when authorized by a learned philosopher:

T

This book could prompt the idea that man can wish to have on earth . . . the abundance of the land of Cockaigne. But this is what we cannot and must not have. Look at the young monks who shamelessly read the parodizing buffoonery of the Coena Cypriani. What a diabolical transfiguration of the Holy Scripture! . . . But on the day when the Philosopher’s word would justify the marginal jests of the debauched imagination, or when what has been marginal would lead to the centre, every trace of the centre would be lost.3

The manuscripts Jorge alludes to were burlesque representations of events in the Scriptures, secretly sniggered over by novices, but in full awareness of their transgression. Once this sense of guilt vanished, engulfed by a wave of licensed laughter, Jorge fears, the very foundations of Christianity would be undermined: ‘law is imposed by fear, whose true name is fear of God’.4

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

170

Shakespeare and laughter

Jorge articulates the by now classic Bakhtinian stance as to the revolutionary potential inherent in carnival. Religion was a system imposed from above, which required only puncturing through laughter to set utopian impulses free. Once parodic depictions of religious themes were actually sanctioned by the authority of a classical sage like Aristotle, they would overwhelm the power of serious religion and set into motion a revolution that might end by upending the rule of religion itself. Baskerville, portrayed as a forerunner of a more enlightened age, defends laughter from what might be seen as a Nominalist point of view: ‘Perhaps the mission of those who love mankind is to make people laugh at the truth, to make truth laugh, because the only truth lies in learning to free ourselves from insane passion for the truth.’5 Here, towards the close of the novel, Baskerville’s thought teeters on Nietzschean ideas that debunked the very search for knowledge as a gigantic hoax to which Western civilization had succumbed. For Nietzsche, truth was a joke, ‘the pretentious lie of civilization’.6 In Baskerville’s words there are shades of Nietzsche’s exhortation to learn to laugh, articulated by Zarathustra: ‘I proclaimed laughter holy: you higher men, learn from me how to – laugh!’7 The only appropriate reaction to the pointlessness of existence was to laugh in heroic, if solipsistic, defiance. In an article with the title ‘The Frames of Comic “Freedom”’ Eco offers a somewhat different stance to those of his characters. He discusses Bakhtin’s notion of carnival as liberating and subversive and sums up laconically: ‘the theory is unfortunately false’.8 As he points out, throughout the centuries those in power have used carnivalesque events to keep the masses quiescent, a pattern he sees repeated in mass media’s ‘continuous carnivalization of life’.9 In terms of textual semiotics he defines a carnivalesque situation as one in which the intertextual or cultural frames are presupposed in order to be violated, and concludes that only where there are stringent hierarchical rules can carnival take hold: ‘Carnival can exist only as an authorized transgression.’10 One might conclude that carnival always served the purpose of shoring up authority – precisely through permitted moments of licensed freedom from norms that apply all the more rigorously the rest of the time. Eco refers explicitly to the medieval comic marginalia against which Jorge fulminated so passionately: The Coena Cypriani quoted by Bachtin, a burlesque representation based upon the subversion of topical situations of the Scriptures, was enjoyed as a comic transgression only by people who took the same Scriptures seriously during the rest of the year. To the modern readern, the Coena Cypriani is only a boring series of meaningless situations, and even though the parody is recognized, it is not felt as a provocative one.11

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Lear’s Fool

171

If only Jorge had read Eco before burning that invaluable book, the world might still possess Aristotle’s lost Treatise on Comedy. Nevertheless, according to Eco there is a type of the comic that does have a subversive effect – which Eco terms humour or irony. Humour is a type of laughter mingled with sympathy for the comic butt. ‘Humor does not pretend, like carnival, to lead us beyond our own limits . . . It is never off limits, it undermines limits from inside.’ Humour does not promise us a utopian liberation from norms, but it does contain a moment of true freedom. However, humour is always shadowed by a melancholy awareness of the limits of any utopian dream: ‘We smile because we feel sad for having discovered, only for a moment, the truth. But at this moment we have become too wise to believe it. We feel quiet and peaceful, a little angry, with a shade of bitterness in our minds.’12 Eco debunks the myth of the subversive power of carnivalesque pleasure. At the same time, he refrains from gesturing towards a Nietzschean form of laughter that would mock all norms entirely. Instead, he falls back on what he terms humour, an amused tolerance of human fallibility coupled with an ironic destabilization of accepted truths. Humour is always tinged with a sense of melancholy which stops short of cynicism. It is this attitude toward laughter that he shares with a formidable thinker from an earlier age, Eramus of Rotterdam. In his Praise of Folly Erasmus demonstrated what laughter, at its best, was capable of: defamiliarizing reality by exposing the absurdity of human behaviour. But the satirical effect was vitiated by an explicit inclusion of the author in the society of fools he presents – his brand of humour, unlike Zarathustra’s, encompassed self-mockery. It is this type of laughter that we find echoed in Shakespeare’s wise fools. A closer look at Erasmus’ text should shed light on the strategies of laughter deployed by the most Erasmian of the Shakespearean fools, Lear’s Fool. With his invention of the wise fool, Erasmus took up the classical idea of telling the truth laughingly – only to undermine it at the same time. The entire book is an extended joke. The idea of a mock-enomium was not new – Erasmus lists a number of classical encomia of absurd subjects in his defence, for instance Lucian’s praise of the fly and the parasite or Synesius’ praise of baldness13 – but the idea of having Folly praise folly was unprecedented.14 The device at the heart of the book is that of paradox or the coincidence of opposites (coincidentia oppositorum) – the yoking together of two opposing terms in a new constellation where both terms retained their validity. Erasmus uses a style termed serio ludere, which comprised jest and earnest at the same time. His book is both a comic encomium and a satire. And the protagonist embodies both human folly and wisdom. Here, as in the very notion of a wise fool, Erasmus was indebted

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

172

Shakespeare and laughter

to the philosopher Nicholas of Cusa. Cusanus’ book De docta ignorantia (which first appeared in 1440) expounds his theory of learned ignorance, which he bases on St Augustine and in which he defines the goal of knowledge as the realization of non-knowledge. In our search for self-knowledge we would gain true insight only when we discovered the limits of our knowledge. This did not imply that humanity should rein in its intellectual restlessness. On the contrary, Cusanus might be seen as one of the leading thinkers of his age, whose drive to explore both the mind and material phenomena led him to radically new epistemological insights. For Ernst Cassirer he is ‘the first modern thinker’.15 In his mathematical inquiry, for instance, he was led to discover the perspectivism implicit in all human observation, and the concomitant suggestion of the partiality of all knowledge. Bound up with this insight is the notion of the coincidence of opposites – if final, objective knowledge is not available, contradictory accounts must be permissible. Our concepts are pure conjecture, hypothetical patterns that have only a symbolic value in relation to the external world. With his celebration of the creative autonomy of the human mind, Cusanus paved the way for the Neoplatonist celebration of human creativity. To be sure, Cusanus does affirm a final point of closure in all inquiry, and that is the faith in God. His thought is also influenced by the mystical selfnegation (via negativa) propagated in certain schools of mystical thought. For our purposes there are two points relevant for an analysis of both Praise of Folly and Shakespeare’s fools. The first is very idea of learned ignorance, of uncertainty as the goal of knowledge. This does not imply – as for Nietzsche and deconstructionist thought – that there is no access to truth. Notoriously, deconstruction is chary of applying its strategies to itself. And Nietzsche would draw the conclusion that, since all truth was an illusion, all that was left was for humanity to shatter the boundaries of the self in a pleasurable quest for artistic creativity. By contrast, the notion of learned ignorance would involve an awareness of the impossibility of ever gaining truth, but not an abandoning of the quest for knowledge altogether. This key notion would play a pivotal role in Erasmian paradox and ambiguity in Shakespeare’s theatre. The second point of interest is the implication of Cusanus’ thought for the notion of spectatorship. In his De visione dei Cusanus describes our relationship to God as analogous to an optical illusion, a picture whose eyes follow the spectator wherever he or she goes. By seeing us God actually brings us into existence, enabling us to see Him and recognize ourselves as reflected in His Creation. But God, too, changes with the changing position of the viewer. Thus our gaze also, as it were, creates God – God appears as a reflection of us. It is God who enables us to recognize ourselves in God as His image. In this dialectic relationship between God and humanity, God encompasses all perspectives but

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Lear’s Fool

173

cannot be grasped by any single viewpoint. What this implies is ‘the recognition that one’s status as an observer is itself illusory; it is the observer who is the observed’.16 The infinitive regression of perspectives will reappear in Folly’s dizzying mise en abyme paradoxes as well as in the fools’ games with our viewer position. The fools mock a stable position of mastery from which to judge events on stage – instead, they offer a multiplicity of possible perspectives which put each other in question.17 Praise of Folly How radically new Erasmus’ approach to folly was becomes apparent when one compares his text with another contemporary exemplar of fool literature, Sebastian Brandt’s Der Narrenschiff (The Ship of Fools) which was first published in 1494 and gained immediate popularity. Brandt’s book might be categorized under the literature of estates, a genre that appeared in the fourteenth century and caricatured different social types. Written in a satirical vein, it castigated above all the sin of social ambition and the desire to rise above one’s estate. As in later Puritan attacks on the emergent market culture, social mobility was directly linked to deceit. Brandt used the image of fools gathered on a ship as a trope for vanitas, life as a fool’s journey leading to an illusory land of material pleasures.18 Erasmus, by contrast, uses the image of the fool (or Folly) to hold up a mirror to our own follies. The classic question that the wise fool asks is ‘Who is the real fool?’ In one of the illustrations that Holbein furnished for the book a non-fool is shown gazing into a mirror, only to find a fool gazing back at him, sticking out his tongue. To be sure, Erasmus also includes a satire of specific professions in his book. But the greater part of the text is given over to demonstrating universal folly, not class-specific faults. The fool is not other people but ourselves. Admittedly, a part of Folly’s argument consists of a satirical catalogue of outstanding fools in contemporary society. One by one she picks off schoolmasters, authors, lawyers, scientists, and theologians. Schoolmasters and writers wallow in affectation, pedantry and conceit. Lawyers flaunt their erudition, while scientists claim to have access to absolute knowledge. Stultitia (Folly) reserves her most vitriolic comments for Erasmus’ learned colleagues. Theologians dabble with abstruse questions while indulging in self-love and pride. Monks, on the other hand, disdain learning and expend their energy on elaborating intricate rules. Although generally disliked as parasites, they wield power through the confessional and through their preaching. But their preaching is generally absurd and ignorant. Nevertheless, their folly is no bar to their sense of self-satisfaction. Finally, Folly takes on bishops, cardinals, and even popes. It is a mercy, she

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

174

Shakespeare and laughter

remarks sardonically, that the latter do not possess a grain of wisdom: ‘Think of all the advantages they would lose if they ever showed a sign of wisdom! Wisdom, did I say? Rather a grain of the salt Christ spoke of would suffice to rid them of all their wealth and honours, their sovereignty and triumphs, their many offices, dispensations, taxes, and indulgences, all their horses and mules, their retinue, and their countless pleasures’ (138). As it is, their ignorance enables them to live a life of bliss, preserving the show of religion and vying with kings for power, while passing on the burdens of religious duty to others. At this point Folly seems to feel that she is getting carried away, and remarks, ‘But it’s not my purpose here to go into details of the lives of pontiffs or priests. I don’t want to look as though I am writing satire when I should be delivering a eulogy’ (140–1). It was the satirical part of the book that gained immediate and sensational attention. The main part of the encomium, however, is by far the more original, as Walter Kaiser rightly points out.19 Folly’s main thesis is that human happiness is intrinsically bound up with folly: ‘the more variety there is in a man’s madness the happier he is’ (112). Folly is the key to happiness. It is a fallacy to believe that the quest for knowledge leads to any form of gratification – ‘it is far sadder not to be deceived’ (118). For real knowledge would imply the awareness of how little we know – which would not be conducive to happiness. The most solid foundation for the enjoyment of life is to be secure in one’s opinions: ‘They’re quite wrong if they think man’s happiness depends on actual facts; it depends on his opinions’ (118). True happiness is reserved for the complacent and the unambitious, ‘those in Plato’s cave who can only marvel at the shadows and images of various objects, provided they are content and don’t know what they miss’, not for those thirsting after wisdom (119). And apart from everything else, fools are never lonely – there are always plenty of other fools to keep them company. On reflection this might appear a deeply pessimistic conception of humanity, one not very different from Neil Postman’s view of our eternal pursuit of amusement. What palliates Erasmus’ apparent pessimism is the undercurrent of humour that runs through the entire book. After all, who can take anything seriously that a character called Folly proclaims? Furthermore, it is not just a scathing critique of human weaknesses that Folly delivers. Intertwined with mockery are arguments in defence of folly that are difficult to refute. In effect, Folly argues, life would be impossible if we were to see ourselves for what we are – a joke. Folly is the essential lubricant to keep the world going. What is a greater folly than falling in love? Yet this world must be peopled, and it is folly that makes us fall in love, marry and procreate. Without a certain portion of delusion no marriage would survive. Friendship, too, depends on turning a

Lear’s Fool

175

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

blind eye to the defects of the other. Even self-love has aspects in its favour. As Folly astutely points out, nobody without a modicum of self-love is capable of being agreeable to others. Flattery, too, can serve the purpose of making others happy. As Folly puts it, In short, no association or alliance can be happy or stable without me. People can’t tolerate a ruler, nor can a master his servant, a maid her mistress, a teacher his pupil, a friend his friend, nor a wife her husband, a landlord his tenant, a soldier his comrade nor a party-goer his companion, unless they sometimes have illusions about each other, make use of flattery, and have the sense to turn a blind eye and sweeten life for themselves with the honey of folly. (98)

All this is delivered tongue in cheek, of course, but Folly does make a few sideswipes at targets that we know are high on Erasmus’ own list of satiric butts. Stoics, who would deny the validity of all passions, and advocate indifference and insensibility, are attacked for wishing to make ‘a kind of marble statue of a man, devoid of sense and any sort of human feeling’ (104). It is unnatural to expect humankind to live rationally at all times. Of such a specimen Folly remarks, ‘He’s has never been alive. There you have a splendid picture of a wise man’ (110). To take delight in life we need to accept human foibles and weaknesses as they are. Stoics, she suggests, should go and live in Plato’s republic and leave the rest of us in peace (104). If Folly makes a convincing case for the importance of self-delusion as a prerequisite to enjoy life, this raises the question of the value of pleasure itself.20 Here it might be helpful to take a look at Erasmus’ position on Epicureanism, which was rediscovered by Neoplatonists such as Ficino in the first half of the fifteenth century. Kaiser points out that Erasmus’ position is as always equivocal, but he does offer a defence of the philosophy of Epicurus in the colloquy Epicureus.21 Here Erasmus makes the same brilliant tactical move that he makes in Praise of Folly, recuperating pleasure (and by extension, laughter) for Christian thought. He builds up a syllogism from the Epicurean principle that pleasure is the greatest good and the Christian belief that God is the summum bonum – and thus the greatest pleasure. Accordingly, the greatest Epicureans are Christians who live piously and rejoice in God. Erasmus concedes that there are different kinds of pleasure, and that worldly pleasures are not the real pleasures of life – the true pleasures of those of the mind. Furthermore, the immoderate use of pleasures is to be deplored. But true Christians would take pleasure from this world in cognizance of the fact that it was created solely for their use. Thus ‘the godly man beholds with reverent, innocent eyes, and with surpassing inward delight, the works of his Lord and Father,

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

176

Shakespeare and laughter

marvelling at every one, finding fault with none but giving thanks for all, since he considers them all to be created for man’s sake’. For Erasmus Christianity is a religion of joy, not sorrow, and pleasure a virtue, not a vice. ‘What spectacle can be more splendid that the sight of this world? Men dear to God derive far more pleasure from this than others do.’22 In sum, Erasmus marvels, what a piece of work is God’s creation. And in a breathtaking sweep he includes Christ in the ranks of Epicureans: ‘no one better deserves the name of Epicurean than the revered founder and head of the Christian philosophy . . . Completely mistaken, therefore, are those who talk in their foolish fashion about Christ’s having been sad and gloomy in character and calling upon us to follow a dismal mode of life.’23 In the joyous, optimistic Christianity that Erasmus advocated, taking pleasure in God’s creation was a way of glorifying God. In his stance on pleasure the cross-fertilization of Erasmus’ thought with Neoplatonic ideas becomes apparent. And it is this humanist brand of faith that might shed light upon the humorous tolerance of human fallibility that underlies his satire of folly. Erasmus’ text has been seen as a defence of a comic worldview.24 It might be more accurate to regard it as a defence of play. In clear contradiction of antitheatrical moralists, Erasmus argues that illusion is a part of life. We create fictions for ourselves in order to live, and it is futile to attempt to break through the web of deception to get to the real truth: ‘For human affairs are so complex and obsure that nothing can be known of them for certain’ (118). A measure of illusion is in fact indispensable to enable us to live full lives. Play always involves an awareness that the playworld is one temporarily entered, but not the only world there is. Similarly, what Erasmus seems to endorse is an awareness that we are only playing – that there is a greater truth elsewhere. To this end he uses the theatrum mundi trope: ‘Now, what else is the whole life of man but a play? Actors come on wearing their different masks and all play their parts until the producer orders them off the stage’ (103). In the little games we play with each other, husbands with wives, friends with friends, it would be senseless to destroy the illusion and demand that the truth be unveiled. For it is by far the greater folly to believe that we can attain knowledge of the truth. Instead, Folly urges, ‘it’s a true sign of prudence not to want wisdom that extends beyond your share as an ordinary mortal, to be willing to overlook things along with the rest of the world or to wear your illusions with a good grace’ (103). For the purposes of his key paradox – folly as wisdom – Erasmus collapses the rigid boundaries that had been erected since the late Middle Ages between the natural fool and the artificial fool. The mentally deficient natural fool was accepted by the Church and his antics condoned, while the artificial fool, who imitated madness to amuse others and to gain a living, was roundly condemned.25 At first Erasmus repeats the conventional view that the natural fool was a source

