[In the following excerpt, Zall traces the evolution of jests and puns in English printed materials beginning in the 1400s, examining in detail works from the seventeenth century.]

THE BLENDING OF WIT AND JEST

… [The] making of jestbooks became an industry in the seventeenth century, expanding with the development of a larger reading public. Jestbooks flourished throughout the land, feeding one upon another in a happy self-sustaining cycle. Badly printed, crudely written, they were welcome alike in parlor and pulpit, playhouse and pub. Aside from their value in sparkling conversation and repartee, they provided preachers with pithy parables, pundits with pungent wit, and a rising middle class with instant culture. It would not be surprising, then, if more people read jestbooks than read the works of Chaucer, Spenser, and Milton combined.

A legion of nameless hackwriters during the previous century had patiently turned out collections like A Hundred Merry Tales and The Jests of Skelton. In the seventeenth century they worked on quietly industrious as ever, with such results as are represented here by the Banquet of Jests and the books about Scogin, Tarlton, Peters, and Hind. But now came a new kind of jestbookmaker from a growing group of entertainers proud of their authorship and eager to capitalize on the advertising of their skills that would accrue from such popular publication. There were semi-professional entertainers also, university wits and impoverished gentlemen, for whom jest-books might have made the difference between abject and genteel poverty. The identifiable authors represented here, then, make up a highly diversified cast of characters:

Anthony Copley, impoverished gentleman, distant relative of Queen Elizabeth (but a secret agent in the service of the King of Spain), whose Wits, Fits, and Fancies provided a well-stocked larder for jestbookmakers throughout the century.

Robert Armin, comedian in Shakespeare's company, an innovator in comic acting, whose Nest of Ninnies used jests as a means to study comic character types.

George Wilkins and Thomas Dekker, among the foremost hackwriters of the day, for whom jestbooks were part of their stock in trade—and collaboration, as in Jests to Make You Merry, part of their way of life.

John Taylor the Water Poet, a professional entertainer in verse and prose, whose Wit and Mirth was another fruitful repository from which other writers, and he himself, drew for later books.

Robert Chamberlain, university wit of meager means, whose Conceits may well have been the first jestbook in English to specialize in puns.

Captain William Hicks, a pseudo-university wit, a tapster in an Oxford tavern, whose Oxford Jests applied the brevity of puns to the telling of tales.

Abel Boyer, lexicographer and pedant, whose Ingenious Companion, with its French and English texts on facing pages, made ingenious use of jests and, through its wide ranging selection, in effect recapitulated the history of jests to the end of the century.

This new breed of jestbookmaker brought a new approach to the writing of jests. Not content, as conventional jestbookmakers had been (and continued to be), with simply reprinting old jests and perhaps changing only names and places, they searched for new sources and reworked the old ones. Copley, for instance, translated a compendium of jests from the Spanish and added many more picked up during his travels on the Continent and in England. Dekker, Wilkins, and Armin exploited theatrical sources. Taylor, openly rejecting bookish sources, plucked his jests from the air of metropolitan London, while Chamberlain and Hicks plucked theirs from university common rooms and taverns. Still, the bulk of their jests were traditional, reworked in a more artful way.

The new approach was not innovative so much as representative of a different tradition of jests, one that we can call classical as distinct from the medieval tradition of conventional jestbooks. This distinction is less historical than stylistic, for the two traditions were coeval. Medieval jests, on the one hand, are discursive, diffuse, explanatory, and emphasize deeds rather than words. Classical jests are direct, concise, more subtle, and emphasize words rather than deeds. The difference is seen in this comparison between a classical jest from Copley and a Medieval jest from Scogin:

In the North of Ireland, where they eat but Oaten-cake bread, there was a Kern's mother, hearing that her son was slain in fight against the Englishmen, came the morrow after into the field, and finding her dead son there, after much moan and lamentation over him, she chanced to cast her eye aside and thereby espied a dead Englishman. Then up she rose and, much accursing our nation for the death of her son, in the end she stripped him of his apparel and chanced to find a stale loaf of bread in his breeches—which was of the provision he brought with him from the English pale—which after she had a good while well viewed and wondered at, in the end burst forth into fresh tears and said, “No marvel though my dear son be slain by one that voids so hard and huge a turd!”

