Shakespeare's Practical Jokes

About This Book

"There is a mountain of work on Shakespeare's comedies but very little on what, in all the plays, can be described as comic. Since the subject is too vast to be tackled head-on, it is considered in this book via a number of practical joke episodes, some of them well known - the deceptions Hal and Poins practice on Falstaff, the tricking of Malvolio or Parolles - and others a little less so (the "Induction" to The Taming of the Shrew, for example). In order to define more closely the many different kinds of comedy Shakespeare can find in the practical joke, comparisons are made with the use of the beffa in both Boccaccio and later Italian writers, and with similar episodes from the work of Jonson. Frequent references are also made to practical jokes as they occur in later literature or in our current popular culture and, since comedy in the theater is so dependent on performance, there is an ongoing concern with questions of staging.^ Throughout the book, there is a running argument with Freud and Bergson, still always cited (surprisingly enough) as the two chief authorities on the comic, but the views of more recent theorists, such as Simon Critchley (from England) or Peter L. Berger (from the United States), are also taken into account." "The nature of the comic is the chief concern of this book but there is also an engagement with some of the topics that have preoccupied Shakespeare critics in the last two decades. On an issue relevant to the debates between New Historicists and Cultural Materialists in recent Shakespearean criticism, there is an exploration of how far the humor in practical jokes is characteristically subversive of established authority; and since such jokes are in themselves exertions of power, there is some discussion of relatively recent feminist readings of the tricking of Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing, or the 'jokes" played on Kate in The Taming of the Shrew.^ In examining the role that cruelty plays in practical jokes (and in comedy in general), the degree to which any sense of humor that responds to their harsher elements is historically or culturally specific is also considered. There is an attempt to distinguish the practical joke from the evil stratagem and to come to terms with Auden's claim - particularly challenging for any student of the comic - that the best way to consider Iago is as a practical joker. Concentrating on this common theatrical device and familiar social phenomenon, this book is narrowly focused. Yet although the practical joke is in many ways such a humble comic device - "that most primitive form of humor," as a critic once called it - its implications for the role comedy plays in society are wide-ranging. A close study of its workings can illuminate both the general nature of comedy and the sharp particularities of Shakespeare's comic practice."--Jacket.