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Lear’s Fool

177

of innocent fun: ‘they’re always cheerful, playing, singing, and laughing themselves, and bring pleasure and merriment, fun and laughter to everyone else . . . as if the gods had granted them the gift of relieving the sadness of human life’ (109). However, he goes on to elide the difference between the two types of fool by pointing to a diversity of forms of madness. ‘For not every form of insanity is a disaster’, Folly claims (111). Clearly the type of madness that is harmful and destructive includes the lust for war or the insatiable thirst for wealth. But the harmless type of madness ‘frees the soul from its anxious cares’ and ‘is pleasurable and affords considerable enjoyment’ (111–12). Interestingly, Erasmus once again draws on a theatrical analogy to illustrate what is meant by harmless madness. He cites the Horatian anecdote of a Greek who sat alone in the theatre all day, laughing and cheering because he thought that plays were being performed for his pleasure. After being freed of his delusions by medical treatment he complained, ‘My friends,’ he said, ‘This is not saving; it’s killing me to snatch My pleasure, take by force what I enjoyed – My mind’s delusion.’ (111)

Some illusions were not only necessary to the machinery of life, but lifeenhancing, a celebration of the power of the human imagination.26 To underscore the point that we are all fools, players in the comedy of life, Erasmus leavens his theme by a rich strain of self-irony. The text is sprinkled with mocking references to the author as a prime example of a fool. Announcing her oration as spontaneous, Folly pours scorn on ‘the common run of orators’, who spend thirty years labouring on a speech but swear it was written in three days (87). This is precisely what Erasmus himself does in the dedicatory Epistle! Commenting on foolish nations, Folly refers to the Dutch as her chosen people: ‘for why shouldn’t I call them mine? They’re my devoted followers’ (93). She is at pains to distance herself from the breed of rhetoricians (whom she dubs ‘morosophoi or foolish-wise’) who are anxious to show off their their linguistic skills: ‘For at this point too I think I should copy the rhetoricians of today who fancy themselves practically gods on earth if they can show themselves twin-tongued, like horse leeches, and think it a splendid feat it they can work a few silly little Greek words, like pieces of mosaic, into their Latin speeches, however out of place these are’ (88). Here the layers of irony are piled thick – not only is the learned scholar, famous for his translation of the New Testament from the Greek, mocked and associated with the likes of a horse-leech, but Folly, too, ironically comments

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

178

Shakespeare and laughter

on precisely what she herself has done – help herself to Greek words. There are constant jibes at philosophers as inept creatures, failures in the practice of real life (99). She names her creator explicitly when she excoriates the superstitious who believe prayers to St Erasmus will help them become rich fast (114) and when she refers to rifling the store of proverbs compiled by her ‘friend Erasmus’ (141). But, she insists, superstitions keep the mass of believers happy. Nothing is less welcome than a reformer who attempts to open their eyes to the large-scale deceptions and exploitation foisted upon them in the name of religion: Meanwhile, if some disagreeable wiseacre were to get up and interrupt with a statement of the true facts: ‘You won’t do badly when you die if you’ve been good in your lifetime. You’ll redeem your sins only by adding hatred for wrong-doing, tears, vigils, prayers, fasts, and a change in your whole way of living to the small sum you’ve already paid. The saint will protect you if you’ll try to imitate his life’ – if, I repeat, your wise man starts blurting out these uncomfortable truths, you can see how he’ll soon destroy the world’s peace of mind and plunge it into confusion. (115)

Folly mocks Erasmus as an ‘disagreeable wiseacre’, blurting out truths no one wants to hear. It is the reformer who attempts to divest humanity of their cherished follies who is the greatest fool. Even in the last, most serious part of the oration, when Folly devotes herself to Pauline injunctions to all Christians to consider themselves fools in God’s eyes, she cannot resist a last sally at the expense of ‘certain Greek pedants’ besieging her with their clamour, bent on ‘catching out the many theologians of today by blinding them with the smoke-screen of their own commentaries’. She adds slyly, ‘The second place in this flock, if not the actual leadership, certainly belongs to my friend Erasmus, whom I mention by name from time to time by way of a compliment’ (144). It is the ultimate irony that the most learned man of his time should be recuperated by Folly as her chief ally. Erasmus’ self-reflexive irony adds a further layer to a text replete with double meanings and ambiguity. And it is precisely here that the main analogy to the workings of laughter might be located. As critics have consistently pointed out, ambiguity is the very essence of laughter.27 Praise of Folly refuses to adopt a single position on any issue – no meaning can be definitively established. If the text seems to tell us that we are all fools, this is undercut by the fact that it is the prime exponent of folly telling us so. Everything Folly says is inevitably suspect by reason of its self-reference. As Rosalie Colie points out, ‘Her discourse is all of folly: her encomium is a self-praise. She points her finger always at herself, as subject and object collapse into tautology, into infinite regression.’28 The

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Lear’s Fool

179

effect on the reader is to constantly mock our understanding of the meaning of a text as slippery as soap to grasp. Doubleness is the main structural device of Praise of Folly. Erasmus makes it clear that his aim is to carry on the tradition of Socratic irony – and the precept of learned ignorance propounded by Cusanus – which employs ignorance as a method to expose the ignorance of the interlocutor. Alluding to the comparison of Socrates to the satyr Silenus in the Symposium, Folly remarks: In the first place, it’s well known that all human affairs are like the figures of Silenus described by Alcibiades and have two completely opposite faces, so that what is death at first sight, as they say, is life if you look within, and vice versa, life is death. The same applies to beauty and ugliness, riches and poverty, obscurity and fame, learning and ignorance, strength and weakness, the noble and the baseborn, happy and sad, good and bad fortune, friend and foe, healthy and harmful – in fact you’ll find everything suddenly reversed if you open the Silenus. (102–3)

Ambiguity is the main trope the text is built upon, for the simple reason that it is the principle that underlies reality itself. Erasmus spells out implications of the image of the Sileni Alcibiadis in his Adages, which appeared three years after the publication of Praise of Folly. Here he describes small images of satyrs that appeared to depict ugly, ludicrous figures but which opened out to reveal the image of a god. Thus the Sileni stood for a thing that appeared ridiculous but on closer view revealed deeper qualities. The debauched and drunken satyr could suddenly signify wisdom. This made him an ideal symbol of ambiguity. Nothing that is so, is so. Ambiguity points up the complexity of reality, in which apparently irreconcilable truths reside in close relation to each other. And an ideal tool to perceive several truths at the same time was humour. To be sure, the Renaissance was particularly partial to paradox. Games of paradox were undertaken as serio ludere, exercises of wit that grappled with logical contradictions.29 The more trivial a paradox, the more profound the truth at which it hinted. But a further function of the Renaissance use of paradox was to entertain – to elicit pleasure and amusement. It was a form of sophisticated play. Erasmus’ self-conscious deployment of laughter called attention to the existence of multiple coexisting perspectives. But at the same time these perspectives undercut each other. His text offers a dazzling display of wit – without actually telling the reader what to think. This was precisely the effect aimed for within the concept of learned ignorance – the reader would realize the uncertainty of all knowledge. However, this also had the effect that misunderstandings were bound to proliferate. Critics have been arguing about what Erasmus meant ever since the book was first misunderstood by Martin Dorp, professor

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

180

Shakespeare and laughter

of divinity at Louvain, who urged Erasmus to write a second book praising wisdom and condemning folly.30 Folly keeps performing a double-take on herself. She proffers a mixture of truth and nonsense. To be sure, the notion of docta ignorantia perceived all contradictions to be harmonized in the existence of God. But in reality it is difficult to ‘find the concord of this discord’ (Midsummer Night’s Dream, 5.2.60), to pin down the point at which the concordia discors is to take hold. Even in the final part of Folly’s oration, in which the idea of the wise fool is anchored in Christian doctrine, ambiguities abound. In what appears to be a shift toward a more serious mode, Folly finally turns to the Christian faith to justify her existence. Citing St Paul’s injunction to become fools for Christ’s sake (1 Cor. 4: 10), Folly argues that Christ, too, belongs in the ranks of fools. For if to be human is to be a fool, Christ voluntarily donned a fool’s cap by becoming a man. Furthermore, the values a true Christian would adhere to and the life he or she would lead would appear pure folly from the point of view of the majority of human beings who were caught up in the breathless pursuit of material goods. True believers would reject all the things that worldly wisdom would enjoin us to aspire for. For this type of behaviour they were often labelled mad by their uncomprehending contemporaries. Indeed, a pious Christian might in fact experience something akin to madness – namely religious ecstasy and closeness to the divine. Ergo, Christianity was nothing but a kind of folly. Here Erasmus taps into the strain of mystical thought that revered madmen as being close to God, rooted in Hebrew–Aramaic culture but also widespread in Russian culture.31 However, Erasmus’ thesis of Christianity as folly was undermined by the structural device of the text itself. How could one assume that this was not one more of Folly’s abstruse joke? How was one to differentiate the idea of the Christian fool from Folly’s previous assertions? Why should one trust anything that a persona called Folly declared to be true? The mock panegyric was traditionally an exercise that obliquely asserted some fundamental truth. Synesius’ praise of baldness, for example, which Erasmus cites (83), was only ostensibly about baldness – it was really a critique of the way society valued superficial appearance over moral qualities.32 Religious paradoxes like George Herbert’s likeness of God to a coconut were a way of expressing the indefinability and infinity of God. Within the concept of learned ignorance God was incomprehensible, so the only way to attempt to grasp the divine essence was by means of radical dialectic – through metaphors of extreme contrast.33 What Erasmus had done, however, was to give a further twist to the mock encomium by having Folly herself speak – and by having her indiscriminately proffer nuggets of wisdom sandwiched between clearly satirical jibes at social abuses. The result was a highly unstable text that refused to commit itself.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Lear’s Fool

181

The entire book is advertised as a gigantic hoax: the Greek title Moriae encomium was simultaneously a pun on Erasmus’ friend Thomas More, to whom the book is dedicated. The joke is that there was no one whom Erasmus could conceive as farther removed from folly than his learned friend (83). Moreover, as Walter Kaiser has perceptively shown, the whole dedicatory epistle was hedged about with disclaimers.34 Erasmus defends himself proleptically against the charge of outrageous libel with the classic line of defence used by satirists, claiming that he has not mentioned names: ‘to criticize men’s lives without mentioning any names – I ask you, does this look like sarcasm, or rather warning and advice?’ (84). Erasmus himself defuses the effect of his corrosive satire. Furthermore, he disclaims responsibility for the text (with a characteristically tongue in cheek quip) by putting the blame on Folly: ‘if anyone is still unappeased by all I have said, he should at least remember that there is merit in being attacked by Folly’ (84). But more significant is the web of lies that Erasmus spins in the epistle. To begin with, he announces, During my recent journey back from Italy to England, not wishing to waste all the time I was obliged to be on horseback on idle gossip and small talk, I preferred to spend some of it thinking over some topic connected with our common interests or else enjoying the recollection of the friends, as learned as they are delightful, whom I had left there in England. (83)

As was well known, Erasmus wrote the book not on his way to England but during his stay in Thomas More’s house. Another false trail is laid by the dateline at the end of the epistle: ‘From the country, June 9 1508’ (85). The date is backdated by two years; the reference to the countryside was probably meant to refer to the fact that the work was written without the aid of scholarly volumes. Erasmus does everything in his power to play down the satiric power of the book: ‘If they want they can imagine I’ve been amusing myself all this time with a game of draughts, or riding my stick if they like that better’ (84). Characteristically, by taking up the riding image he makes a sly thrust at the imaginary horseback ride that figures in the first line of the epistle. Playing draughts or riding a hobby horse – the book is clearly labelled as playful. The epistle compounds the effect of a text that layers ambiguity upon ambiguity to create the impression of a self-referential game. Similarly, the near-serious exposition of the idea of Christian folly at the end of the oration is disrupted by the equivocal peroration: Folly has long since forgotten what she has said, she claims, and exhorts her listeners to do likewise, coining the adage: ‘I hate an audience which won’t forget.’ Should anyone take umbrage at anything she has said, she reminds her auditors that ‘it’s Folly and a woman who’s been speaking’ (153). Folly subverts her own argument, leaving the readers without a fixed point from which to attempt mastery of the text.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

182

Shakespeare and laughter

It is the refusal to be tied down to one meaning, to take a decisive stance on an issue, that is a hallmark of laughter. For ambiguity lies at the very heart of laughter – which implies that for the laugher two or more perspectives are opened up simultaneously. But the perception of a multiplicity of meanings tends to problematize the espousal of a clear stance. The fool himself usually avoids taking sides. He remains sitting on the fence, mocking both sides and refusing to commit himself. His purpose is to ask questions, not to become engaged in any controversy. He is the paradigmatic outsider. Erasmus was well aware of the fact that the propensity to see the various aspects of reality could lead to a reluctance to take action. Folly herself set up an opposition between ‘the wise man who attempts nothing, partly through his sense of propriety, partly through his natural timidity’ and ‘the fool, who isn’t deterred from anything either by the propriety which he hasn’t got or the dangers which he doesn’t think about’ (102). Perception of ambiguity is not conducive to active engagement. Laughter is unsuitable as a basis for practical action: ‘In our everyday world, humour is a form of play rather than an engagement with the practical realities of life.’35 Structurally, too, laughter works to refuse an unequivocal stand. There is an inbuilt disclaimer in laughter that always defuses the effect of mocking norms. Laughter signals: this is just a game. It is the pleasurable effect of laughter – the entertainment factor – that disrupts the satirical point being made. As Erasmus himself admits, ‘my intention was to give pleasure, not pain’ (84). Even laughter with a moral purpose (satirical laughter, for instance), always threatens to spiral off into the sheer delight of play. As a result, all norms are mocked – including the moral the deployment of laughter is meant to drive home. Thus it is futile to debate whether laughter is subversive or affirmative – it is both at the same time. Erasmus remarks that fools are often permitted a licence to say the truth to rulers: ‘They can speak truth and even open insults and be heard with positive pleasure; indeed, the words which would cost a wise man his life are surprisingly enjoyable when uttered by a clown’ (110). This is precisely because the form of the critique undercuts its substance – nothing that a fool says is taken seriously. Laughter makes nothing happen. Scholars such as Michael Mulkay argue that the idea that laughter has any political effect at all is a myth. Through its built-in disclaimer (this is just a game) humour works to defuse its own critique. In social situations humour serves to deflect conflict and thus reinforce the social structure. Even what appears to be subversive humour mainly works to reaffirm the social system. Humour is only subversive in specific contexts in which opposition has already been articulated. He sums up: ‘humour normally comes to be used to conserve the dominant pattern of social relationships. Humour can be used to challenge

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Lear’s Fool

183

the existing pattern – but only when it is given meaning in relation to criticism and confrontation that is already under way within the serious realm.’36 An example is provided by political cartoons. Even where the satirical purpose is clear, cartoons only serve to confirm oppositional opinions already in existence: ‘on the whole, political cartoons, like the speeches at party conferences, are addressed to the converted and are designed to strengthen, and reaffirm, recipients’ political commitment rather than to change it’.37 Mulkay concludes: ‘Humour is predominantly a conservative, rather than a liberating or constructive, force in society.’38 It is a moot point to what extent humour in dictatorships, for instance, actually served to subvert the political system. The German cabaret comedian Werner Finck, active during the Third Reich, once remarked, ‘Without our jokes the Germans would have resisted Hitler earlier.’39 Subversive humour creates the impression of political opposition and thus produces a facade of resistance. In reality, humour works to defuse the tensions within society. In his analysis of the relationship between folly and power, Anton Zijderveld argues that humour does not only reinforce authority but can actually serve to strengthen it. The more authoritarian a regime, the more it needed fools. A case in point were court fools at European courts, whom he sees as a structural complement to absolutist rule. Through their licensed laughter the court fools demonstrated to all the other courtiers just how powerless they were – and thus served to enhance state power.40 One might argue that even the proverbial exposure of the emperor’s lack of clothes can have the effect of revealing nothing so much as the nakedness of power that lies behind the benign façade of authority. The fallacy at the root of the belief that laughter is politically effective is the deep-seated notion that knowledge automatically leads to action. We are still in the throes of the Platonic tenet that awareness of the truth induces virtuous behaviour. Wisdom (or in the terms of learned ignorance, the knowledge of our ignorance) is precisely that: a deeper insight into human nature. As Erasmus points out, it is the wise, who are aware of the relativity of their notions of truth, who will be hesitant to embark on a decided course of action. Action is fuelled by affects like anger or hate, not by humour. Revolutions have no time for messing around with jokes. It is the context that decides whether laughter is subversive, not the jokes themselves. A case in point are attitudes to anticlerical jests in the early modern period. These were a staple of medieval culture and particularly popular amongst clerics themselves. However, they were not regarded as a vehicle of religious scepticism. On the contrary, they were seen as an exhortation to reform – or as an attack on other clerics. With the outbreak of religious conflict the climate changed. The Catholic Church, now heavily under attack, reacted by placing

