A Cultural History of Comedy in the Early Modern Age

Andrew McConnell Stott, Andrew McConnell Stott, Eric Weitz

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781350187702
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: History

Drawing together scholars with a wide range of expertise across the early modern period, this volume explores the rich field of early modern comedy in all its variety. It argues that early modern comedy was shaped by a series of cultural transformations that included the emergence of the entertainment industry, the rise of the professional comedian, extended commentaries on the nature of comedy and laughter, and the development of printed jestbooks. It was the prime site from which to satirize a rapidly-changing world and explore the formation of new social relations around questions of gender, authority, identity, and commerce, amongst others. Yet even as it reacted to the novel and the new, comedy also served as a receptacle for the celebration of older social rituals such as May games and seasonal festivities. The result was a complex and contested mix of texts, performances, and concepts providing a deep tradition that abides to this day. Each chapter takes a different theme as its focus: form, theory, praxis, identities, the body, politics and power, laughter and ethics. These eight different approaches to early modern comedy add up to an extensive, synoptic coverage of the subject.

CHAPTER ONE

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Form

MEGAN HERROLD

To speak about “comic form” is to grapple with a tension in those terms juxtaposed. Comedy tends to push boundaries and defy expectations. While it can be defined alternatively as a genre, a mood, and a tone or attitude, that which is considered “comic” often turns on a sense of incongruity, a doubleness of perspectives or expectations that are humorously at odds.¹ In the early modern period, comic incongruity may be an ironic juxtaposition, as when Sir Thomas More, on ascending a rickety scaffold to be beheaded, tells his executioner, “I pray you, Mr. Lieutenant, see me safe up and for my coming down let me shift for myself” (Prescott 2011: 267). Or the incongruity may result in a play that pits human nature against social custom, as when queer desire naturally surfaces between two maids (played by boy actors) cross-dressed as shepherds and unable to marry in that state in John Lyly’s Gallathea (1592). Or consider the numerous times William Shakespeare famously plays with his audience’s expectations around theatrical conventions—conventions that he also helped shape. For example, Shakespeare uses a regent as comic relief when Macbeth’s King Duncan seems as unaware he is a character in a tragedy as he is oblivious to the “fog and filthy air” of the Scottish heath (1.1.13). Arriving at the Macbeths’ castle, he remarks that “This castle hath a pleasant seat; the air / Nimbly and sweetly recommends itself / Unto our gentle senses,” little expecting his impending death (1.6.1–3).

Looking more closely, however, the incongruity so integral to comedy in the examples above is often at odds with attempts to define its form. Does More’s witticism on the scaffold mark him as a comic or tragic figure, or is the line apocryphal, written later to fit with More’s reputation as a wit? Should we consider Gallathea a proper comedy if the marriage promoted at its close is only nominally heterosexual? And how can we reconcile the laughable naiveté of a king with the tragedy of an unjust regicide?

As it happens, the tension between comedy’s defiance of expectations on one hand and its formal conventions on the other has been in place since the earliest efforts to define it, yet they remain especially remarkable in the early modern period. For even as humanism ushered in new ways of understanding and organizing the world and the place of human beings within it, the aspects of the comic that resist definition and articulation—especially those that derive from oral cultures and folklore, from the bodily and the bawdy—pushed against attempts at delimiting the form comedy ought to take. This chapter will demonstrate how the attempts of various early moderns to theorize and define the comic often fell short of the thinker’s original goal when those theories were put into practice. To explore this dynamic, the chapter begins by outlining the various attempts to organize, define, and contain comic form, before pointing to those aspects of comedy that resist such confines and reveal the capaciousness of comedy in the period and in general.

