This book examines laughter in the Shakespearean theatre, in the
context of a cultural history of early modern laughter. Aimed at an
informed readership as well as graduate students and scholars in
the field of Shakespeare studies, it is the first study to focus
specifically on laughter, not comedy. It looks at various strands
of the early modern discourse on laughter, ranging from medical
treatises and courtesy manuals to Puritan tracts and jestbook
literature. It argues that few cultural phenomena have undergone as
radical a change in meaning as laughter. Laughter became bound up
with questions of taste and class identity. At the same time,
humanist thinkers revalorised the status of recreation and
pleasure. These developments left their trace on the early modern
theatre, where laughter was retailed as a commodity in an emerging
entertainment industry. Shakespeares plays both reflect and shape
these changes, particularly in his adaptation of the Erasmian wise
fool as a stage figure, and in the sceptical strain of thought that
is encapsulated in the laughter evoked in the plays. -- .
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