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

184

Shakespeare and laughter

jestbooks on the index and forbidding jests in sermons. Only in a climate of religious critique and insecurity was mockery seen as dissent. Interestingly, the Counter-Reformation Church was as rigid in its crackdown against humour and its campaign to reform manners as were Calvinists, a fact often overlooked in discussions of the impact of Puritanism on popular culture.41 Clearly, there are analogies between the public figure of Erasmus and the figure of the wise fool that he virtually created. One of foremost thinkers of his day, he was petitioned for his support by both the Church and leading reformers. Despite his scathing critique of corrupt ecclesiastical practices he was reluctant to take the side of Luther. By contemporaries he was regarded as slippery, someone whose ability to argue both sides of an issue and whose delight in arcane games of ambiguity led him to eschew taking a clear stance.42 He increasingly turned against the excesses of humanists (whom he accused of celebrating paganism) as well as reformers. Throughout his life he retained his independence from all camps – to the extent possible. For of course a crucial difference distinguished Erasmus from the artful construct of the wise fool. As he knew only too well, in reality the notion of a disinterested observer was a myth. Erasmus, too, was bound up in structures of power, and was often accused of evading responsibility by refusing to take an unequivocal stance on issues. In Reformation Europe, an age where universal folly seemed to have broken out, the notion of a choice was itself an illusion. Another leading thinker of this age, Montaigne, resolved to take as his guideline the advice articulated by Sextus Empiricus, founder of the Pyrrhonian school of scepticism, to suspend judgement on all issues: ‘I do not easily get involved’, he declared.43 In this context Erasmus’ refusal to commit himself and the fool’s stance of sitting on the fence could be read as a self-protective ruse – a strategy of survival. Excursus A trenchant exploration of the political implications of laughter is offered in the play Comedians by Trevor Griffiths, first staged in 1976.44 Griffiths, himself a politically engaged writer, discusses the nature of laughter in a play that deals with an evening class of would-be stand-up comics being trained by their tutor. The climax of the play involves the first public performance by the class, attended by an agent from London who has promised contracts to the most promising talent among them. The main protagonists are the ageing comedian Eddie Waters, tutor to the group, and his favourite student, Genthin Price, who is locked in a love–hate relationship to his mentor. Along with comic skills, Waters tries to inculcate a sense of ethics into his students. After Price has made a misogynist joke, Waters lectures the group about the responsibility of the comedian:

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Lear’s Fool

185

A joke that feeds on ignorance starves its audience. We have the choice. We can say something or we can say nothing. Not everything true is funny, and not everything funny is true. Most comics feed prejudice and fear and blinkered vision, but the best ones, the best one . . . illuminate them, make people laugh till they cry. Cry. Till they find their pain and their beauty. Comedy is medicine. Not coloured sweeties to rot their teeth with. (23)

Price’s misogynist limerick is ‘a joke that hates women’ (22), he declares. Waters admits that what is funny is not necesarily connected to what is true – laughter is not intrinsically bound up with ethics. But he believes the comedian has a choice between fostering prejudice by reaffirming stereotypes, and unmasking conventional ways of seeing things and thus leading to deeper insights. For him laughter clearly has a political function. It makes things happen. What he rejects is entertainment purely for the sake of entertainment – which gives pleasure while in reality reconciling humanity to the injustices in the world. Like coloured sweets given to children as a bribe, it tastes sweet but is the secret source of corruption. Of course, his idea of comedy as medicine harks all the way back to the classic notion of laughter as a moral corrective. But for Waters the main aim of laughter is not to correct others but to correct one’s own faults. The best form of laughter is laughter at oneself. Waters rejects what has been the staple of humour from time immemorial, jeering at others: ‘Do we fear . . . other people . . . so much that we must mark their pain with laughter, our own with tears? People deserve respect because they are people, not because they are known to us’ (30). At the root of all laughter should lie an awareness of the dignity of humankind, however ludicrous specific specimens might appear. His exhortations have little effect, however. All the budding comedians stage comic shows replete with sexual and racial innuendo, desperate to rake in a few easy laughs to fulfil their dream of a contract as a professional. All but one – Waters’s prize student Genthin Price. Price delivers a brilliant, sinister performance that circles obsessively around the theme of laughter, but that is devoid of all humour. He comes on stage accompanied by two life-size dummies representing an elegantly dressed young couple, obviously from the upper strata of society. In a lower-class youth act, Price addresses the couple, first trying to insinuate himself into their confidence by cracking jokes, then becoming aggressive at their lack of response, and finally turning violent: Laugh you buggers, laugh! (PRICE exhorts them to laugh, squeezing their bodies up and down and voicing their laughter for them. Then, very suddenly.) Here. (He takes a flower out of his pocket, offers it to them.) For the lady. No, no, I have a pin. (Pause. He pins the flower – a marigold – with the greatest delicacy between the girl’s breasts. Steps back to look at his work.) No need for thanks. My

186

Shakespeare and laughter

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

pleasure entirely. Believe me. (Silence. Nothing. Then a dark red stain, gradually widening, begins to form behind the flower.) Aagh, aagh, aagh, aagh . . .

The strangled sounds turn into barks of laughter. Price speculates aloud, ‘I wonder what happened. P’raps it pierced a vein.’ But then he adds triumphantly, ‘I made them laugh, though’ (50–1). His aggressive underclass persona pretends to interprete the strangled sounds of pain the dummies emit as sounds of laughter – ironically picking up Waters’s injunction to ‘make people laugh till they cry’, till ‘they find their pain’ – and giving it a lethal twist. The entire performance is a metaphor for class war and creates a powerful impact, leaving the spectators stunned. Aggression is something it shares with much of the humour of the preceding acts, but here any sense of amusement is brutally stifled. In their final confrontation Waters refuses to accept Price’s argument that he is being true to himself. Price defines himself as the archetypal rebel: ‘I stand in no line. I refuse my consent’ (66). By contrast, Waters claims that the act ‘was drowning in hate’ (63). He rejects the clarion call for revolution that Price articulates and insists on values such as compassion. The play ends with the conflict between the two attitudes towards political commitment unresolved, leaving the audience an open choice between the idealist stance of Waters and the radical option endorsed by Price. But what interests me here is how the play itself serves to underline the thesis that laughter makes nothing happen. It is clear that none of the rival acts in the nightclub carries any radical potential. The only overtly political presentation is the one by Price – which rejects humour altogether. In other words, the play is unable to offer a practical demonstration of a comedy act that is both politically radical and funny – either in the humanist vein of a Waters or in the revolutionary spirit of a Price. The play itself, however incisively it might explore the issue of the politics of laughter, offers little in the way of mirth. It appears that humour is only an appropriate vehicle for reactionary content. There is certainly no place for humour in the self-righteous and aggressive certitudes of a Price. One wonders why he decided to become a comedian. Not that he is incapable of being funny. Indeed, the funniest moment in the entire play is when Price cuts a cruel joke at the expense of Waters. After Waters has criticized his sexist joke as articulating a hatred for women, Price rounds upon a fellow would-be comedian who has just made a joke about poaching – with a brilliantly improvised riff on bestiality, ending triumphantly in the punchline: ‘It is a joke that hates deer, George’ (25). Waters is sent up as a meddlesome old man mouthing pious platitudes. Brutal humour is a useful tool when it comes to exposing Waters as sentimental and ineffective. But deploying humour on stage would imply being co-opted by the entertainment industry. And that, at all costs, Price

Lear’s Fool

187

(and the play itself ) is determined to resist. Class war has no time for messing around with humour.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Lear’s Fool King Lear is a study of folly – in all its variations and degrees. In this context, the Fool appears as the sanest person on stage.45 Like Folly, Lear’s Fool holds up a mirror to his surroundings. His role pivots on the query, Who is the real fool? He sets the keynote of this theme in his very first appearance on stage – addressing Kent, he holds out his coxcomb, offering to relinquish his role to someone better qualified to play the fool. When asked to explain his behaviour, he answers by declaring that Kent is the greater fool: ‘Why? For taking one’s part that’s out of favour. Nay, an thou canst not smile as the wind sits, thou’lt catch cold shortly. There, take my coxcomb. Why, this fellow has banished two on’s daughters and did the third a blessing against his will – if thou follow him, thou must needs wear my coxcomb’ (1.4.98–103).46 In a characteristic jumble of cryptic allusions, commonplaces, and paradoxical ironies, the Fool drastically exposes Lear’s erratic behaviour as wilful and marked by megalomania. In this he is more the ally than the opponent of Kent – his mockery of Kent is aimed at Lear. Indeed, it was Kent who first warned against the consequences that would ensue ‘[W]hen majesty falls to folly’ (1.1.150). As in Praise of Folly, the play itself juggles with the multiple meanings of folly – as a form of hubris, and conversely, as a conduit to a higher wisdom. By analogy with the related term blindness, which is literalized in Gloucester’s punishment, the metaphor of folly is literalized in Lear’s madness – a state which paradoxically leads to a greater insight. The Fool makes his point even more explicitly when he addresses Lear directly, turning him into straight man for his comic wit: Fool: Dost thou know the difference, my boy, between a bitter fool and a sweet one? Lear: No, lad, teach me. Fool: That lord that counselled thee to give away thy land, Come place him here by me; do thou for him stand. The sweet and bitter fool will presently appear, The one in motley here, the other found out there. (1.4.134–40)47

Lear, he asserts, is the greater fool of the two. But Lear is not alone, there is a veritable explosion of fools in society: ‘lords and great men will not let me; if I had a monopoly out, they would have part on’t; and ladies too, they will not let me have all the fool to myself, they’ll be snatching’ (1.4.145–8). These

188

Shakespeare and laughter

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

lines (like the jingle on the sweet and bitter fool above) are omitted in the Folio version, possibly for reasons of censorship or self-censorship.48 Quite apart from the topical allusion to the abuse of monopolies under James I, the play on words (fool as a dessert) and the sexual innuendo, the idea of the endless proliferation of fools is repeated in the song the Fool proceeds to sing: Fools had ne’er less grace in a year, For wise men are grown foppish, And know not how their wits to wear, Their manners are so apish. (1.4.158–61)

Folly dominates the fashion at court, he asserts, where courtiers are busy aping fools. In another characteristic riddle, the Fool offers to give Lear two crowns in exchange for an egg. Mystified, Lear demands to know the nature of these crowns. The Fool explains: Why, after I have cut the egg i’the middle and eat up the meat, the two crowns of the egg. When thou clovest thy crown i’the middle and gav’st away both parts, thou bor’st thine ass on thy back o’er the dirt. Thou hadst little wit in thy bald crown when thou gav’st thy golden one away. If I speak like myself in this, let him be whipped that first finds it so. (1.4.151–7)

The Fool spins out a quadruple pun from the word crown, alluding to gold coins, Lear’s head, the royal crown, and the ends of an egg. Typically, he slips in and out of metaphors, injecting the adage of a man who carried his ass upon his back, trying to please everyone and ending up pleasing no one, into the imagery of eggs and crowns. The most exalted objects in the kingdom are absurdly deflated by being associated with the trivial. The warning hidden in his play upon words is the egg-like fragility to which he is drawing attention – the tenuous hold Lear has on both power and his sanity. But he immediately defuses the truth he delivers by entangling it in a whimsical paradox. Those who believe that he is simply speaking in character, that is foolishly, deserve to be whipped for their obtuseness. For if they fail to realize the truth of his words, they prove that they are the true fools. Conversely, if he is speaking the truth (as a wise fool characteristically does, if obliquely), those who realize this will be whipped – for in Lear’s regime no premium is placed on truth: ‘They’ll have me whipped for speaking true, thou’lt have me whipped for lying, and sometimes I am whipped for holding my peace’ (1.4.174–6). One of the main tropes that the Fool evokes is that of inversion. His words are riddled with allusions to a world turned upside down. The reversal of norms was, of course, a standard metaphor for folly in many cultures that were organ-

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Lear’s Fool

189

ized in rigid hierarchical structures. The Fool incessantly harps on the fact that Lear has voluntarily relinquished the reins of power into his children’s hands. He has turned those who in an ordered society should be subordinate to him into figures with authority over him: ’thou mad’st thy daughters thy mothers; for . . . thou gav’st them the rod and putt’st down thine own breeches’ (1.4.163– 5). Festive imagery is replete with references to fishes flying, animals whipping humans, and, above all, women beating men. But the very notion of carnival festivity was closely linked to the idea of temporality. Inversion was invoked and even celebrated precisely because order would be restored after a period of licensed anarchy – Lent inevitably followed carnival. Norms were transgressed precisely to reinforce them. Chaos was welcomed to remind society of the precariousness of order. What the Fool is alluding to in the case of Lear is an entire world out of joint, one whose anarchic energies are no longer amenable to being harnessed. By divesting himself of his power, Lear has unleashed the forces of disorder upon his kingdom. As Gloucester puts it: Love cools, friendship falls off, brothers divide: in cities, mutinies; in countries, discord; in places, treason; and the bond cracked twixt son and father . . . The King falls from bias of nature – there’s father against child. We have seen the best of our time. Machinations, hollowness, treachery and all ruinous disorders follow us disquietly to our graves. (1.2.106–14)

Where Gloucester employs apocalyptic rhetoric, piling one bleak example of disorder on the next in paratactic sequences, the Fool uses images of festive topsy-turvydom: the daughter chastizes the father, the man carries an ass on his back, ‘the cart draws the horse’ (1.4.215–16), and the cuckoo fledgling bites off the head of the mother bird: ‘The hedge-sparrow fed the cuckoo so long / That it’s had it head bit off by it young’ (1.4.206–8). In the violent, nearcannibalistic overtones of the latter image, the treatment meted out to both Gloucester and Lear by their children is foreshadowed. A related theme the Fool continually rehearses is the concept of nothing. Here his strategy is more varied – he repeatedly incites Lear to evoke the notion of nothingness himself, before he delivers his devastating coup de grace. The term ‘nothing’ alludes to a key concept in the play. The tone is set with Cordelia’s reply to the love-test of her father – her response to his demand to know which of his daughters loves him best is the single word ‘Nothing’ (1.1.87). Lear reacts by citing the truism that ‘nothing will come of nothing’ (1.1.90). In this context it is helpful to bear in mind that early modern Christian orthodoxy denied the existence of nothing.49 Continuing in the footsteps of the major Greek philosophers, who negated the idea of a vacuum (Aristotle’s horror vacui), Christian thought rejected the idea of nothing as an affront to the notion of God’s

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

190

Shakespeare and laughter

perfection. The belief in the existence of the void smacked of a challenge to God’s omnipotence. Speculation about the void was only (barely) permissible as a means to grasp the ungraspable, as in Cusa’s dialectic method of learned ignorance. The idea of nothing was closely bound up with the notion of evil. Evil, too, was denied an independent existence. For Church Fathers from Origen to Aquinas, evil had no reality, but existed only negatively, as an absence rather than as substance. Evil was non-Being, the privation of reality.50 The roots of this idea lie in the Neoplatonic belief that all Being was created as essentially good. Origen initiated a synthesis of Neoplatonism with Christianity to attempt to solve the vexed issue of why God had created evil. In his battle with Manichaean doctrine St Augustine finally put paid to the dualistic idea of the coexistence of good and evil: ‘Those things we call evil, are defects in good things, and quite incapable of existing in their own right outside good things.’51 St Thomas Aquinas summed up the notion of privative evil with the words ‘Malum est non ens’ (Evil is not essence).52 Both evil and the void were essentially illusory. The Fool’s task was to open Lear’s eyes to the abyss of chaos into which he had propelled his kingdom and himself. It was not merely disinheritance of property that was at stake – what Lear had done was precipitate a complete reversal of all norms. To this end, the Fool plays incessantly on the term ‘nothing’. ‘Can you make no use of nothing, nuncle?’ he asks rhetorically, provoking Lear to rehearse the the axiom that ‘nothing can be made out of nothing’ (1.4.127–30). After repeatedly alluding to Lear’s lack of wit, he asserts, ‘Thou hast pared thy wit o’both sides and left nothing i’the middle’ (1.4.177–9). When he finally rounds on Lear with the truth, he declares, ‘Now thou art an O without a figure; I am better than thou art now. I am a fool, thou art nothing’ (1.4.183–4). Lear has been reduced to a cipher. He is an empty husk, a ‘shelled peascod’ (1.4.190) who has been divested of both potency and meaning. What the Fool prophetically voices is the subsequent disintegration of Lear’s identity – torn from the moorings that fixed his position in the world, his sense of selfhood spirals off into a vertiginous void where nothing exists but negation. Like Eramus’ Folly, the Fool serves the function of destabilising Lear’s worldview and thus precipitating a process of self-knowledge. After his humiliation at the hands of Goneril we witness the first cracks in Lear’s identity: Lear: Does any here know me? Why, this is not Lear. Does Lear walk thus, speak thus? Where are his eyes? . . . Who is it that can tell me who I am? Fool: Lear’s shadow. (1.4.217–22)53

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Lear’s Fool

191

Characteristically, the Fool’s meaning is ambiguous – on one level he could imply that all that remains of Lear is a shadow of his former self. But he could also be denoting his own function as that of a shadow, a mirror held up to Lear to help him recognize his own folly. The Fool is not a seer whose task it is to pronounce axiomatic truths. Instead, within the concept of learned ignorance he would lead Lear to realize the limits of his own ‘fantasy of omnipotence’,54 the insecurity of his identity. Once Lear shows signs of awareness, the Fool’s function in the play undergoes a subtle change. He increasingly addresses a wider audience. He lectures Kent on the ways of the world in a passage that warrants a closer look: All that follow their noses are led by their eyes but blind men, and there’s not a nose among twenty but can smell him that’s stinking. Let go thy hold when a great wheel runs down a hill lest it break thy neck with following it, but the great one that goes upward, let him draw thee after. When a wise man gives thee better counsel give me mine again; I would have none but knaves follow it, since a fool gives it. That sir which serves and seeks for gain, And follows but for form, Will pack when it begins to rain, And leave thee in the storm; But I will tarry, the fool will stay, And let the wise man fly: The knave turns fool that runs away, The fool no knave perdy. (2.2.258–74)

