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

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esearch tools unavailable ten years ago. I present them here (for convenience, and with consequences we might come onto at the end) in the format of a jest-book. Helen M. Whall, ‘Timing Shakespeare’s Jests’ When Thomas Deloney introduced his 1583 Mirror of Mirth and Pleasant Conceits, he promised a collection of “clinches, bulls., quirkes, yerkes, quips and jerkes.” Shakespeare never wrote a clinch, a quirk, or a jerk. His bulls had horns and he only told two quips. On the other hand, despite our contemporary sense to the contrary, Shakespeare also never wrote a joke. Where Deloney’s terms had all but become archaic by the 1590s, the term “joke” lay a hundred years away. This paper will attempt to show that Shakespeare was keenly attuned to the transient nature of “jests,” an awareness first reflected in his insistent use of that term, then by his decision, more often than not, to link “jest” to “merry,” an already antiquated adjective. Jests, he implies, are rooted in a time gone by, in a time when “gests” were more complex entities than the “practical jokes” which would supplant them. Clearly, the playwright also knows that the merriment of jests can fade. In Much Ado About Nothing, Beatrice expresses outrage that Benedict accuses her of deriving her wit from the 1526 anthology, A Hundred Merry Talys. But much as Shakespeare’s work acknowledges the way time devours not just beauty but also humor, it demonstrates the search for what Prince Hal calls “a good jest for ever.” Good “jests” are more than “quips.” They are perfectly timed humorous incidents, not merely anecdotes or witty lines. The “played jest,” stage history also proves, has a much longer shelf-life than the merry tale. Though subject to decay, the jest can also benefit from the powers of metamorphosis. If a jest ceases to please, re-present it. If taming a shrew comes to offend an audience whose sensibilities are changing, introduce a shrew who need not be broken in Much Ado About Nothing. If making the Jew a butt of the jest risks too much in The Merchant of Venice, recast the role with “something of a Puritan” in Twelfth Night. And if a future looms in which happy brides will become silenced women while drunks are pitied as alcoholics, trust that the future will find their pleasure in the jests told by a fool who comes before Merlin but accompanies Lear. Jests, played under any name, may be subject to what aesthetics theorist Ted Cohen calls the “hermeneutics of joking,” but Shakespeare’s gifts as jester have, so far, kept his work and that word alive. Adam Zucker, ‘Jest-book Idiocy’ My essay will present the results of a research experiment I’ve set out for myself over the next few months. I hope to create a composite sketch of an early modern idiot by reading through a number of Tudor and Stuart jest books. My results will, of course, be bound by the formal contexts of the genre (that is to say, my composite will present the image of a “jest-book” idiot, rather than giving us some sort of accurate reflection of a real idiot), but I do believe there is something to be learned from this set of texts. What are the matrices – social, political, economic, aesthetic – that locate stupidity in a jest-book context? What kinds of relationships might this idiotic figure guarantee? Critique? Obscure? Is there something decidedly different – historically, logically, politically – about idiocy and its other, wit? Are the two necessarily bound to one another in a dialectic of competency and incompetence? Or might the abject idiot present a kind of limit case for our own intelligent analysis of humor and its historical/aesthetic purposes? My intention is to use this composite image as a lens through which to read several of 6
Shakespeare’s stupidest characters, but I’m not entirely sure I’ll have time to do that by February. Needless to say, this is the kind of essay that, at present, lacks a precise argument. With luck, I will be able to present one to you in writing this spring. I look forward to discussing this workin-progress with you. 7
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