Shakespeare and laughter: A cultural history

Introduction

A RECENT DAILY MIRROR 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 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:

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 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.

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. 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 reference 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 non-serious. 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.

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, 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 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 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 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