The Fool’s words, alluding as they do to the De casibus model of tragedy relating to the fall of a great man and the inexorable turning of the wheel of fortune, seem to endorse a cynical worldview. He advises Kent to leave the services of someone whose fortunes are so clearly sinking. But the Fool also sets up a further opposition between the terms fool and knave. What might appear as worldly-wise advice is in reality a corrosive diagnosis of manners and mores – particularly at court. He ironically undercuts his own words by claiming that his counsel is given by a fool and only intended for knaves. As we have seen with Folly, what she praises as normative in society might be regarded as dialectically opposed to true values. The Fool makes a clear declaration of his own intention to remain loyal to Lear – admitting that it is not a decision to be lauded for its wisdom. Instead, he brings ethical norms into play when he labels those that desert their leader as knaves as well as fools – what might appear as the right course to follow from an opportunistic point of view is, in reality, a sign of moral corruption. It is interesting to note that Dr Johnson amended

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

192

Shakespeare and laughter

the last two lines of the rhyme as follows: ‘The fool turns knave who runs away; / The knave no fool perdy.’ As Enid Welsford rightly points out, greater clarity is achieved at the expense of the ambiguity of the lines – what is elided is the paradoxical conjunction of wisdom and folly in the fool.55 If this passage seems to give us a touching insight into the Fool’s real feelings, and has been milked for its sentimental value, seeming to exemplify the Fool’s pathos, loyalty, and kindness,56 it needs to be set against other moments where the Fool punctures any illusionistic belief in his reality as a character. Immediately after the poignant dramatic moment when Lear prays to retain his precarious hold on sanity – ‘O let me not be mad, not mad, sweet heaven! I would not be mad’ (1.5.43–4) – the Fool turns to the audience and addresses its female members with an obscene jest: ‘She that’s a maid now, and laughs at my departure, / Shall not be a maid long, unless things be cut shorter’ (1.5.49– 50). The laughter he provokes results from a sudden grotesque injection of mirth into an increasingly bleak world on stage. The effect is a radical disruption of tragic illusionism and a reminder of the reality of the world of the audience. Clowns and fools have always been attributed with excessive sexuality, playing with phallic symbols such as their bauble. Indeed, one of the meanings consistently linked with folly was lewdness.57 Nevertheless, it would be a fallacy to associate the fool or clown with the physical per se. As William Willeford reminds us, the essence of the fool is his two-dimensionality.58 He is both less and more than a real person – he combines an exaggeration of physicality with a ludicrous lack of reality. A typical comic ploy is the fool’s estrangement from his own body, for instance when he points and calls out, ‘Look! Look! Look!’ only to announce triumphantly: ‘A finger!’ Clearly he is sending up our normative expectations – when someone urges us to look we assume that there is something that is worth engaging our attention – but the humour also lies in the way the fool collapses the difference between subject and object. He regards parts of his body as a collection of discrete parts that can be dismantled at will. The point is that the presence of the fool is rooted in his lack of selfpresence. The fact that the fool is not a real person has been endlessly exploited for its comic potential, particularly in the device of the fool pair – neither of whom is a rounded character. One of the most brilliant implementations of this strategy appears in Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, where the lack of a distinct fool character in Hamlet is compensated for by turning the Tweedledum and Tweedledee pair of minor courtiers, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, into a vaudeville pair. The principle of physical mix-ups is enacted in the hilarious dialogue that takes place in pitch darkness. It bears quoting at length:

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Lear’s Fool

193

Guil: Are you there? Ros: Where? Guil (bitterly): A flying start . . . (Pause.) Ros: Is that you? Guil: Yes. Ros: How do you know? Guil (explosion): Oh-for-God’s-sake! ... Guil: . . . You can feel, can’t you? Ros: Ah! There’s life in me yet! Guil: What are you feeling? Ros: A leg. Yes, it feels like my leg. Guil: How does it feel? Ros: Dead. Guil: Dead? Ros (panic): I can’t feel a thing! Guil: Give it a pinch! (Immediately he yelps.) Ros: Sorry. Guil: Well, that’s cleared that up.59

What the fools call into question is our view of reality – including our view of our own reality. Rather than reducing us to our materiality as the only basis for identity, the fool or clown serves to put precisely this certainty in question. How do we know our leg is really our own? How do we know we exist at all? The absurdity of reversing commonsensical notions about reality triggers a brief shift in perception – and leads to the momentary awareness that our ideas of the normative are based on nothing more solid than deeply engrained habits of thought. Thinkers such as Nietzsche (or Bakhtin) would claim that the materiality of the body is the irreducible reality that remains once we have dismantled the web of illusions we have woven around our lives in the course of civilisation. By contrast, what the comedian sets out to demonstrate is that our view of the body is nothing less than yet another illusion, one that is based on a unified notion of selfhood. To be sure, the comedian personifies the human condition that is so well epitomized by Montaigne in the lines, ‘Our specific property is to be equally laughable and able to laugh’.60 Laughter exposes our pretensions as absurd, constrained as we are within a body whose limitations deflate all our attempts to transcend our situation. But as the philosopher Simon Critchley reminds us, what is at stake is the realization that we are estranged from our body – the awareness that our condition is a perpetual negotiation between culture and nature. Our thoughts fly up, but our bodies remain below.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

194

Shakespeare and laughter

He warns against a Bakhtinian notion of the culture of laughter as an expression of the immortal collective popular body – a notion that ‘is both historically questionable’ and ‘can also lead to a romanticization and heroization of the body’.61 Far from representing the quiddity to which all existence can be reduced, we are as alienated from the body as from all our other self-constructed myths. In the case of the fool and his modern counterpart, the comedian, however, there is more at issue than defamiliarizing our ideas of corporeal reality. Comedians play games with materiality, as well as with time and space. They are either more clumsy than the rest of us or – in a cunning volte-face – suddenly achieve triumphs like climbing an imaginary ladder into space. The body of a comedian is a metatheatrical device – deployed to draw attention to the fact that the comedian is emphatically not like the rest of us. A star performer will in fact flaunt his skill as an entertainer precisely by making comic capital out of his corporeality – showing off his virtuosity in gags like pratfalls, horseplay, slapstick, and the like. Above all, comedians are indestructible – whatever physical punishment is meted out to them in the course of their comic act, the audience is sure of the fact that they will never actually die. The comedian is the prototypical player. And as the Player in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead defines his profession, ‘We’re actors – we’re the opposite of people!’62 A further example of the Fool’s effect in violating stage illusionism is the prophecy he delivers at the end of Act 3 Scene 2. In a garbled version of Chaucerian verse he offers first a satirical catalogue of the iniquities of the age, in which priests abuse their office, brewers adulterate their beer, noblemen are wholly engrossed with fashion, and syphilis rages. Then he outlines a utopian vision of a world to come, concluding with the words, ‘This prophecy Merlin shall make, for I live before his time’ (3.2.95–6). Kiernan Ryan, who identifies a concern with social injustice at the core of the play, comments on the prophecy as follows: In these enigmatic, colloquial couplets, delivered in the ambivalent zone between the illusionistic play world and the reality of the audience, the Fool sardonically shuffles together bitter actualities and millennial possibilities, challenging us to turn our minds to the tragic contradiction between history and utopia that pulses at the heart of King Lear.63

The Fool draws our attention to the key issues of the play – but transposes them into a comic key. For both the list of abuses and the description of an ideal world are parodically distorted: neither is the image of adulterated ale precisely the stuff apocalytic imagery is made on, nor is the idea of an Albion where usurers count their riches in public and whores turn religious and devote

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Lear’s Fool

195

themselves to building churches exactly a serious millennarian vision of an ideal world. In other words: the utopian view the Fool offers us is a fool’s paradise. By his tongue-in-cheek reference to Merlin, the Fool alludes to the tradition of weighty prophecies foretelling the doom of England. ‘The Fool’s speech accentuates the wilful anachronism of the tragedy’s construction: its employment of every resource at its command to stay out of step with its time, to wrench itself free from the grip of the given.’64 The Fool destabilizes the security of the spectator’s viewpoint, which relegates the events on stage firmly to the past, by foregrounding his link to the present world. As he reminds us, he is a participant in both the illusory world on stage and the contemporary world of the audience. If he is castigating the depravity of a lost age, his words have equal relevance for the reality of seventeeth-century England. But like Folly, the Fool immediately undermines the import of his words by ironically sending up his own position as well. On one level the plot of King Lear is indeed set in a past that precedes the alleged age of King Arthur and Merlin. But the Fool immediately washes his hands of the prophecy and delegates it to a mythical figure, Merlin, who is as detached from the present as is the world of Lear. Above all, by foregrounding the metadramatic dimensions of his act the Fool draws attention to the fact that he is merely an entertainer figure, an interlude in an afternoon’s performance, whose existence is no more real than Merlin’s. Nobody takes a licensed fool seriously. The metatheatricality of the Fool is further highlighted in the trial scene, an episode that is cut in the Folio version but often included in stage productions for its sheer dramatic power. Lear, Edgar, the Fool, and Kent have taken shelter from the storm when Lear, whose wits have quite turned, announces a trial of his daughters before the jury of his companions. Stools stand in for his daughters. In this scene the Fool increasingly appears as the sanest of the trio of fools. At one point he remarks soberly, ‘This cold night will turn us all to fools and madmen’ (3.4.77). While Edgar (as Poor Tom) and Lear exchange philosophical insights, the Fool is gradually sidelined until with a final ironic comment, ‘And I’ll go to bed at noon’ (3.6.82, included only in the Folio), he disappears from the play altogether. Briefly before, he participates in the mock trial scene, where at first he enters into the spirit of Lear’s mad game: ‘Come hither, mistress: is your name Goneril?’ – only to sabotage Lear’s make-believe by quipping sardonically, ‘Cry you mercy, I took you for a joint-stool’ (3.6.49– 51). This turns out to be the Fool’s final attempt to restore Lear’s sanity. The Fool ruptures Lear’s private fantasy world of revenge. But his mocking remark about joint-stools is also directed at the audience. Lest we forget, the Fool reminds us that this is just a play we are watching – a-play-within-a play, to be precise. Before we are drawn into the pathos of the sight of Lear disintegrating

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

196

Shakespeare and laughter

before our very eyes, we are reminded that this is the tale of a ‘very foolish, fond old man’ (4.7.60) whose hubristic rage and passion for passing judgement has not yet abated. We are not merely distanced from the main protagonist, however – the Fool’s words foreground the quintessential theatricality of the situation on stage. Through its mocking self-reference the play points at the way we, too, are caught up in endless games of illusion. We, too, are only playing on ‘this great stage of fools’ (4.6.179). Our identity may not dissolve to the extent Lear’s does, but we are no more in control of our own worlds – our identity is no less a function of social construction than that of the characters on stage. All the world’s a stage, and we are busy acting our own roles in the conviction that we can clearly differentiate illusion from reality. The Fool embodies the principle that we are always playing roles. If the fool poses the perennial question about who the real fool is, he also asks uncomfortable questions about who we really are. The answer, he hints, lies in the fact that we will never really know. To puncture Lear’s hubristic fantasies the Fool consistently resorts to the strategy of bathos. After his estrangement from his first daughter Lear demands to see his second daughter, threatening a disciplinary power that he no longer possesses: Go tell the Duke and’s wife I’d speak with them, Now, presently: bid them come forth and hear me, Or at their chamber door I’ll beat the drum Till it cry sleep to death.

(2.2.305–8)

The Fool cheers him on with a grotesque little anecdote: ‘Cry to it, nuncle, as the cockney did to the eels when she put ’em i’the paste alive: she knapped ’em o’the coxcombs with a stick, and cried “Down, wantons, down!”’ (2.2.311–14) The absurdity of the tale lies in the fastidious woman’s ineffectual attempts to deal with the unruly ingredients of her cooking. By analogy, Lear’s towering rages are no more than a ludicrous effort to intimidate precisely those into whose hands he has devolved his power. The bathetic effect lies in the use of an analogy from the kitchen for the fate of a king. In the momentous storm scene, when Lear measures himself with the elements and challenges them to wreak their rage on the world, the Fool urges him to seek shelter from ‘this rain-water out o’doors’ (3.2.11). What in Lear’s grandiloquent rhetoric achieves cosmic dimensions is in the Fool’s words deflated into no more than a thunderstorm. When Kent appears and demands to know who the bedraggled pair are, the Fool describes them with the words ‘here’s grace and a codpiece – that’s a wise man and a fool’ (3.2.40–1). The Fool has just commented sardonically on the priority of the lower passions over reason, citing a codpiece as a symbol

Lear’s Fool

197

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

for lechery. But now he deliberately conflates the king’s grace with his lack of reason, continuing his paradoxical quibble on which of the two is the greater fool. Referring to himself as well as the king as a codpiece is of course a piece of self-mockery as well. The juxtaposition of royal grace with a codpiece at this climactic moment in the play briefly serves to debunk the build-up of dramatic tension and comically degrades the tragic to the banal. Laughter and tragedy Apart from holding up a mirror to Lear in his folly, the task of the Fool consists in trying to divert him from his misfortune and keep up his spirits with a steady stream of patter. In the words of an unnamed knight, the Fool ‘labours to outjest / His heart-struck injuries’ (3.1.16–17). This invites a query as to how far he succeeds in his aim. If Lear gains any insight in the course of the play, it is the weight of his suffering, not the words of the Fool, that effects his reversal. As a licensed jester, the Fool is expected to abuse his employer and evoke the imagery of inversion. His words are not heeded. In attempting to fortify Lear’s grasp on his sanity the Fool clearly fails. In effect, the Fool makes nothing happen. After he disappears in the middle of the play he is not missed – partly because folly takes such a firm hold of the play that there are at least two compensatory fools (Lear and Poor Tom) who take over his role. To be sure, for the audience he offers a counter-perspective to that of the playworld. As an outsider, bridging the world of the spectators and the fictive world, he serves as a commentator on the play. But even the values he seems to defend are open to query. Theodore Leinwand has attacked the Shakespearean fools as conservative figures who do no more than try and safeguard the sources of power on which they depend. He draws an analogy between court fools in reality and the fools in Shakespeare’s plays. The independence of the fool, he points out, is a myth. Fools are amoral opportunists who play it safe. Their privileged position gives them access to the inner circle of power. Lear’s Fool is anxious for Lear to regain power to protect his own standing at court. His cynical advice is for Lear to make peace with his daughters. Most of all he fears the age of new men like Edmund. What the Fool is least interested in is social reform. According to Leinwand, ‘The Fool disappears from the play because in the world that succeed III.vi, there is no place for a court jester’.65 Leinwand’s fallacy lies in his seamless equation of historical fools with the stage fool. It might well be the case that historically court fools were instruments of reaction rather than of progress. Their lack of a power base outside the court would in itself entail a close symbiosis between the fool and the sources of authority.66 But the stage fool was not simply a reflection of real-

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

198

Shakespeare and laughter

life fools but a dramatic construct shaped by generic conventions. Where Leinwand has a point is in the typical ambiguity that characterizes the stance of a fool. While it is clear that the Fool is exposing the flaws at the heart of the feudalism which Lear represents, it remains unclear what exactly he is endorsing. The paradoxes of a wise fool create multiple meanings which ironically cancel each other. The comedian’s pleasure in cocking a snook at everyone makes it difficult to pin him down to a fixed political standpoint. The fool presents himself as an individualist whose main concern is to look to his own interests: He that has and a little tiny wit, With heigh-ho, the wind and the rain, Must make content with his fortunes fit, Though the rain it raineth every day. (3.2.74–7)

Significantly, a version of the same song was song by Feste in Twelfth Night – ending with the line, ‘And we’ll strive to please you every day’ (5.1.407). The air of detached melancholy that surrounds both fools is attributable to their sense of identity as professional entertainers. Perhaps the standpoint of the fool is so difficult to locate precisely because he has none. The disappearance of the Fool by no means implies the end of laughter in King Lear. G. Wilson Knight was probably one of the first critics to point out that the play is suffused with grotesque humour.67 The tragedy continually teeters on the brink of the comic. Madness is itself replete with comic potential. Both Lear and Poor Tom provide a variety of moments that combine the absurd with the pitiful. But the subplot contains even more ghoulish humour than the main plot. Regan’s taunt after blinding Gloucester, ‘let him smell / His way to Dover’ (3.7.92–3) is saturated with a savage sense of humour that the play incessantly replays. Lear, encountering his loyal old courtier at Dover, pokes fun at the expense of Gloucester’s blindness. ‘I remember thine eyes well enough. Dost thou squiny at me?’ he quips, proceeding to jeer ‘No eyes in your head . . . ?’ and to demand, ‘Look with thine ears’ (4.6.132–3; 141; 147). The Dover cliff episode itself, traditionally read as Edgar’s attempt to teach his father Christian humility, is brimful with grotesque comedy, ending as it does with a blind man’s pratfall in the sand. Grotesque humour, which might be defined as a style of comic that combines horror with mirth, was rooted in a long tradition of farcical morality drama.68 It is only with the triumph of neoclassical strictures that laughter and the tragic began to be seen as mutually incompatible. To the medieval mind, as Charlotte Spivack reminds us, evil was comic. This was grounded in the concept of privative evil – evil was an illusion that urgently called for exposure through laughter.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Lear’s Fool