CLASSICAL PRECEDENCE AND RECEPTION IN EARLY MODERN AESTHETIC THEORY

Theorists of comedy have long acknowledged that comic form is both imitative and innovative: although it often uses conventional plot tropes or character types, those conventions must be continually built on in ways that feel fresh and new. Ben Jonson articulates this dichotomy in his play Every Man Out of His Humour (1600) through the character Cordatus. Named as the “author’s friend” and the moderator of the play, Cordatus gives a genealogy of comedy derived from ancient models:

’tis extant, that that which we call “Comoedia,” was at first nothing but a simple and continued song, sung by one only person, till Susario invented a second; after him, Epicharmus a third; Phormus and Chionides devised to have four actors, with a prologue and chorus; to which Cratinus, long after, added a fifth and sixth: Eupolis, more; Aristophanes, more than they; every man in the dignity of his spirit and judgment supplied something. And, though that in him this kind of poem appeared absolute, and fully perfect, yet how is the face of it changed since, in Menander, Philemon, Cecilius, Plautus, and the rest! who have utterly excluded the chorus, altered the property of the persons, their names, and natures, and augmented it with all liberty, according to the elegancy and disposition of those times wherein they wrote!

—1: Induction, 241–52

In this list, Cordatus creates a family tree of comic development to argue that comic laws were not “delivered us ‘ab initio,’ and in their present virtue and perfection,” but rather were developed and refined over time. In fact, Cordatus extrapolates upon this conclusion by urging that comic authors (like Jonson) “should enjoy the same license, or free power to illustrate and heighten our invention, as they did; and not be tied to those strict and regular forms which the niceness of a few, who are nothing but form, would thrust upon us” (255). In celebrating both the study of classical precedence and the drive to innovate upon it, Jonson’s suggestion is perfect for a man like himself who ascended to literary renown despite the relatively modest class into which he was born. And despite having to countenance jibes regarding his lower-class upbringing throughout his literary career, Jonson is now acknowledged in the same breath as Shakespeare when we consider geniuses of early modern English stagecraft—especially in the art of comedy.

Jonson’s support in Every Man Out of His Humour for comedic innovation within the limits of convention also fits in with the Renaissance humanistic trend to align contemporary works in the vernacular with ancient comedic conventions and theories of poetics. However, the rediscovery of ancient texts had its limits when it comes to the genre of comedy. While Jonson’s lines articulate a legacy of comic writers and hint at Jonson’s place as the heir to their comic greatness, those specific comic innovations are harder to pin down than Jonson’s genealogy suggests. In fact, scholars have concluded that Cordatus’s speech concerning comic innovation is largely an invention. Aristotle himself in Poetics states that nothing of the subject of comedy is known definitively: “who introduced masks, prologues, various numbers of actors, and everything of that kind, has been lost” (1995: 45). Because comedies were not as well documented as tragedies, their titles, authors’ names, and awarded prizes are often all that remains of their legacy. Of those comic writers Cordatus names, the work of “Susario (Susarion of Megara)” is either entirely lost or the lines attributed to him likely apocryphal, while the works of Epicharmus of Kos, Cratinus, Eupolis, Philemon, and Caecilius Statius survive only in fragments (Jonson 2001: 126–8, n. 248ff–57).

Perhaps Jonson’s invented genealogy of comic writers attempts to recreate a portion of Aristotle’s lost treatment of comedy: the supposed sequel to Poetics. In Poetics, Aristotle touches on comedy mostly in relation to tragedy, promising to theorize the subject more fully in his future writing. But the work expounding this theory either never existed or has been lost. In 1839, however, the classicist J.A. Cramer published his discovery of the Tractatus Coislinianus, a tenth-century manuscript containing in outline a theory of comedy that he believed to be derived from this lost work of Aristotle. While the authoritative status of Cramer’s discovery has been debated since its first publication, the Tractatus does seem to rehearse and comment upon Aristotle’s theories of comedy articulated in Poetics, The Nicomachean Ethics, and Rhetoric.²

While Aristotle claims that all poetry stems from the innate human instinct for, and pleasure in, imitation, he distinguishes between the various forms that imitation may take as well as their relative value. Comedy differs from tragedy in terms of the morals and classes of the people it imitates: “the more serious produced mimesis of noble actions and the actions of noble people, while the more vulgar depicted the actions of the base” (1995: 39). The result of this distinction is that different emotions are provoked in the audiences witnessing the imitation. Famously, tragedy produces pity or fear when the tragic plot results in the hero’s reversal of fate: his trajectory from ignorance to knowledge corresponds with his reversal of situation in life. Oedipus, to take Aristotle’s example, begins his play as the king of Thebes but ends it in self-imposed exile and blindness, having learned he has inadvertently fulfilled the prophecy to which he was born: to kill his father and marry his mother. In contrast, comedy, in depicting the actions of baser men, focuses on a particular kind of non-tragic fault: what Aristotle terms the “laughable” as “something ugly and twisted, but not painfully” (45). That is, characters in comedy are not morally “bad” but merely ridiculous. Their errors do not bring about lasting pain or destruction, but rather give pleasure to the audience in their depiction.³