(from Copley, Wits, Fits, and Fancies)

Scogin had a great Hare's skin that was new killed, and he went to a Wheatland that was an handful and a half high and did lay there a foul great Mard (they that can speak French can tell what a Mard is), and couched the Hare's skin over it, and set up the Hare's ears. And then he came to Oxford and said to them that used hunting that he had found a Hare sitting. They ran for their Greyhounds to kill the Hare, and Scogin went with them to the land where the Hare did sit. At last, one espied the ears and the head of the Hare and said, “So how!” “Stand you there,” said the other, “and give her the law of the game.”

Scogin got him home to Oxford, and one that came to see the game was bid to put up the Hare. And when he came almost at the Hare, “Up whore!” he said, “or I will prick you in the buttock by and by.” But the Hare did not stir. At last, when he came to the place, he thrust his staff at the Hare's skin and did turn it over, and under it was a great Mard. He returned again as if he had a flea in his ear to Oxford. “Why,” said they, “do you not put up the Hare?” “Go put her up yourself, with a vengeance,” said he and went home in a fury.

They that held the Greyhounds did marvel what he meant, and that Scogin was gone. They went to see where the Hare should sit, and they found a Hare's skin and a great Mard. “Well,” said they, “we can never beware of Scogin's mocks and jests. Would part of this Hare were in his mouth.” And so they departed. Whereby you may see that fair words make fools fain.

(from Scogin's Jests)

The differences seen here flourished side by side throughout the century, but there was a strong tendency for the medieval and classical elements to blend, combining the exuberant story-telling quality of the one with the concise economy of the other, producing a hybrid with roots centuries deep.

Typical of the ancestry of the medieval style was the collection of erotic stories called Milesian Tales that were extremely popular in the ancient world. Barbarian chiefs were shocked when they found that Roman legionaries carried such tales into battle, but by the eleventh century they were considered decent enough to hold a steady place in Peter Alphonso's Disciplina Clericalis, or Priest's Handbook. In this vehicle they were carried throughout the western world, wherever missionaries wandered, from Spain to Iceland. Embellished with appropriate moral taglines, they served as the root stock of every medieval preacher's collection of “exempla,” and every story-teller's collection of merry tales. Versified, they spread into more formal literature as fabliaux and, with the coming of printing, they were translated back into prose for jests in vernacular French, German, Spanish, and English.

Coeval with collections of such realistic, often scatalogical tales were collections of verbal wit accumulating especially in textbooks on the art of rhetoric, where rules for effective public speaking were illustrated by the practice of past masters. In an age when education consisted chiefly of rhetorical training, no educated man could escape being exposed to such examples as these, from Cicero's De Oratore: A citizen, hearing about the death of his neighbor, exclaims, “What a fool! Just as he starts making money he dies.” A politician, pointing graciously at his opponent, asks, “What does this noble man lack—except cash and character?” It was only a question of time before such examples would be accumulated for their own sakes as collections of bons mots, repartee, choice insults, and witty remarks. Some collections specialized, like the tenth-century manuscript now known as The Jests of Hierocles (about Hierocles rather than by him), consisting of one- or two-line profiles of an absent-minded professor: told that a friend's ancestors drank from a deep well, the hero says, “My, what long necks they had!” He meets a friend reported to have died, and the friend cannot convince him that the report had been exaggerated; our hero persists, “The man who told me so was much more reliable than you.”

During the Middle Ages, the more leisurely merry tales spread across the land while collections of concise, witty jests lay dormant. But the classical jests bloomed again in the Renaissance, especially after the appearance of Poggio Bracciolini's Facetiae in 1477. Poggio, discoverer of some of the finest classical manuscripts in northern Italy, renewed Cicero's emphasis on epigrammatic economy, applying it to both merry tales and witty sayings. Thus in sixty words we hear the wily father assuring the prospective suitor that his daughter is neither too young nor too innocent to wed, having already had three children by the parish clerk. And we hear of the sad husband whose wife has fallen into a rushing stream, looking for her upstream rather than downstream, because he knew her to be the most perverse woman alive. Disseminated more widely than ever thanks to printing, such pointed jests served subsequent generations of Humanists as a vehicle for wit and wisdom. Many of them, like Erasmus and More, turned classical epigrams into prose jests and prose jests into classical epigrams as a means to practicing a clean Latin style; others used merry tales as a vehicle for spreading “the new learning,” mixing classical wit and medieval tales for sweetness and light. Towards the end of the sixteenth century the cosmopolitan Copley had little trouble in quickly compiling 1125 classical jests for Wits, Fits, and Fancies.