199

‘To the ordinary Christian of the Middle Ages, then, who believed in the ultimate reality of the good, the best defence against the distracting illusion of evil was laughter.’69 Homiletic medieval drama reverberates with laughter at horror, death, and the devil. The purpose this black strain of humour was meant to achieve was clear: laughter was a defence mechanism that attempted mastery of the sources of fear by turning them into a joke. The conjunction between laughter and power has been pointed up throughout. In the face of anxiety or pain, laughter serves as a weapon that domesticates fear by distancing it. One function that laughter has consistently fulfilled is that of a defence mechanism. Laughter signalled the triumph of the individual over his absurd fears. Neoclassical norms have been so persuasive in shaping our attitudes to laughter that there are realms of the serious that have still not succumbed to the general triumph of laughter in our society. We tend to consider laughter in the context of tragic events distasteful. Nevertheless, medieval attitudes to laughter and anxiety have actually been confirmed as making good sense by recent scientific research in the field of laughter. One of the staples of the conventional wisdom associated with laughter since time immemorial has been the therapeutic effect of laughter. Laughter, it has been claimed, is good for your health. In the recent past this idea was revived almost singlehandedly by one individual. In the late 1970s Norman Cousins, a patient suffering from a painful degenerative disease, spondylitis, embarked on a self-help regime based on large doses of Vitamin C and laughter. He checked into a hotel and began a therapy that consisted largely of the Marx Brothers. He claimed that his recovery was due to the therapeutic impact of humour. Cousins’s book, Anatomy of an Illness as Perceived by the Patient, which appeared in 1979, immediately became a bestseller. He himself became a widely sought-after expert on holistic medicine. As the leading scientific expert on laughter, Robert Provine, points out, ‘Cousins’s timing was ideal . . . By the mid-1970s, it took no leap of faith to believe that love, hope, and laughter could produce a benevolent body chemistry conducive to health.’70 More recent research has revealed that the alleged link between humour and health cannot be conclusively substantiated. Laughter as the best medicine is a myth. ‘There is little scientific support for the popular idea that people with the personality traits of humor, cheerfulness, or optimism are particularly healthy or long-lived,’ Provine concludes.71 Laughter, it seems, makes nothing happen. However, there is one effect of laughter for which there is scientific evidence. Empirical research has proved that laughter has an analgesic effect – it reduces the sensation of pain, if only momentarily. One possible explanation involves the release of endorphin, the pain-killing hormones produced by the body itself.72 Laughter does make something happen – it helps us cope with pain and suffering. It manages the level of stress caused by feelings of anxiety.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

200

Shakespeare and laughter

Laughter at horror simultaneously invokes and domesticates precisely those aspects of the world that induce terror in us. Through creating a sense of distance to whatever creates fear, laughter helps us gain mastery over our anxiety. Nietzsche once claimed that the reason why man alone laughed was that ‘he alone suffers so deeply that he had to invent laughter’.73 The medieval notion of deploying humour to combat the fear of death or feelings of terror has retroactively been proved to be an excellent crisis-management strategy. The problem is that it doesn’t quite work that way in King Lear. As G. Wilson Knight observes, the grotesque comedy in the play only serves to heighten the horror.74 A similar effect has been identified in the case of the Porter scene in Macbeth by De Quincey, who astutely pointed out that, for all its analogies to the Hell porter scenes in medieval farce, the comic interlude in Macbeth does not, in fact, work to defuse the tension but actually increases the audience’s horrified reaction to the murder of Duncan.75 Black humour in King Lear is quite different from the use of the grotesque in morality drama. What it does is radically call the tragic norms themselves into question. This, according to Susan Snyder, who has undertaken a probing examination of the juxtaposition of the comic and the tragic in Shakespeare’s plays, is the main function of the comic in Shakespearean tragedy.76 These norms would imply the notion of redemption through suffering, and the validation of the individual in his or her heroic battle with fate. King Lear, Snyder points out, is saturated with elements taken from comedy. These include not only the addition of a fool but the motif of inversion, the double plot, and the movement within the plot into a green world. Significantly, most of the comic devices were added to the source narrative by Shakespeare. But one by one he skewers the expectations an audience would associate with these motifs. The Fool disappears half-way through the play. Inversion is usually evoked to reaffirm an ordered universe – one that the play denies us. The double plot centred on Gloucester and his sons reveals itself at a closer look not as a commentary or counter-perspective offered on the main plot but merely a dreary repetion of the same ghastly pattern. The parallels to pastoral romance would normally invoke assumptions about the harmony of humanity and nature and the sentimentalization of the simple life. By contrast, in King Lear nature takes the side of the villains, grimly lashing the protagonist into madness. Instead of romanticizing the simple life, the play includes a radical attack on poverty and social injustice. A further motif taken from comedy is the challenge of youth to age. But in King Lear our sympathies lie with the old, not with the young rebels. Shakespeare breaks all the rules in the book. In addition, he takes care to foreground comic conventions repeatedly in the play. Edmund comments on the entrance of his brother, ‘Pat he comes, like the catastrophe of the old comedy. My cue is villainous melancholy . . .’ (1.2.134–5).

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Lear’s Fool

201

And a metadramatic comment on the horrific end of the play is delivered by Kent, who serves as a mouthpiece for the audience: ‘Is this the promised end?’ (5.3.262) he exclaims in horror. Other critics have pointed to the political implications of the parody of pastoral romance in the play.77 Both the source play of Leir and the subplot taken from Sidney’s Arcadia provided Shakespeare with the stuff of romance: parental injustice, sibling rivalry, a loyal servant banished and true merit rewarded. The pastoral fantasy involved a regeneration of the ills of society through contact to nature. It combined the recompense of the loyal subject (often in disguise) with the recogition of his or her services and the reaffirmation of reciprocal ties between the ruler and the ruled. But in Shakespeare’s play Lear barely recognizes Kent, let alone reward him for his loyalty. The feudal world of reciprocity is shown as irrevocably flawed, marred by internal contradictions. The play refuses to confirm the myth of social reconciliation. In fact, ‘this is a play in which the oppositional does not bring regeneration; instead, it breaks out in open contradiction that leads to terminal collapse’.78 A play that appears to offer the Stuart monarchy a myth of national origin undermines its own premises: ‘Shakespeare has turned his historical and romance materials upsidedown: the heroic past out of which Tudor and Stuart moralists drew their mythical charter yields in King Lear to an understanding of the present as a time and place of abiding injustice, where morality remains problematical and reciprocity incomplete.’79 The crux of the issue is Shakespeare’s perversion of the end demanded both by the source material and by the conventions of pastoral romance. To be sure, a tragedy would not be expected to end in marriage (as in Nathum Tate’s 1681 radical overhaul of the play which inserts the nuptials of Edgar and Cordelia). But the wholly gratuitous death of Cordelia undermines the pattern of redemption through suffering that provided the theoretical assumptions for the genre of tragedy. Generations of critics have tried to press the play into the mould of Christian redemption, according to which pain would lead the protagonist to a growth in self-knowledge and the acceptance of a providential order. Even critics who attest to the problems with a Christian reading of the play have recourse to the Aristotelian notion of catharsis to explain how tragedy helps to reconcile us to the human condition and provides redemption through suffering.80 Tragedy explores pain only to transcend it and offer us consolation. Tragedy presents the struggle of a unique individual against relentless forces in nature and society – a struggle that is doomed to fail. Nevertheless, what tragedy offers is the vision of the hero’s assertion of his identity.81 It is the staging of heroic identity that helps to reconcile us to our mortality. Through our vicarious identification with the tragic hero we impose meaning on our own lives.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

202

Shakespeare and laughter

But what vision of heroic self-creation does King Lear offer? I wish to suggest that the play sabotages the very idea of tragedy. Pain is presented as random, not as part of an ineluctable destiny – there is no pattern discernible. It is purely gratuitous. As Ryan points out, the play refuses to provide catharsis.82 It offers no consolation for suffering. It rejects the idea of redemption, be it Christian or humanist. It negates the idea that pain teaches us universal truths. Tragedy makes nothing happen. This is not to endorse the bleak nihilistic view of reality that has been read into the play since the 1960s. The play does not embrace nihilism. Nihilism is a form of signification, albeit in purely negative form. The real abyss the play opens up is not the certainty of absence. It is the absence of certainty. And this is what haunted Shakespeare’s tragedies in an age where religious certitudes were in crisis, where both reformed thought and sceptical currents questioned any means of discovering the ways of divine providence. Both Reformers and sceptics such as Montaigne demolished the self-image of humanity and the idea of our privileged status in the universe. The crucial question was whether we would ever attain certainty.83 Shakespeare’s plays incessantly explore these issues – but they deny us the answers to the urgent questions they pose. The last reference to laughter in the play appears in Lear’s utopian vision of his future in prison with Cordelia, where he dreams of an existence in a private world with his beloved daughter: ‘We two alone will sing like birds i’the cage.’ In a deeply touching passage Lear fantasizes about an island of domestic bliss in the surrounding sea of desolation: ‘So we’ll live / And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh / At gilded butterflies . . .’ (5.3.9–13). This dream never materializes because of the heart-rending, gratuitous murder of Cordelia. Nothing either in the source narrative or in the comic motifs that traverse the play would have prepared the audience for the horror of this ending. The play refuses the analgesic qualities of laughter. Laughter may not change things, but it does help us cope. The Fool is rejected because the humour that the play finally deploys is Shakespeare’s own cruel joke – at our expense. King Lear is an angry play. What it has in common with laughter is its effect in radically putting norms into question – particularly the cultural norms that ascribe a cathartic or consolatory effect to tragedy. Instead, it shows us the contingency of pain, the sheer arbitrariness of human fate and the gratuitous nature of evil. Like laughter, it shows humanity to be one huge joke. But it refuses the inbuilt defusion of tension that inheres in laughter – the inherent reconciliation with life as it is. What is rejected is the amused tolerance of an Erasmus, which carries a reassurance that at the end of the day it is all a game. What the play does do is change our response to tragedy. Things will never be quite the same for a spectator who has watched the events of the play unfold

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Lear’s Fool

203

in horror and disbelief. In the final analysis, Shakespeare’s tragedy shapes our views about the didactic powers of art. No longer can we depend on tragedy to show us the redemptive power of pain and thus offer us a model for our own lives. As I have hope to have shown, laughter is not primarily about subversion – or didacticism. But in addition to its analgesic properties, laughter does make things happen. Laughter is about creating communities based on the shared experience of pleasure. A collective is shaped out of an agglomeration of disparate individuals. Similarly, tragedy creates communities grounded in shared suffering.84 In fact, the bleak world of King Lear is itself lit up by occasional flashes of compassion.85 While raging at the elements Lear suddenly notices his woe-begone Fool: ‘How dost my boy? Art cold?’ (3.2.68). It is only consideration for his shivering fool that makes him seek shelter from the storm: ‘Poor fool and knave, I have one part in my heart / That’s sorry yet for thee’ (3.2.72– 3). However transitory, these moments might evoke a sense of common humanity that breaches divisions of degree and birth. Laughter and tragedy are intrinsically bound up with each other. Empirical research carried out to prove that laughter induced pain relief were based on tests involving the viewing of both comic and tragic stimuli. Interestingly, analyses of the pain-reducing properties of laughter were correlated by similar tests involving tragedy. Both laughter and tears seem to produce similar physiological effects. This suggests that the pain relief was actually attributable to distraction, not specifically laughter. These findings are of remarkable import for a cultural critic. Both comedy and tragedy serve similar functions – they serve to defuse the potency of suffering and pain in our lives. This is not be equated with a sense of redemption, which would imply that suffering has a deeper purpose, namely to teach us intrinsic truths. Instead, they create this effect by offering us the means of recreating reality by way of play. Indeed, what is at the heart of laughter is play and the power of the imagination. Montaigne once observed that what distinguised humanity from the rest of nature is our ability to be moved by illusion. ‘We can be distracted and diverted by small things, since small things are capable of holding us. We hardly ever look at great objects in isolation: it is the trivial circumstances, the surface images, which strike us.’86 Imaginative power is as liable to produce pleasurable sensations as sorrow: ‘When I throw myself into building castles in the air my imagination forges me pleasures and comforts which give real delight and joy to my soul.’ Similarly, ‘How often do we encumber our spirits with . . . sadness by means of such shadows?’87 Montaigne is characteristically ambivalent about the sway that illusion holds over us: the human susceptibility to the power of the imagination is what makes us vulnerable to delusion, as much as it provides

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

204

Shakespeare and laughter

solace for pain. Above all, the power of fantasy is at the root of our incessant desire for narrative, our hunger for stories that help us explore the issues about which we are exercised. As Montaigne points out, in our attempt to grasp the ‘great objects’ we need ‘surface images’. It lies in the skill of the artist to produce these images. He has the power to move millions to tears over centuries at the fate of characters who are no more than figments of his own imagination. As if to test this power, Shakespeare consistently breaks the illusion of the fictive world he has created, even at moments of supreme pathos. When Lear in his crazed grief is deluded into believing that Cordelia is still alive, and dies pointing at her breathing lips: ‘Look on her: look, her lips, / Look there, look there!’ (5.3.308–9). Shakespeare seems to be wilfully drawing attention to the fact that all we have is one actor pretending to grieve over another (boy) actor playing a girl who is playing a corpse. A close look at the spectacle on stage would immediately reveal that Cordelia’s death was a cruel hoax. Play, however, always involves an awareness of two distinct worlds simultaneously. Similarly, theatrical illusion meant that the audience was affectively engaged in the spectacle – while being perfectly conscious of the fact that it was watching an illusion. We need illusions to give meaning to the world. Art offers us a variety of different perspectives which we can bring to bear upon the themes around which our imaginations circle obsessively. Shakespeare may deny us the analgesic properties of laughter in this play. But he does give us a masterpiece that caters to our craving for narrative. He may deny us a pattern to the pain, a reconciliation with the status quo. But he does not deny us the means to recreate the world in play – and thus gain a sense of control. Laughter and tragedy may not make anything happen, but they offer us the pleasure of playing through the anxieties and the fantasies of our lives – a way of happening, a mouth. Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6

The Norton Anthology of Poetry, p. 1369. Eco, Name of the Rose, p. 576. Ibid., p. 578. Ibid., p. 578. Ibid., p. 598. Emphasis in the original. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy (1872), trans. Douglas Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000) p. 53. 7 Ibid., p. 53. In the second edition of 1886 Nietzsche included an ‘Atempt at a SelfCriticism’ where he cites Thus Spake Zarathustra, Part 4. 8 Umberto Eco, ‘The Frames of Comic “Freedom”’, in Thomas A. Sebeok (ed.), Carnival! (Berlin: Mouton, 1984), p. 3. 9 Ibid., p. 3.

Lear’s Fool

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

10 11 12 13

14

15

16 17

18 19 20 21

22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30

31 32 33 34 35

205

Ibid., p. 6. Emphasis in the original. Ibid., p. 6. Ibid.., p. 8. Desiderius Erasmus, Praise of Folly, trans. Betty Radice, Collected Works of Erasmus, Vol. 27, ed. A. H. T. Levi (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1986), p. 83. Subsequent references to be given in parentheses. Walter Kaiser, Praisers of Folly: Erasmus, Rabelais, Shakespeare (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1963), p. 36. I am indebted to Kaiser’s scrupulous reading of the text throughout. Ernst Cassirer, The Individual and the Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy (1963), trans. Mario Domandi (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2000), p. 10. On Cusanus also see Levao, Renaissance Minds and Their Fictions, and Rosalie L. Colie, Paradoxia Epidemica: The Renaissance Tradition of Paradox (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966). Levao, Renaissance Minds and Their Fictions, p. 78. For perspectival games in Shakespearean comedy see Barbara Freedman, Staging the Gaze: Postmodernism, Psychoanalysis, and Shakespearean Comedy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991). On Brandt see Agnew, Worlds Apart, pp. 61–3, and Zijderveld, Reality in a LookingGlass, pp. 77–82. Kaiser, Praisers of Folly, p. 50. See Kaiser, Praisers of Folly, pp. 76–83. Desiderius Erasmus, The Epicurean (The Epicureus), Collected Works of Erasmus: Colloquies, Vol. 40, trans. Craig R. Thompson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977), pp. 1070–96. Ibid., p. 1084. Ibid., p. 1086. See Peter L. Berger, Redeeming Laughter: The Comic Dimension of Human Experience (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1997), p. 21. See Billington, A Social History of the Fool, pp. 16–31. Montaigne uses the same anecdote in his ‘An Apology for Raymond Sebond’. See Montaigne, The Complete Essays, 2: 12, p. 552. Zijderveld, ‘The Sociology of Humour and Laughter’, p. 23. Colie, Paradoxia Epidemica, p. 17. See Colie, Paradoxia Epidemica, pp. 3–40. For a discussion of the Dorp controversy see Johan Huizinga, Erasmus and the Age of Reformation (1957), trans. F. Hopman (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2001), pp. 94ff. Billington, A Social History of the Fool, p. 16. Colie, Paradoxia Epidemica, p. 10. Colie, Paradoxia Epidemica, pp. 25–6. See Kaiser, Praisers of Folly, pp. 27–34, to whose ideas I am indebted in the discussion of the epistle. Mulkay, On Humour, p. 218.

