1 Jests in Early Modern Culture Seminar Leader - Shakespeare ...

jesting spirit associated with Antonio and Sebastian when Stephano extracts the Jester Trinculo
from the body of Caliban, asking him how he came to be the excrement of such a curious
creature (3.1.106-7). And indeed the kind of disruptive homonymic jest heard memorably in
Love’s Labor’s Lost, and echoed later in an early scene of The Tempest, is heard rarely in the
latter play after the comic purgation of the Jester. While Caliban admittedly is not prone to
disruptive jesting, his freedom from the jesting spirit is appropriate; for as G. Wilson Knight and
others have shown, Shakespeare works to define in this character the foundation of the human,
which includes the capacities for dream, reason, the appreciation of music, and for selfunderstanding.
Maya Mathur, ‘“I would all the world might be cozened”: Policing Mirth in The Merry Wives of
Windsor’
A staple of classical treatises on rhetoric and medieval exempla, the formal jest acquired a
broader cast of characters and gained wider circulation in the Renaissance. In sixteenth-century
England, the publication and dissemination of jest books occurred during a period of heightened
social mobility. As a result, Tudor jokes often revealed the tensions that arose when divergent
groups of people came into contact with one another. These tensions are most apparent in the
“rogue literature,” a species of jest book which describes the schemes used by London’s vagrants
and beggars to dupe gullible citizens of their wages. Conservative in nature, the rogue pamphlets
condemned the poor and unemployed as habitual criminals in order to warn their readers against
extending charity to strangers.
Like the pamphlets, The Merry Wives of Windsor features the duplicitous vagrant, Sir John
Falstaff, who attempts to swindle the housewives, Mrs. Page and Mrs. Ford, of their husbands’
wealth. But despite its affinity with the rogue tracts, the play reverses the order of duper and
duped, so that the knight is ultimately bested at his own game. Merry Wives has consequently
been read as signifying the triumph of female chastity and social inclusiveness in the face of a
predatory outsider. In contrast, I wish to posit that Mrs. Page and Mrs. Ford draw on
contemporary jest books and popular pamphlets in order to target the knight for his financial
rather than his sexual profligacy. Accordingly, I maintain that, instead of serving as founts of
rural virtue, the wives deploy mirth in order to safeguard Windsor’s boundaries against a
dangerously-mobile economic intruder.
Rory McKeown, ‘Brevity, Wit, and Prosperity: The Reception of Jesting’
A jest’s prosperity lies in the ear
Of him that hears it, never in the tongue
Of him that makes it. (Love’s Labour’s Lost, 5.2.850-53)
Benedick’s suggestion that Beatrice had her “good wit out of The Hundred Merry Tales”
(2.1.117-18) is implausible but painful, but not only because of the audience’s sense that the
comic center of the play, and her powers of witty improvisation are continually on display”
(Munro, 92). Crucially, Beatrice’s wit, with rare exceptions, is formally distinct from the tales
and fabliaux of the jest-book; her wit, like Benedick’s, is improvisatory and generated as part of
an on-going engagement with her interlocutors, discursive rather than declamatory.
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