Abstract
The introduction sets out the purpose and aims of the book. By way of entrance into those, it first puts forward a discussion of the way in which some of the main humour theories can be applied to a test-case—the jesting of the fool in Shakespeare’s King Lear—exploring their uses and limits in that context. It then explains the purposes and disciplinary aims of the book: to begin mapping out the methodological problems involved in studying humour in history. It documents the emerging disciplinary convergence between humour studies and history and situates this volume within that convergence.
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Notes
- 1.
Reference here is to the text and line numbers of the third Arden edition of the play edited by R.A. Foakes, who provides a conflated text (of Q and F) leaning toward F’s readings. Citations from the play are given in brackets following quotes.
- 2.
See Shakespeare, King Lear, 200. For the text of the old jest as Shakespeare might have encountered it see Zall, 289–90, where it appears as number 59 of Tales and Quick Answers (c.1535).
- 3.
Hornback, English Clown Tradition, 12–13. Hornback points to the specifically ‘neoclassical’ character of the category ‘comic relief’.
- 4.
Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations, 86–93.
- 5.
See for instance, O’Callaghan, The English Wits, and Withington, ‘Tumbled into the Dirt’.
- 6.
For the former, see Brown, Better a Shrew, 16; for the latter, see Smyth, ‘Divines into Dry Vines’, 69–70.
- 7.
For the former, see Kaiser, Praisers of Folly, 99; for the latter, see Gatti, ‘Nonsense and liberty’.
- 8.
For SSTH, the seminal work is Raskin, Semantic mechanisms; for GTVH, Attardo and Raskin, ‘Script theory revis(it)ed’; for, OSTH, Raskin, et al., ‘How to Understand’.
- 9.
Raskin, et al., ‘How to Understand’, 288.
- 10.
Attardo and Raskin, ‘Script theory revis(it)ed’, 307–8.
- 11.
Ibid., 308. These oppositions can be described at different levels of abstraction.
- 12.
These are mentioned in Attardo and Raskin, ‘Script theory revis(it)ed’ 303–7; for further elaboration see Attardo, et al., ‘Script Oppositions and Logical Mechanisms’ and for an extended critique, see Oring, ‘Oppositions, Overlaps, and Ontologies’.
- 13.
Attardo and Raskin, ‘Script theory revis(it)ed’, 303.
- 14.
The OED traces it to the late seventeenth century. On jests and humour, see the helpful discussion in Smyth, ‘Divines into Dry Vines’, 59–62.
- 15.
Attardo and Raskin, ‘Script theory revis(it)ed’, 330–31.
- 16.
See Gurevich, ‘Bakhtin and his Theory’, 55–6.
- 17.
McGraw and Warren, ‘Benign Violations’, 1142.
- 18.
Freud’s concepts were developed in ‘The Joke’, and Bergson’s in ‘Laughter’.
- 19.
Bremmer and Roodenburg, A Cultural History, 1.
- 20.
Ibid., 7–8.
- 21.
Ibid.
- 22.
Halsall, Humour, History and Politics, 2.
- 23.
Examples include: Chey and Milner Davis, ‘Humour in Chinese Life and Culture’; Beard, ‘Laughter in Ancient Rome’; Halliwell, ‘Greek Laughter’.
- 24.
A very helpful review of a range of recent work on humour and cultural history can be found in the introduction to Westbrook and Chao, ‘Humour in the Arts’.
- 25.
For a skeptical approach, see in particular Conal Condren’s chapter herein.
- 26.
Morreall, Comic Relief, 6. For another discussion of the problems labelling historical thinkers as theorists of ‘superiority’, see Lintott, ‘Superiority in Humor Theory’.
- 27.
Lucy Rayfield, for instance, shows that, with respect to early modern theory about laughter and the ridiculous, the three categories are insufficient to account for the complexity of thought on the topic in this period.
- 28.
See Oring, ‘Joking Asides’, especially 1–99.
- 29.
See, for instance, Jamie Beckett’s chapter herein.
- 30.
Bown, In the Event of Laughter, 24.
- 31.
Gurevich, ‘Bakhtin and his Theory’, 58.
- 32.
Raskin, et al., ‘How to Understand’, 286–7.
- 33.
Ibid., 286.
- 34.
The HOP Network’s blog can be found at https://humoursofthepast.wordpress.com/.
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Derrin, D. (2020). Introduction. In: Derrin, D., Burrows, H. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Humour, History, and Methodology. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56646-3_1
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