206

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43

44

45

46 47 48 49 50

51 52 53

54 55 56

Shakespeare and laughter

Ibid., p. 177. Emphasis in the original. Ibid., p. 209. Ibid., p. 211. Quoted in a feature on laughter in the German journal Geo, 8 (1997), 23. My translation. Zijderveld, Reality in a Looking-Glass, pp. 92–130. See Johan Verberckmoes, Laughter, Jestbooks and Society in the Spanish Netherlands (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999). For a useful overview of the life and times of Erasmus see Huizinga, Erasmus. Montaigne, ‘On restraining your will’, Complete Essays, 3:10, p. 1134. On Montaigne’s brand of Pyrrhonian scepticism see Richard H. Popkin, The History of Scepticism from Erasmus to Spinoza (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), pp. 42–65. Trevor Griffiths, Comedians (London: Faber and Faber, 1976). Subsequent references to be given in parentheses. I am grateful to John Drakakis for drawing this to my attention and triggering a line of inquiry. Also see Manfred Pfister’s ‘Beckett, Barker, and Other Grim Laughers’, in Manfred Pfister (ed.), A History of English Laughter: Laughter from Beowulf to Beckett and Beyond (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2002), pp. 175–89. The influence of Praise of Folly on Lear’s Fool is discussed in William Empson, The Structure of Complex Words (London: Chatto & Windus, 1979), pp. 105–57. On Lear’s Fool also see M. C. Bradbrook, Shakespeare: The Poet in His World (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1978), pp. 188–201, as well as Gareth Lloyd Evans, ‘Shakespeare’s Fools: The Shadow and the Substance of Drama’, in Bradbury and Palmer (eds), Shakespearian Comedy, pp. 142–59. All citations from the play taken from The Arden Shakespeare, third series, ed. R. A. Foakes (London: Thomson Learning, 1997). The answer to the Fool’s question is only to be found in the Quarto version of the play. See Foakes, Introduction to the Arden edition, p. 130. See Colie, Paradoxia Epidemica, pp. 219–51. For the concept of privative evil see Charlotte Spivack, The Comedy of Evil on Shakespeare’s Stage (Rutherford: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 1978), pp. 13– 31. Quoted in ibid., p. 16. Quoted in ibid., p. 20. In the Quarto version the Fool’s words are spoken by Lear himself. This adds a metadramatic twist to the lines, since the actor playing Lear would be pointing self-referentially at himself as shadow (another term for player). Stephen Greenblatt, Introduction, King Lear, The Norton Shakespeare (New York: Norton, 1997), p. 2307. See Welsford, The Fool, pp. 255–6. See Goldsmith, Wise Fools, p. 65: ‘Walking clear-eyed into the stormy night and to his probable death on the heath, he comes as close as any fool ever does to the heroic.’

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Lear’s Fool

207

57 See Willeford, The Fool and His Sceptre, p. 9. 58 Ibid., pp. 57ff. In the following I draw on Willeford’s perceptive comments on the physicality of the fool. 59 Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (London: Faber and Faber, 1967), p. 70. 60 Montaigne, ‘On Democritus and Heraclitus’, The Complete Essays, 1: 50, p. 340. 61 Simon Critchley, On Humour (London: Routledge, 2002), p. 51. 62 Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, p. 45. 63 Kiernan Ryan, Shakespeare (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 1989), p. 99. 64 Ibid., p. 99. 65 Theodore B. Leinwand, ‘Conservative Fools in James’s Court and Shakespeare’s Plays’, Shakespeare Studies, 19 (1987), 232. 66 See Zijderveld, Reality in a Looking-Glass, pp. 92–130. 67 See G. Wilson Knight, ‘King Lear and the Comedy of the Grotesque’ (1949), in Janet Adelman (ed.), Twentieth Century Interpretations of King Lear: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1978), pp. 34–49. 68 See Philip Thomson, The Grotesque, The Critical Idiom (London: Methuen, 1972). 69 Spivack, The Comedy of Evil, p. 28. 70 Provine, Laughter, p. 191. 71 Ibid., p. 193. 72 Ibid., pp. 202ff. 73 Quoted in Critchley, On Humour, p. 93. 74 Wilson Knight, ‘King Lear’, pp. 48–9. 75 See Thomas De Quincey, ‘On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth’ (1823), in D. F. Bratchell (ed.), Shakespearean Tragedy (London: Routledge, 1990), pp. 139–42. 76 Susan Snyder, The Comic Matrix of Shakespeare’s Tragedies: Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Othello, and King Lear (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979). On King Lear see pp. 137–79. 77 See Holderness, Potter, and Turner, Shakespeare: The Play of History, pp. 89–118. 78 Ibid., p. 96. 79 Ibid., p. 111. 80 See Ryan, Shakespeare, for an overview of the critical debate about the function of tragedy, pp. 67–72. 81 See Robert N. Watson, ‘Tragedy’, in A. R. Braunmuller and Michael Hattaway (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 301–51. Also see G. K. Hunter, ‘Shakespeare and the Traditions of Tragedy’, in Stanley Wells (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 123–41, as well as Danson, Shakespeare’s Dramatic Genres. 82 Ryan, Shakespeare, p. 71. I am indebted to Ryan’s thoughts on the play, though my own arguments take a somewhat different turn to his. 83 For these insights I am indebted to W. R. Elton, ‘Shakespeare and the Thought of His Age’, in Wells (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare Studies, pp. 17–34.

208

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

84 85 86 87

Shakespeare and laughter

See Terry Eagleton, Sweet Violence: The Idea of the Tragic (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003). See Greenblatt, Introduction, King Lear, pp. 2312–13. Montaigne, ‘On Diversion’, Complete Essays, 3:4, p. 942. Ibid., p. 945. Emphasis in the original.

1

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Select bibliography

Agnew, Jean-Christophe, Worlds Apart: The Market and the Theatre in Anglo-American Thought, 1550–1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986) Allen, Don Cameron, ‘The Rehabilitation of Epicurus and His Theory of Pleasure in the Early Renaissance’, Studies in Philology, 41:1 (1944), 1–15 Allen, E. Sprague, ‘Chesterfield’s Objection to Laughter’, Modern Language Notes, 38 (1923), 279–87 Altman, Joel B., The Tudor Play of Mind: Rhetorical Inquiry and the Development of Elizabethan Drama (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970) Anselment, Raymond A., ‘Betwixt Jest and Earnest’: Marprelate, Milton, Marvell, Swift and The Decorum of Religious Ridicule (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979) Apte, Mahadev L., Humor and Laughter: An Anthropological Approach (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985) Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics, trans. H. Rackham, The Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994) ——Parts of Animals, trans. A. L. Peck (London: William Heinemann, 1937) ——Poetics, trans. Stephen Halliwell, The Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995) Bacon, Francis, Essays (London: Penguin, 1985) Bakhtin, Mikhail, Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984) Barber, C. L., Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy: A Study of Dramatic Form and its Relation to Social Custom (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959) Barish, Jonas, The Antitheatrical Prejudice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981) Barton, Anne, ‘“As You Like It” and “Twelfth Night”: Shakespeare’s Sense of an Ending’, in Malcolm Bradbury and David Palmer (eds), Shakespearian Comedy, Stradford-upon-Avon Studies, 14 (London: Edward Arnold, 1972), pp. 160–80 ——‘Love’s Labour’s Lost’, in Harold Bloom (ed.), William Shakespeare: Comedies

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

210

Select bibliography

and Romance: Modern Critical Views (New York: Chelsea House, 1986), pp. 113–31 ——‘The Synthesizing Impulse of A Midsummer Night’s Dream’, in Harold Bloom (ed.), William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Modern Critical Interpretations (New York: Chelsea House, 1987), pp. 7–13 Bates, Catherine, Play in a Godless World: The Theory and Practice of Play in Shakespeare, Nietzsche and Freud (London: Open Gate Press, 1999) Bateson, Gregory, ‘A Theory of Play and Fantasy’, in Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution, and Epistemology (London: Intertext, 1972), pp. 177–93 Belsey, Catherine, ‘Making Histories’, in Graham Holderness (ed.), Shakespeare’s History Plays: Richard II to Henry V, New Casebooks (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992), pp. 103–20 Berger, Harry, Jr, The Absence of Grace: Sprezzatura and Suspicion in Two Renaissance Courtesy Books (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000) ——Second World and Green World: Studies in Renaissance Fiction-Making (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988) Berger, Peter L., Redeeming Laughter: The Comic Dimension of Human Experience (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1997) Bergson, Henri, ‘Laughter’, in Wylie Sypher (ed.), Comedy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1956), pp. 61–190 Berry, Edward, ‘Laughing at “Others”’, in Alexander Leggatt (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Shakespearean Comedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 123–38 Berry, Ralph, ‘Twelfth Night: The Experience of the Audience’, in Shakespeare and the Awareness of the Audience (London: Macmillan, 1985), pp. 63–74 Billington, Sandra, A Social History of the Fool (Brighton: The Harvester Press, 1984) Booth, Stephen, ‘Shakespeare’s Language and the Language of Shakespeare’s Time’, Shakespeare Survey, 50 (1997), 1–17 Bourdieu, Pierre, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977) Bowen, Barbara (ed.), One Hundred Renaissance Jokes: An Anthology (Birmingham, Ala.: Summa Publications, 1988) Boyle, Marjorie O’Rourke, ‘Gracious Laughter: Marsilio Ficino’s Anthropology’, Renaissance Quarterly, 52 (1999), 712–41 Bradbrook, M. C., The Growth and Structure of Elizabethan Comedy (London: Chatto & Windus, 1955) ——’Robert Armin and Twelfth Night’, in D. J. Palmer (ed.), Shakespeare, Twelfth Night: A Casebook (London: Macmillan, 1972), pp. 222–43

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Select bibliography

211

——Shakespeare: The Poet in His World (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1978) Bradley, A. C., ‘Feste the Jester’, in D. J. Palmer (ed.), Shakespeare, Twelfth Night: A Casebook (London: Macmillan, 1972), pp. 63–71 ——‘The Rejection of Falstaff ’, Oxford Lectures on Poetry, in G. K. Hunter (ed.), Shakespeare, Henry IV Part I and II: A Casebook (London: Macmillan, 1979), pp. 56–78. Brathwait, Richard, The English Gentlewoman (Amsterdam: Da Capo Press, 1970) Brewer, Derek, ‘Prose Jest-Books Mainly in the Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries in England’, in Jan Bremmer and Herman Roodenburg (eds), A Cultural History of Humour: From Antiquity to the Present Day (Cambridge: Polity, 1997), pp. 90–111 Bright, Timothy, A Treatise of Melancholie (Amsterdam: Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, 1969) Bristol, Michael D., Big-Time Shakespeare (London: Routledge, 1996) ——‘Theatre and Popular Culture’, in John D. Cox and David Scott Kastan (eds), A New History of Early English Drama (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), pp. 231–48 Brown, Pamela Allen, Better a Shrew than a Sheep: Women, Drama, and the Culture of Jest in Early Modern England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003) Bryson, Anna, From Courtesy to Civility: Changing Codes of Conduct in Early Modern England (Oxford: Clarendon, 1998) Burckhardt, Jacob, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, trans. S. G. C. Middlemore (London: Penguin, 1990) Burke, Peter, The Fortunes of the Courtier: The European Reception of Castiglione’s Cortegiano (Cambridge: Polity, 1995) ——‘Frontiers of the Comic in Early Modern Italy, c. 1350–1750’, in Jan Bremmer and Herman Roodenburg (eds), A Cultural History of Humour: From Antiquity to the Present Day (Cambridge: Polity, 1997), pp. 61–75 ——Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (London: Temple Smith, 1978) Burton, Robert, The Anatomy of Melancholy, ed. Thomas C. Faulkner, Nicolas K. Kiessling, and Rhonda L. Blair (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989) Caillois, Roger, Man, Play, and Games, trans. Meyer Barash (New York: The Free Press of Glencoe, 1961) Calderwood, James L., Metadrama in Shakespeare’s Henriad: Richard II to Henry V (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979) ——Shakespearean Metadrama: The Argument of the Play in Titus Andronicus, Love’s Labour’s Lost, Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Richard II (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1971) Callaghan, Dympna, ‘“And all is semblative a woman’s part”: Body Politics and

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

212

Select bibliography

Twelfth Night’, in R. S. White (ed.), Twelfth Night, New Casebooks (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996), pp. 129–59 Carlyle, Thomas, From ‘On Heroes and Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History’, in G. B. Tennyson (ed.), A Carlyle Reader: Selections from the Writings of Thomas Carlyle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), pp. 387–406 Carroll, William C., The Great Feast of Language in Love’s Labour’s Lost (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976) Cassirer, Ernst, The Individual and the Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy, trans. Mario Domandi (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2000) Castelvetro, Lodovico, Castelvetro on the Art of Poetry, Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies 29 (Binghamton, NY: Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, State University of New York, 1984) Castiglione, Baldesar, The Book of the Courtier, trans. Charles S. Singleton, ed. Daniel Javitch (New York: Norton, 2002) Chambers, E. K. (ed.), The Elizabethan Stage, 4 vols (Oxford: Clarendon, 1923) Chapman, Anthony J., ‘Social Aspects of Humorous Laughter’, in Anthony J. Chapman and Hugh C. Foot (eds), Humour and Laughter: Theory, Research and Applications (London: John Wiley, 1976), pp. 155–85 Cicero, De oratore, trans. E. W. Sutton (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1942) ——On Obligations (De officiis), trans. P. G. Walsh (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000) Cohen, Ted, Jokes: Philosophical Thoughts on Joking Matters (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999) Colie, Rosalie L., Paradoxia Epidemica: The Renaissance Tradition of Paradox (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966) Collinson, Patrick, The Birthpangs of Protestant England: Religious and Cultural Change in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988) ——‘Ecclesiastical Vitriol: Religious Satire in the 1590s and the Invention of Puritanism’, in John Guy (ed.), The Reign of Elizabeth I: Court and Culture in the Past Decade (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 150–70 ——The Elizabethan Puritan Movement (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967) ——The Reformation (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2003) Cook, Ann Jennalie, ‘Audiences: Investigation, Interpretation, Invention’, in John D. Cox and David Scott Kastan (eds), A New History of Early English Drama (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), pp. 305–20 Cox, John D., Shakespeare and the Dramaturgy of Power (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989) Crawford, Patricia and Sara Mendelson, Women in Early Modern England 1550–

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Select bibliography

213

1720 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998) Critchley, Simon, On Humour (London: Routledge, 2002) Crockett, Bryan, The Play of Paradox: Stage and Sermon in Renaissance England. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995) Curtius, Ernst Robert, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953) Danson, Lawrence, Shakespeare’s Dramatic Genres, Oxford Shakespeare Topics (Oxford; Oxford University Press, 2000) Davidson, Clifford, ‘“What hempen home-spuns have we swagg’ring here?” Amateur Actors in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and the Coventry Civic Pageants’, Shakespeare Studies, 19 (1987), 87–99 Davis, Natalie Zemon, Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1975) Dawson, Anthony B. and Paul Yachnin, The Culture of Playgoing in Shakespeare’s England: A Collaborative Debate (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001) De Quincey, Thomas, ‘On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth’, in D. F. Bratchell (ed.), Shakespearean Tragedy (London: Routledge, 1990), pp. 139–42 Dent, R. W., ‘Imagination in A Midsummer Night’s Dream’, in Anthony Price (ed.), Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream: A Casebook (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1983), pp. 124–42 Diehl, Huston, Staging Reform, Reforming the Stage: Protestantism and Popular Theater in Early Modern England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997) Dolan, Frances E. (ed.), William Shakespeare, The Taming of the Shrew: Texts and Contexts (Boston: Bedford Books, 1996) Eagleton, Terry, Sweet Violence: The Idea of the Tragic (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003) Eco, Umberto, ‘The Frames of Comic “Freedom”’, in Thomas A. Sebeok (ed.), Carnival! (Berlin: Mouton, 1984), pp. 1–9 ——The Name of the Rose, trans William Weaver (New York: Harcourt, 1983) Eire, Carlos M. N., War Against the Idols: The Reformation of Worship from Erasmus to Calvin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986) Elam, Keir, Shakespeare’s Universe of Discourse: Language-Games in the Comedies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984) Elias, Norbert, The Civilizing Process: The History of Manners and State Formation and Civilization, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994) Elton, W. R., ‘Shakespeare and the Thought of His Age’, in Stanley Wells (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 17–34 Empson, William, The Structure of Complex Words (London: Chatto & Windus, 1979) Erasmus, Desiderius, Apophthegmes, trans. Nicholas Udall (Amsterdam: Da Capo Press, 1969)

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

214

Select bibliography

——Collected Works of Erasmus: Adages, vol. 31, trans. Margaret Mann Phillips; Vol. 32 and Vol. 33, trans. R. A. B. Mynors (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1989–91) ——Collected Works of Erasmus: Colloquies, Vol. 40, trans. Craig. R. Thompson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977) ——Collected Works of Erasmus: De civilitate morum puerilium: On Good Manners for Boys, Vol. 25, trans. Brian Macgregor (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985), pp. 269–89 ——Collected Works of Erasmus: Praise of Folly, Vol. 27, trans. Betty Radice (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1986) Evans, Gareth Lloyd, ‘Shakespeare’s Fools: The Shadow and the Substance of Drama’, in Malcolm Bradbury and David Palmer (eds), Shakespearian Comedy (London: Edward Arnold, 1972), pp. 142–59 Evans, Malcolm, Signifying Nothing: Truth’s True Contents in Shakespeare’s Text (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1989) Fletcher, Anthony, Gender, Sex and Subordination in England 1500–1800 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995) Foucault, Michel, The Order of Things, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Tavistock, 1970) Foyster, E., ‘A Laughing Matter? Marital Discord and Gender Control in Seventeenth-Century England’, Rural History, 4:1 (1993), 5–21 Freccero, Carla, ‘Politics and Aesthetics in Castiglione’s Il Cortegiano: Book III and the Discourse on Women’, in David Quint, Margaret W. Ferguson et al. (eds), Creative Imitation: New Essays on Renaissance Literature in Honor of Thomas M. Greene, Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies Vol. 25 (Binghamton, NY: Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, State University of New York, 1992), pp. 259–79 Freedman, Barbara, Staging the Gaze: Postmodernism, Psychoanalysis, and Shakespearean Comedy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991) Freud, Sigmund, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, trans. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1960) Galbraith, David, ‘Theories of Comedy’, in Alexander Leggatt (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Shakespearean Comedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 3–17 Garner, Shirley Nelson, ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream: “Jack shall have Jill; / Nought shall go ill”’, Women’s Studies, 9 (1981), 47–63 Gilman, Ernest B., The Curious Perspective: Literary and Pictorial Wit in the Seventeenth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978) Goldsmith, Robert Hillis, Wise Fools in Shakespeare (East Lansing, Mich.: Michigan State University Press, 1955)

