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

In this paper, I use the genre of the jest-book to map out some of the important formal and social
conventions of wit in Shakespeare. Formally, Beatrice insists that wit be a mutual exercise, as
she complains bitterly that “You always end with jade’s trick” (1.1.138), disrupting the flow of
conversation. As to the matter of wit, Benedick insists – both in his slander against Beatrice and
in his suggestion that Claudio’s discourse is guarded by “fragments” and “old ends” – that it be
the product of the speaker’s mind, rather than conned.
In Much Ado About Nothing, the banter between most characters consists principally of brief
conversational turns, and conforms to a kind of banter that Jennifer Coates has dubbed “sparky
one-at-a-time”: an “interaction … composed of witticisms with loose semantic links and a
competitive edge” (Dynel, 245). This dynamic of witty back and forth also shares certain
features with what Bakhtin calls “stylization,” and while the analogy is not perfect, it is
suggestive. “Sparky one-at-a-time” banter requires that each conversational participant continue
the chain of semantic links, picking up what the other participants put down, overtly
appropriating their words, and re-fashioning them. In Bakhtin’s terms, stylization is the
use of someone else’s discourse for his own purposes, by inserting new semantic intention into a
discourse which already has, and which retains, an intention of its own. Such discourse, in
keeping with its task, must be perceived as belonging to someone else. (189)
As such, stylization minimizes the perlocutionary threat to interlocutors’ face, allowing jesting to
fulfill its paradoxical function of emphasizing the social ties between speakers, while asserting
the intellectual prowess of one speaker.
Significantly, it is Beatrice and Benedick, the two characters most explicitly concerned with
maintaining verbal decorum, who most frequently deviate from this pattern. Their frequent
longer-than-usual turns, as well as their tendency to deviate further in their invention, marks
them out as aggressive conversational partners who show less regard for the face of others. This
paper will consider the complex strategies they use both to regulate the speech of others and to
seek licence for their own deviations from conversational norms. More specifically, I examine
how Beatrice and Benedick seek to corner the market on wit and jesting, maximizing their profit
from it, and restricting others’ access to it.
Kirk Melnikoff, ‘Godly Leisure and the Merrie Conceited Iests of George Peele Gentleman’
With this essay, I intend to read the 1607 Merrie Conceited Iests of George Peele within the
context of early seventeenth-century popular piety. This short, anonymous jestbook has so far
been located in what Linda Woodbridge has called the “third phase” of English jestbooks, a
“reblossoming” sparked by Greene’s conycatching pamphlets of the early 1590s. It also has been
credited as the main source for Thomas Middleton’s 1607 satiric comedy The Puritan, or The
Widow Watling Street, its University Wit protagonist repackaged for the stage as the knavish
citizen scholar “George Pyeboard.” What has yet to be appreciated, however, are the
implications surrounding this anonymous jestbook’s publication history. Surprisingly, the Merrie
Conceited Iests (1607) launches an extensive series of religious publications by the London
booksellers Francis Faulkner and Henry Bell. Bell, the more prolific financier of the two,
specialized in texts by Calvinist writers and preachers. Between 1607 and 1616, he not only
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