THE INSPIRATION BEHIND THE THEORIES: GREEK AND ROMAN COMEDY

Early theorists of comic form base their commentary on a body of work now largely lost to us. However, we do have extant copies of ancient Greek and Roman comedies themselves. Athenian comedy is largely divided into three periods: Old Comedy, represented by the eleven surviving plays of Aristophanes; Middle Comedy, now largely lost; and New Comedy, represented by fragments of plays by Menander. The Roman comedies that survive are the plays of Plautus and Terence, which were adapted from Greek works to suit Roman audiences. Because of the limitations we have on extant copies of individual plays, only one or two authors represents each period, making it impossible to avoid overemphasizing their influence. However, keeping these limitations in mind, it is possible to characterize each comic period in terms of the conventions of its representative playwrights.⁴ Renaissance humanists certainly characterized them as such—and so, after providing a broad outline of the traditions, I will point to examples from early modern drama that can be situated within each.

Ancient comedy was highly ritualistic, stemming from the fifth century BCE and performed in seasonal festivals held in honor of the god of wine, fertility, and madness—Dionysus/Bacchus. I will have more to say about comedy’s relationship with festival and disorder below, but for now, I will focus on the features of Old Comedy that allow us to see how it sparked the development of New Comedy. The eleven surviving plays of Aristophanes represent our only existing access points to Old Comedy and its emphasis on a mix of pointed political satire, comedy centering sexuality and scatology, and loosely related episodes featuring structured formal conventions beginning with a song (parados), followed by a rhetorical contest(s) (agon), and then the chorus’s direct address to the audience (parabasis). The play that fits this description well is The Clouds (424/3 BCE), a satire on Athenian philosophical trends that lampoons Socrates as the head of “The Thinkery,” a school that teaches its students how to measure the distance a flea can jump and win debates with second-rate arguments. In addition to mocking Socrates and the link between philosophy and pederasty, The Clouds subjects many others to ridicule. Aristophanes mocks his own baldness, his rival playwrights, and his audience, famously revising the play’s parabasis to feature the chorus commenting upon the play’s being awarded third place at its premiere at the Dionysia (Ruffell 2002).

An early modern English exemplar of Old Comedy’s satirical motifs is Ben Jonson. Indeed, his “Induction on the Stage” in Bartholomew Fair (1614) recalls Aristophanes’ willingness to call attention to his audience’s taste and decorum in the parabasis of The Clouds. In the Induction, Jonson’s “Stage-Keeper” and “Scrivener” employ legalese to enumerate the “Articles of Agreement” existing between “the Spectators or Hearers, at the Hope on the Bankside, in the County of Surry” and “the Author of Bartholomew Fair” before the play proper begins. Although playful, Jonson’s staged contract makes mention of various irritations Jonson likely encountered as a dramatist, including the tendency for audience members to “censure” his plays in terms disproportionate to the price they paid for a ticket: “marry, if he drop but six Pence at the Door, and will Censure a Crowns worth, it is thought there is no Conscience, or Justice in that” (4: Induction, 71–2). In addition to this instance of broad critique, Jonson’s forwardness as a pointed political satirist—also in line with Old Comedy precedence—at one point led to his imprisonment. Co-authored with George Chapman and John Marston in 1605, Jonson’s Eastward Ho! landed all three men in ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Series
• Title Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Notes on Contributors
• Series Preface
• Note on Texts
• Introduction
• 1 Form
• 2 Theory
• 3 Praxis
• 4 Identities
• 5 The Body
• 6 Politics and Power
• 7 Laughter
• 8 Ethics
• Notes
• References
• Index
• Copyright