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Select bibliography

215

Greaves, Richard L., Society and Religion in Elizabethan England (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1980) Greenblatt, Stephen, Introduction, King Lear, The Norton Shakespeare (New York: Norton, 1997), pp. 2307–16 ——Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Oxford: Clarendon, 1988) Greene, Thomas M., ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost: The Grace of Society’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 22 (1971), 315–28 Greif, Karen, ‘Plays and Playing in Twelfth Night’, in Harold Bloom (ed.), William Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night: Modern Critical Interpretations (New York: Chelsea House, 1987), pp. 47–60 Griffiths, Trevor, Comedians (London: Faber and Faber, 1976) Guazzo, Steeven, The Civile Conversation, trans. George Pettie (London: Constable and Company, 1925) Gurr, Andrew, Playgoing in Shakespeare’s London, third edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004) ——The Shakespearean Stage 1574–1642, third edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992) Haigh, Christopher, English Reformations: Religion, Politics, and Society under the Tudors (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993) Harris, Tim (ed.), Popular Culture in England, c. 1500–1850 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995) Hawkes, David, Idols of the Marketplace: Idolatry and Commodity Fetishism in English Literature, 1580–1680 (New York: Palgrave, 2001) Hawkes, Terence, Shakespeare’s Talking Animals: Language and Drama in Society (London: Edward Arnold, 1973) Hazlitt, W. Carew, Studies in Jocular Literature: A Popular Subject More Closely Considered (London: Elliot Stock, 1890) Helgerson, Richard, Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago: (University of Chicago Press, 1992) Herrick, Marvin T., ‘The Theory of the Laughable in the Sixteenth Century’, The Quarterly Journal of Speech, 35:1 (1949), 1–16 Hill, Christopher, Society and Puritanism in Pre-Revolutionary England (London: Secker & Warburg, 1964) Hillman, David, ‘Puttenham, Shakespeare, and the Abuse of Rhetoric’, Studies in English Literature, 36 (1996), 73–90 Hodgdon, Barbara, The End Crowns All: Closure and Contradiction in Shakespeare’s History Plays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991) Hoeniger, F. David, Medicine and Shakespeare in the English Renaissance (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1992)

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

216

Select bibliography

Holderness, Graham, Shakespeare Recycled: The Making of Historical Drama (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992) ——Shakespeare: The Histories (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000) Holderness, Graham, Nick Potter and John Turner, Shakespeare: Out of Court: Dramatizations of Court Society (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1990) ——Shakespeare: The Play of History (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988) Horkheimer, Max and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002) Howard, Jean E. and Phyllis Rackin, Engendering a Nation: A Feminist Account of Shakespeare’s English Histories (London: Routledge, 1997) Huizinga, Johan, Erasmus and the Age of Reformation, trans. F. Hopman (Mineola, N. Y.: Dover Publications, 2001) ——Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture (Boston: The Beacon Press, 1955) Hull, Suzanne W., Chaste, Silent and Obedient: English Books for Women 1475–1640 (San Marino: Huntington Library, 1982) Hunter, G. K., ‘Shakespeare and the Traditions of Tragedy’, in Stanley Wells (ed.), Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 123–41 Huston, J. Dennis, Shakespeare’s Comedies of Play (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981) Hutton, Ronald, The Rise and Fall of Merry England: The Ritual Year 1400–1700 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994) Ingram, Martin, ‘Reformation of Manners in Early Modern England’, in Paul Griffiths et al. (eds), The Experience of Authority in Early Modern England (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996), pp. 47–88 Jardine, Lisa, Still Harping on Daughters: Women and Drama in the Age of Shakespeare. (Brighton: Harvester, 1983) Javitch, Daniel, Poetry and Courtliness in Renaissance England (Princeton University Press: Princeton, 1978) Jonson, Ben, Every Man in His Humour, in Volpone and Other Plays, ed. John Pitcher (London: Penguin, 1998) ——Three Comedies, ed. Michael Jamieson (London: Penguin, 1966) ——Timber, or Discoveries, in The Works of Ben Jonson, ed. C. H. Herford and Percy and Evelyn Simpson, Vol. 8 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1947) Joubert, Laurent, Treatise on Laughter, trans. Gregory David de Rocher (University, Ala.: University of Alabama Press, 1980) Kaiser, Walter, Praisers of Folly: Erasmus, Rabelais, Shakespeare (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1963)

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Select bibliography

217

Kastan, David Scott, Shakespeare After Theory (New York: Routledge, 1999) Kelly-Gadol, Joan, ‘Did Women Have a Renaissance?’, in Renate Bridenthal and Claudia Koontz (eds), Becoming Visible: Women in European History (Boston: Houghton Miffin, 1977), pp. 139–64 Kelso, Ruth, Doctrine for the Lady of the Renaissance (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1956) Kemp, William, Kemps Nine Daies Wonder: Performed in a Daunce from London to Norwich, with an Introduction and Notes by the Rev. Alexander Dyce (New York: Johnson Reprint Corporation, 1968) Kinney, Arthur F. (ed.), Markets of Bawdrie: The Dramatic Criticism of Stephen Gosson, Elizabethan and Renaissance Studies, (Salzburg: Institut für Englische Sprache, 1974) Knight, G. Wilson, ‘King Lear and the Comedy of the Grotesque’, in Janet Adelman (ed.), Twentieth Century Interpretations of King Lear: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1978), pp. 34–49 Knights, L. C., ‘Time’s Subjects: The Second Part of Henry IV ’, in G. K. Hunter (ed.), Shakespeare, Henry IV Part I and II: A Casebook (London: Macmillan, 1979), pp. 174–86 Koestler, Arthur, ‘Humour and Wit,’ Encyclopaedia Britannica, fifteenth edition (Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1977) Kolve, V. A., The Play Called Corpus Christi (London: Edward Arnold, 1966) Lake, Peter with Michael Questier, The Antichrist’s Lewd Hat: Protestants, Papists and Players in Post-Reformation England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002) Le Goff, Jacques, ‘Laughter in the Middle Ages’, in Jan Bremmer and Herman Roodenburg (eds), A Cultural History of Humour: From Antiquity to the Present Day (Cambridge: Polity, 1997), pp. 40–53 Leggatt, Alexander, English Stage Comedy 1490–1990: Five Centuries of a Genre (London: Routledge, 1990) Leinwand, Theodore B., ‘Conservative Fools in James’s Court and Shakespeare’s Plays’, Shakespeare Studies, 19 (1987), 219–37 Levao, Ronald, Renaissance Minds and Their Fictions: Cusanus, Sidney, Shakespeare (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985) McDonald, Russ, Shakespeare and the Arts of Language, Oxford Shakespeare Topics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001) Magnusson, Lynne, ‘Language and Comedy’, in Alexander Leggatt (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Shakespearean Comedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 156–78 Malcolmson, Christina, ‘“What You Will”: Social Mobility and Gender in Twelfth Night’, in Valerie Wayne (ed.), The Matter of Difference: Materialist Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991), pp. 29–58

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

218

Select bibliography

Mangan, Michael, A Preface to Shakespeare’s Comedies: 1594–1603 (London: Longman, 1996) Manley, Lawrence (ed.), London in the Age of Shakespeare: An Anthology (London: Croom Helm, 1986) Maslen, R. W., Shakespeare and Comedy, The Arden Critical Companions (London: Thomson Learning, 2006) Mayer-List, Irene, ‘Lachen’, Geo, August 1997, 8–29 Mazzeo, Joseph Anthony, ‘Castiglione’s Courtier: The Self as a Work of Art’, in Renaissance and Revolution: The Remaking of European Thought (London: Methuen, 1965), pp. 131–60 Meredith, George, ‘An Essay on Comedy’, in Wylie Sypher (ed.), Comedy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1956), pp. 3–57 Montaigne, Michel de, The Complete Essays, trans. M. A. Screech (London: Penguin, 1987) Montrose, Louis A., ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream and the Shaping Fantasies of Elizabethan Culture: Gender, Power, Form’, in Margaret W. Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan, and Nancy J. Vickers (eds), Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), pp. 65–87 ——‘Curious-Knotted Garden’: The Form, Themes, and Contexts of Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost (Salzburg: Institut für Englische Sprache und Literatur, 1977) ——‘The Purpose of Playing: Reflections on a Shakespearean Anthropology’, Helios, 8 (1980), 51–74 ——The Purpose of Playing: Shakespeare and the Cultural Politics of the Elizabethan Theatre (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996) ——‘“Sport by Sport O’erthrown”: Love’s Labour’s Lost and the Politics of Play’, in Gary Waller (ed.), Shakespeare’s Comedies (London: Longman, 1991), pp. 56–72 More, Thomas, A Dialogue of Comfort Against Tribulation, in Louis L. Martz and Frank Manley (eds), The Complete Works of St Thomas More, Vol. 12 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976) Morreall, John (ed.), The Philosophy of Laughter and Humor (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1987) Mulkay, Michael, On Humour: Its Nature and Its Place in Modern Society (Cambridge: Polity, 1988) Neely, Carol Thomas, ‘Broken Nuptials in Shakespeare’s Comedies’, in Peter Erickson and Coppélia Kahn (eds), Shakespeare’s ‘Rough Magic’: Renaissance Essays in Honor of C. L. Barber (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1985), pp. 61–72 Nelson, T. G. A., Comedy: The Theory of Comedy in Literature, Drama, and Cinema (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990)

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Select bibliography

219

Newman, Karen, Fashioning Femininity and English Renaissance Drama (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991) Nietzsche, Friedrich, The Birth of Tragedy, trans. Douglas Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000) O’Connell, Michael, ‘The Idolatrous Eye: Iconoclasm, Anti-Theatricalism, and the Image of the Elizabethan Theater’, English Literary History, 52:2 (1985), 279–310 Olson, Glending, Literature as Recreation in the Later Middle Ages (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982) Patterson, Annabel, Shakespeare and the Popular Voice (Cambridge, Mass.: Basil Blackwell, 1989) Peacham, Henry, The Complete Gentleman, The Truth of Our Times, and The Art of Living in London, ed. Virgil B. Heltzel (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1962) Perkins, William, A Direction for the Government of the Tongue According to Gods Word, (London, 1593) ——The Foundation of Christian Religion: Gathered into Sixe Principles (London, 1595) ——The Whole Treatise of the Cases of Conscience (London, 1606) Pfister, Manfred, ‘Beckett, Barker, and Other Grim Laughers’, in Manfred Pfister (ed.), A History of English Laughter: Laughter from Beowulf to Beckett and Beyond (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2002), pp. 175–89 ——‘Laughter in Early Modern England’, Beyond Philology, 2 (2002), 147–64 Plato, The Republic, trans. Desmond Lee (London: Penguin, 1955) Poole, Kristin, Radical Religion from Shakespeare to Milton: Figures of Nonconformity in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000) Popkin, Richard H., The History of Scepticism from Erasmus to Spinoza (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979) Postman, Neil, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (New York: Penguin Books, 1985) Prescott, Anne Lake, ‘Humanism in the Tudor Jestbook’, Moreana, XXIV, 95– 6 (Nov. 1987), 5–16 Provine. Robert R., Laughter: A Scientific Investigation (London: Faber and Faber, 2000) Prynne, William, Histriomastix, ed. Arthur Freeman (New York: Garland, 1974) Puttenham, George, The Arte of English Poesie, ed. Gladys Doidge Willcock and Alice Walker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970) Quintilian, The Institutio Oratoria of Quintilian, trans. H. E. Butler (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1966) Rackin, Phyllis, Stages of History: Shakespeare’s English Chronicles (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990) Radcliffe-Brown, A. R., ‘On Joking Relationships’, in Structure and Function in Primitive Society (London: Cohen & West, 1952), pp. 90–104

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

220

Select bibliography

Reay, Barry, (ed.), Popular Culture in Seventeenth-Century England (London: Croom Helm, 1985) ——Popular Cultures in England 1550–1750 (London: Longman, 1998) Rebhorn, Wayne, A., Courtly Performances: Masking and Festivity in Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1978) Rhodes, Neil, Elizabethan Grotesque (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980) Richards, Jennifer (ed.), Early Modern Civil Discourses (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003) Righter, Anne, Shakespeare and the Idea of the Play (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1962) Ryan, Kiernan, ‘The Future of History in Henry IV’, in Nigel Wood (ed.), Henry IV Part One and Two, Theory in Practice (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1995), pp. 92–125 ——Shakespeare (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 1989) Schmidt, Alexander, Shakespeare Lexikon and Quotation Dictionary (Berlin: Georg Reimer, 1902) Screech, M. A., Laughter at the Foot of the Cross (London: Allen Lane The Penguin Press, 1997) Screech M. A. and Ruth Calder, ‘Some Renaissance Attitudes to Laughter’, in A. H. T. Levi (ed.), Humanism in France at the End of the Middle Ages and in the Early Renaissance (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1970), pp. 216– 27 Segal, Erich, Roman Laughter: The Comedy of Plautus (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1968) Shakespeare, William, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, ed. Harold F. Brooks, The Arden Shakespeare (London: Methuen, 1979) ——King Henry IV Part 1, ed. David Scott Kastan, The Arden Shakespeare (London: Thomson Learning, 2002) ——King Henry IV Part 2, ed. A. R. Humphreys, The Arden Shakespeare (London: Methuen, 1966) ——King Lear, ed. R. A. Foakes, The Arden Shakespeare (London: Thomson Learning, 1997) ——Love’s Labour’s Lost, ed. H. R. Woudhuysen, The Arden Shakespeare (London: Thomson Learning, 1998) ——The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen et al. (New York: Norton, 1997) ——Twelfth Night, ed. J. M. Lothian and T. W. Craik, The Arden Shakespeare. London: Routledge, 1975) Sidney, Sir Philip, An Apology for Poetry, or The Defence of Poesy, ed. R. W. Maslen (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002) Siegel, Paul N., ‘Malvolio: Comic Puritan Automaton’, in Maurice Charney

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Select bibliography

221

(ed.), Shakespearean Comedy (New York: New York Literary Forum, 1980), pp. 217–30 Skinner, Quentin, ‘Hobbes and the Classical Theory of Laughter’, in Hobbes and Civil Science, Vol. 3 of Visions of Politics, 3 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 142–76 Snyder, Susan, The Comic Matrix of Shakespeare’s Tragedies: Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Othello, and King Lear (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979) Spivack, Bernard, Shakespeare and the Allegory of Evil: The History of a Metaphor in Relation to His Major Villains (New York: Columbia University Press, 1958) Spivack, Charlotte, The Comedy of Evil on Shakespeare’s Stage (Rutherford: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 1978) Stallybrass, Peter, ‘The World Turned Upside Down: Inversion, Gender and the State’, in Valerie Wayne (ed.), The Matter of Difference: Materialist Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991), pp. 201–20 Stoppard, Tom, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (London: Faber and Faber, 1967) Stott, Andrew, Comedy, The New Critical Idiom (New York: Routledge, 2005) Stubbs, Philip, Anatomy of the Abuses in England, ed. Frederick J. Furnivall, The New Shakespere Society Publications, 1877–79. (Vaduz: Kraus Reprint, 1965) Swain, Barbara, Fools and Folly During the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1932) Tave, Stuart M., The Amiable Humorist: A Study in the Comic Theory and Criticism of the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960) Taylor, Charles, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989) Taylor, Gary, ‘The Fortunes of Oldcastle’, Shakespeare Survey, 38 (1985), 85–100 ——Reinventing Shakespeare: A Cultural History from the Restoration to the Present (London: The Hogarth Press, 1990) Temple, William, ‘Of Poetry’, in J. E. Spingarn (ed.), Critical Essays of the Seventeenth Century, Vol. 3 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1908), pp. 73–109 Thirsk, Joan, Economic Policy and Projects: The Development of a Consumer Society in Early Modern England (Oxford: Clarendon, 1978) Thomas, Keith, ‘The Place of Laughter in Tudor and Stuart England’, Times Literary Supplement, 21 Jan. 1977, 77–81 ——‘Work and Leisure’, Past & Present, 29 (1964), 51–62 Thompson, R., ‘Popular Reading and Humour in Restoration England’, Journal of Popular Culture, 9.3 (1975), 653–71

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

222

Select bibliography

Thomson, Philip, The Grotesque, The Critical Idiom (London: Methuen, 1972) Tiffany, Grace, ‘Puritanism in Comic History; Exposing Royalty in the Henry Plays’, Shakespeare Studies, 26 (1998), 256–87 Trafton, Dain A., ‘Politics and the Praise of Women: Political Doctrine in the Courtier’s Third Book’, in Robert W. Hanning and David Rosand (eds), Castiglione: The Ideal and the Real in Renaissance Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), pp. 29–44 Turner, Victor, From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play (New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1982) ——‘Liminal to Liminoid, in Play, Flow, and Ritual: An Essay in Comparative Symbology’, Rice University Studies, 60:3 (1974), 53–92 Verberckmoes, Johan, Laughter, Jestbooks and Society in the Spanish Netherlands (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999) Vives, Juan Luis, The Education of a Christian Woman: A Sixteenth-Century Manual, ed. Charles Fantazzi (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000) ——The Passions of the Soul: The Third Book of De Anima et Vita, trans. Carlos G. Norena, Studies in Renaissance Literature Vol. 4. (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen, 1990) Wardroper, John (ed.), Jest upon Jest: A Selection from the Jestbooks and Collections of Merry Tales Published from the Reign of Richard III to George III (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970) Watson, Robert N., ‘Tragedy’, in A. R. Braunmuller and Michael Hattaway (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 301–51 Weimann, Robert, Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition in the Theater (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978) Welsford, Enid, The Fool, His Social and Literary History (London: Faber and Faber, 1935) Whigham, Frank, Ambition and Privilege: The Social Tropes of Elizabethan Courtesy Theory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984) White, Paul Whitfield, ‘Calvinist and Puritan Attitudes Towards the Stage in Renaissance England’, Explorations in Renaissance Culture, 14 (1988), 41–56 Wickberg, Daniel, The Senses of Humor: Self and Laughter in Modern America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998) Wiles, David, Shakespeare’s Clown: Actor and Text in the Elizabethan Playhouse (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987) Willeford, William, The Fool and His Scepter: A Study in Clowns and Jesters and Their Audience (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1969) Williams, Bernard, ‘Plato’, in Ray Monk and Frederic Raphael (eds), The Great Philosophers: From Socrates to Turing (London: Phoenix, 2000), pp. 47–92

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Select bibliography

223

Wilson, F. P., ‘The English Jestbooks of the Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 2 (1938–39), 121–58 Wilson, John Dover, ‘Riot and the Prodigal Prince’, in G. K. Hunter (ed.), Shakespeare, Henry IV Parts I and II: A Casebook (London: Macmillan, 1979), pp. 92–101 Wilson, Richard, ‘The Management of Mirth: Shakespeare via Bourdieu’, in Jean Howard and Scott Cutler Shershaw (eds), Marxist Shakespeares (London: Routledge, 2001), pp. 159–77 ——Will Power: Essays on Shakespearean Authority (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993) Winnicott, D. W., Playing and Reality (London: Tavistock Publications, 1971) Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Culture and Value: A Selection from the Posthumous Remains, ed. G. H. von Wright, trans. Peter Winch (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998) Womack, Peter, ‘Imagining Communities: Theatres and the English Nation in the Sixteenth Century’, in David Aers (ed.), Culture and History 1350–1600: Essays on English Communities, Identities and Writing (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992), pp. 91–145 Woodbridge, Linda, Women and the English Renaissance: Literature and the Nature of Womankind, 1540–1620 (Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1984) Woodhouse, J. R., Baldesar Castiglione: A Reassessment of The Courtier (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1978) Wright, Louis B., Middle-Class Culture in Elizabethan England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1958) Wrightson, Keith, English Society 1580–1680 (London: Hutchinson, 1982) Yachnin, Paul, Stage-Wrights: Shakespeare, Jonson, Middleton, and the Making of Theatrical Value (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997) Yeo, Eileen and Stephen (eds), Popular Culture and Class Conflict 1590–1914: Explorations in the History of Labour and Leisure (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1981) Young, David P., Something of Great Constancy: The Art of ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966) Zall, P. M. (ed.), A Hundred Merry Tales and Other English Jestbooks of the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1963) ——(ed.), A Nest of Ninnies and Other English Jestbooks of the Seventeenth Century (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1970) Zijderveld, Anton C., Reality in a Looking-Glass: Rationality through an Analysis of Traditional Folly (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982) ——‘The Sociology of Humour and Laughter’, special issue of Current Sociology/La sociologie contemporaine, The Journal of the International Sociological Association/Association Internationale de Sociologie, 32: 3 (Winter 1983), 1–103

1

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Index absolutist rule 21, 183 admiratio 60 Adorno, Theodor W. 78−80 Agnew, Jean-Christophe 139 Alexander the Great 142 Alleyn, Edward 93 Amazon.com 11 Ambrose, St 130 Anderson, Benedict 78 anthropology 6, 63 applause 137 Aquinas, Thomas 61, 161, 190 Aristotle (and Aristotelianism) 2, 8, 15, 19, 28, 52−61, 71−2, 118, 128−30, 134, 144, 161, 170−1, 189, 201 Armin, Robert 95−9, 102 art concealing art 16−17, 23 As You Like It 108 asceticism 135 Auden, W.H. 169 audiences 138 Augustine, St 119−20, 140, 172, 190 authoritarian regimes 183 Babington, Gervase 135 Bacon, Francis 25, 61, 133, 147 Bakhtin, Mikhail 63−5, 68, 73, 150, 170, 193−4 Bale, John 133, 148 Barber, C.L. 72, 114 Barton, Anne 78, 115 Bateson, Gregory 82

bathos 196 Bedford, Countess of 27 Bembo, Pietro 21 Benedictine Rule 131 Berger, Harry 16, 31−2 Bergson, Henri 9 Berry, Ralph 115−16 Beza, Theodor 133 Biblical texts 25, 28, 62, 121, 128−31, 150, 162, 169 ‘Big Brother’ 163 Bishop’s Injunction (1599) 147 bisociation 6 black humour 199−200 Borde, Andrew 109 Bourdieu, Pierre 18 Bowen, Barbara 103 Bradley, A.C. 157 Braithwait, Richard 24−9 Brandt, Sebastian 173 Brechtian theory 121 Bright, Timothy 52−3 Bristol, Michael 67 Bryson, Anna 19 buffoons 57, 95 Burbage, Richard 93, 97 Burke, Peter 64−5 Burton, Robert 54 Caillois, Roger 21 Caius, John 66 Calvin, John (and Calvinism) 129, 132−4, 144−5, 162, 184 Camden, William 61

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Index

Carleton, George 146 Carlyle, Thomas 11 carnival and the carnivalesque 63−8, 79, 99, 131, 147−50, 169−71, 189 Cartesian dualism 69 cartoons 183 Cartwright, William 100 Cassirer, Ernst 172 Castelvetro, Lodovico 60 Castiglione, Baldassare 4, 15−17, 21−3, 27−32, 36−7 Catholic Church 183−4 charivari 63, 65, 75 Chesterfield, Lord 9−10 chimpanzees 56 Christianity 55, 128, 130, 140, 161, 169, 175−6, 180−1, 189−90, 201−2 Chrysostom, St John 129−31, 162 Cicero 16−17, 20−1, 58−9, 121, 141 city comedies 139 clowns 5, 94−100, 182 Cobham, Lord 148−9 Colie, Rosalie 178 Collinson, Patrick 132−3, 146−7 comedians 5, 23, 85, 93−100, 104, 151−2, 156, 193−4, 198 Comedians 184−7 comedy 119−23, 140−3, 158−60, 203 commedia dell’ arte 33−4 commodity fetishism 161 conduct literature 1, 17, 26 conversation 28−9 Copley, Anthony 101−2 Counter-Reformation 184 courtesy manuals 15, 19, 28

225

courtliness 16, 31−2, 38−9, 42 Cousins, Norman 199 Critchley, Simon 193−4 Crocker, Bryan 138 cross-dressing 8 cuckoldry 102−5, 108, 152−3 Cusanus see Nicholas of Cusa Danson, Laurence 58 deconstructionism 172 Dekker, Thomas 101−2 Democritus 58 Dent, R.W. 82 De Quincey, Thomas 200 dissimulation 23−4, 30, 34 Donatus 57 Dorp, Martin 179−80 Easter laughter 131 Ecclesiasticus 19 Eco, Umberto 128, 169−71 Elias, Norbert 17−20, 69 Elizabeth I 132, 137, 145 Enlightenment, the 17−18, 128 entertainment culture 11, 163 Epicureanism 61, 175−6 epidemics of laughter 63 Erasmus of Rotterdam 4−5, 18−19, 26, 56, 60−1, 69−70, 94, 98−9, 111, 131, 171−84, 190, 202 Eucharist debate 132 Falstaff, character of 5, 97, 99, 148−60, 163 Feast of Fools 63−4, 131 feminism 72, 102 festivals and festivities 63−75, 79, 114, 123, 131, 149 Ficino, Marsilio 55, 61, 175

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

226

Shakespeare and laughter

Finck, Werner 183 Fletcher, John 94, 100 Folly (in Erasmus) 173−81, 190−1 fools in real life and in the theatre 197−8 wisdom of 5, 94−100, 109, 171, 173, 180, 184, 198 Foucault, Michel 25 Foxe, John 132, 148−9 Fracastoro, Girolamo 60 free will 144 Freud, Sigmund 9, 17, 69, 72, 103 Galenic thought 53−5 gallows humour 7 Giberti, Gian Matteo 133 Globe Theatre 94, 98 goliards 96 Gosson, Stephen 134, 138−43 Gouge, William 24 Graham, Billy 162 Greene, Thomas 45 Grimaldi, Joseph 100 Grindal, Edmund 66, 145 Guazzo, Steeven 29 guilds 67−8 Gurr, Andrew 93 habitus 18 Hall, Joseph 135 Hamlet 93−4, 97, 141, 192 Harington, Sir John 21 Harris, Tim 67 Harvey, Gabriel 24 Hatton, Sir Christopher 145 Hawkes, David 161 Hazlitt, William Carew 100

hedonism 157 Helgerson, Richard 99 Henry IV, Parts 1 and 2 148−60 see also Falstaff, character of Henry V 148−9 Henry V 8, 81 Herbert, George 180 Heywood, John 62 Hierocles of Alexandria 101 Hitler, Adolf 183 Hobbes, Thomas 8−10, 57, 108 Hoby, Sir Thomas 16 Holbein, Hans 2, 173 Holinshed, Raphael 148 holy days 63 Homer 142 Hooker, Richard 145 Horace 136, 144, 177 Horkheimer, Max 78−80 Howard-Brown, Rodney 11 Huizinga, Johan 7, 121 Hull, Suzanne 105 humanism 55−6, 70, 100, 106, 121, 130, 176, 184, 202 humour (as understood by Umberto Eco) 171 see also sense of humour Hutcheson, Francis 8−10 Hutton, Ronald 65 Huxley, Aldous 162 idolatry 160−1 imagery 37, 76 incongruity theory of laughter 8−10, 60 inversionary customs 64−5, 70−3, 79, 105, 197, 200 James I 78, 131, 188 Jardine, Lisa 27, 31

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Index

Javitch, Daniel 21 jestbooks 5, 60−2, 97−109, 183−4 jesters 95 jesting 15−16, 22−4, 30, 38, 42−5, 54, 60, 100−1, 130, 133, 135 anticlerical 183 Jesus Christ 55, 61−2, 128−31, 176, 180 jigs 93−4, 98, 157 Johnson, Samuel 12, 191−2 Jonson, Ben 71−3, 96, 113, 117, 148 Joubert, Laurent 52−5, 69−70 Kaiser, Walter 174−5, 181 Kant, Immanuel 9 Katherine of Aragon 27 Kelly-Gadol, Joan 27 Kelso, Ruth 26 Kemp, Will 5, 93−9, 102, 133, 151, 154, 157 King Lear 5, 100, 187−204 Knight, G. Wilson 198, 200 Koestler, Arthur 6, 105 Kris, Ernst 77 Lake, Peter 138 ‘laughing at’ and ‘laughing with’ 151 laughter aesthetics of 7, 27, 55 ambiguous nature of 6, 178, 182 ambivalence about 52, 61−2 analgesic effect of 199−204 as a defence mechanism 199 and delight 118 and distancing 151

227

as an end in itself 158, 163 causes of 52−3, 56, 59, 118−19 changing perceptions of 1−2, 27−8 commodification of 162−3 control of 69 definitions of 5, 10−11, 52, 57, 59, 140 early modern attitudes to 52, 60 Erasmus’s view of 19, 70, 179 evolutionary basis for 6 functions of 4−9, 22, 47, 57, 107, 143, 185 history of 9−12 performative nature of 23 professionalization of 95 in real life and in the theatre 3, 11−12, 57, 119, 151 recreational aspect of 7, 16, 45, 60, 182 as a social phenomenon 6, 20, 22, 57, 62−3, 78, 106−7, 117, 142 theories of 4, 8−10, 56−62, 103 therapeutic value of 53−6, 109, 199 ‘learned ignorance’ concept 179−80, 183, 190−1 Leicester, Earl of 133 Leinwand, Theodore 197−8 leisure activities 67 Levao, Ronald 119 literalism 82, 120, 151, 160−1 Lodge, Thomas 139 Lollardism 148−9 London 68, 139−40, 146 Lord Chamberlain’s Men 97−9, 149

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

228

Shakespeare and laughter

Lord of Misrule tradition 95−6, 114, 136, 149 Love’s Labour’s Lost 3−4, 15, 25−6, 32−48, 77, 158 Lucian 171 Luther, Martin 25, 184 Lyly, John 27, 34, 47, 147 Macbeth 200 Macdonald, Russ 25−6 malapropism 36 manners 4, 17−26, 31, 45, 65−6, 69−70, 131, 136 market economy 161, 173 Marlowe, Christopher 93 Marprelate, Martin 146−50, 157 Marsus, Domitius 59 mass culture 79 Measure for Measure 1, 113 The Merchant of Venice 2−3 Meredith, George 115 A Midsummer Night’s Dream 70−86 monastic life 131 Montaigne, Michel Eyquem de 2, 78, 184, 193, 202−4 Montrose, Louis 78 morality plays 121, 156, 198, 200 More, Sir Thomas 1−2, 4, 26, 60−2, 69, 101, 106, 181 Morecambe, Eric 1 Much Ado About Nothing 61 Mulcaster, Richard 26 Mulkay, Michael 182−3 Munday, Anthony 147 mystical thought 180 Nancel, Nicolas 53, 63 Nashe, Thomas 134, 147, 156 Neoplatonism 120, 144−5,

161−2, 172, 175−6, 190 New Historicism 72−3, 143 Newman, Karen 27 Nicholas of Cusa 5, 171−2, 179 Nietzsche, Friedrich 170−2, 193, 200 nihilism 202 nominalism 25, 170 norms 17, 60, 105−8, 118, 131, 170−1, 200 reversal of 188−90 O’Connell, Michael 132 Oldcastle, Sir John 148−9, 157 oratory 58−60, 177 Origen 190 Orwell, George 162 Othello 155 Ovid 17, 70 pamphleteering 146−7 paradox 179 Pattensen, Henry 2 Patterson, Annabel 73 Paul, St 62, 128−9, 178, 180 Peacham, Henry 19 Pembroke, Countess of 27 Perkins, William 108−9, 129−30, 133−7 Petrarch 101 Pico della Mirandola, Comte 144 Plato 25, 55−9, 118−19, 130, 140−2, 174, 183 Plautus 119 play attitudes to 159−60, 163 definition and nature of 7, 21−2, 120−1, 176 Plutarch 101, 144 poetry 7, 21, 142−4

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Index

Poggio Bracciolini, Gian Francesco 60, 101 Poole, Kristen 148, 150 portraiture 1 Postman, Neil 162−3, 174 postmodernism 128 Presbyterianism 145 Preston, Thomas 80 Provine, Robert 6, 11, 20, 56, 199 Prynne, William 129, 131, 137−8, 160−1 Punch 100 puns 102 Puritanism 5, 66, 102, 113−17, 129−40, 145−52, 157−63, 173, 184 Puttenham, George 21 Quintilian 58−9 Rabelais, François 65, 115 Rastell, John 62, 101 Reay, Barry 64 Reformation, English 132−3 relief theory of laughter 9 religion 11, 128−35, 163, 170 religious drama 121, 131−2 Renaissance thinking and attitudes 16, 20, 27, 55−60, 83, 101−3, 117−21, 179 rhetoric 24−6, 34, 37−8, 58−9, 121, 129, 138, 142, 145, 154 Righter, Anne 47, 120−1 Ryan, Kiernan 194, 202 sabbatarianism 66 satire 147, 150, 157−8, 171−4, 181−2 Schopenhauer, Arthur 9 Segal, Erich 67

229

Seneca 70 sense of humour 11, 107 serio ludere 171, 179 Sermon on the Mount 62, 128 Servetus, Michael 55 Sextus Empiricus 184 sexuality, control of 102 Shaftesbury, Earl of 10 Sidney, Sir Philip 7, 12, 27, 117−22, 139−45, 201 silence, virtues of 28−9, 104−5 Snyder, Susan 200 Socratic irony 179 speech 56 Spivack, Bernard 156 Spivack, Charlotte 198 spleen function 53 sprezzatura 16, 22−3, 32 Spurgeon, Caroline 11 Sterne, Laurence 11 Stoicism 175 Stoppard, Tom 192−4 Stowe, John 148 Stubbes, Peter 134−8 Synesius 171, 180 The Taming of the Shrew 54, 105 Tarlton, Richard 5, 93−9, 102−6, 119, 147, 156 Tate, Nathum 201 Taylor, Charles 134−5 Taylor, Gary 149 Taylor, John 101−2 Temple, Sir William 11 Tertullian 131, 140, 160−1 theatre 67−70, 78−85, 98, 120−1, 157−8 criticisms of 131−45, 148, 154, 160−3 Thomas, Keith 67

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

230

Shakespeare and laughter

Throckmorton, Job 146 Tiffany, Grace 150−1 tragedians 5 tragedy 57−8, 160, 201−3 transubstantiation 132 tricksters 73−5, 95, 155 Troilus and Cressida 2 Turner, Victor 79 Twelfth Night 3, 5, 53, 67, 94, 96, 107, 109−17, 122−3, 155, 198 Tyndale, William 25 Udall, Nicholas 54 urbanity 19−20, 31, 43, 59−60, 130 Vesalius 55 Vice, the 95, 97, 111, 156−9 Vives, Juan Luis 18, 27−8, 69 Vopiscus, Julius Caesar Strabo 58 Walsingham, Sir Francis 140 War of the Theatres 148 Warwick, Earl of 133 Weimann, Robert 68 Wells, Stanley 149 Welsford, Enid 100, 192 Whigham, Frank 22

Whitehead, A.N. 56 Whitgift, John 145 Wiles, David 96−9, 151 Wilkins, George 101−2 Willeford, William 192 Wilson, Richard 73 wit 4, 15−16, 20−35, 39−47, 58−61, 101, 111−12, 117, 179 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 7, 12, 106−8, 151 Womack, Peter 78 women behaviour of 27−31, 102 education of 26−7 humour about 102−5 ideal attributes of 30 role and status of 27, 31−2 and wit 26−33 Woodbridge, Linda 102−3 wordplay 23−6, 33, 37, 41−2, 46 work ethic 67, 114 Yachnin, Paul 80 Zall, P.M. 102 Zijderveld, Anton 96, 183 Zuni Indian clowns 65 Zwingli, Huldreich 132−5