The dramatic quality of the classical jest was of course congenial to theater people like Dekker, Wilkins, and Armin, with their knack for dialogue, irony, and colloquial language:

“Dear heart,” said a Gentleman to his bride, “shall we have our pleasure or our dinner first?”

“Do just as you like, dear, and then we can dine.”

(Poggio, Facetiae, 1477)

One called a Captain coward and said he had no heart. “It's no matter,” quoth the Captain, “I have legs.”

(Wilkins and Dekker, Jests to Make You Merry, 1607)

Their knack for scene and dialogue expanded simple jests into comic skits, modern “blackouts.” A jest of Copley's reads:

One being in danger of drowning, another standing on the shore said unto him, “Get to yonder stooping tree and you are safe.”

“Tut,” he answered, “tell not me of getting or gaining, for I care only to save myself at this time.”

Wilkins and Dekker's Jests to Make You Merry renders it thus:

A couple of Servingmen, having drunk hard in Southwark, came to take water about ten or eleven of the clock at night at Saint Maryovary's stairs. But the moon shining, and a puddle of water lying before them which they could not perfectly discern (without better eyes) by reason that their shadows hid it, one of them fell in, laboring with his hands and feet as if he had been a-swimming.

His fellow stood (so well as a man in his case could stand) looking upon him and said, “Art thou gone? Art thou gone? Jesus receive thy soul. Yet if thou canst but get the Temple stairs, there's some hope thou shalt do well enough.”

“Tush,” says the other that was down, “I look not to get. So I may save myself, I care for no more.”

Such skilful use of scenic detail boded well for the development of artistry in jests that would have combined the story-telling appeal of the medieval tradition with the style of the classical tradition.

But the wordplay of the classical tradition attracted popularity for its own sake. By 1639 Chamberlain's Conceits accumulated close to 150 one- or two-line puns: “Smiths of all handicraftsmen are the most irregular, for they never think themselves better employed than when they are addicted to their vices.” Little dramatic quality here, and no narrative, yet its brevity must have been considered ample compensation, and over the century we can see a developing preference generally for economy at any cost. The effect is apparent in this comparison:

Two Countrymen keeping company till night, it happened that one of the Countryman's heels were lighter than his head; and going under a Signpost this Countryman lifted his leg very high. The other demanded why he did so. He told him it was to go over the stile, and pointed to the Sign.

“Stile!” quoth his friend, “thou fool, it is a Sign!”

“A Sign?” quoth he. “What Sign?”

“Marry,” quoth he again, “a sign that thou art terribly drunk.”

(from A Banquet of Jests, 1633)

A drunken fellow coming by a shop asked a 'prentice boy what their sign was. He answered, it was a sign he was drunk.

(from A Choice Banquet of Witty Jests, 1660)

Those responsible for this kind of epitome were interested more in what was said than in how it was said, but fortunately there were also writers like Taylor, Hicks, and Boyer who tried for a more artful balance. They adapted the direct style and subtlety of classical jests to medieval jests, imposing order, point, and thus effective economy with happier results. And, incidentally, they developed a plain, simple narrative style that helped to prepare the tastes of a growing body of readers for the higher art of Defoe, Swift, and Fielding in the ensuing years. It is instructive that one of Boyer's best jests would hold place in the most influential jestbook of them all, Joe Miller's Jests (1739) with hardly any change:

A modest Gentlewoman being compelled to accuse her Husband of defect and being in the Court, she humbly desired the Judge that she might write what she durst not speak for Modesty. The Judge gave her that liberty and a Clerk was presently commanded to give her Pen, Ink, and Paper; whereupon she took the Pen without dipping it into the Ink, and made as if she would write. Says the Clerk to her, “Madam, there is no Ink in your Pen.”

“Truly, Sir,” says she, “that's just my Case, and therefore I need not explain myself any further.”

A style like this blends the best of the classical and medieval traditions.

There was a comparable development in integrating classical and medieval traditions in jest-biographies, those jestbooks that focused their jests on the words and deeds of one man. Diogenes Laertes' Lives of the Philosophers (Ca. 250 a.d.), a typical progenitor of the classical tradition, compiled all known anecdotes about historical figures like Diogenes the Cynic, providing us with such well-known jests, for example, as Diogenes warning a bastard who was throwing rocks into a crowded street, “Be careful, lad, the man you hit may be your father.” Written with the economy of classical jests, such episodes acquire a certain integrity from being focused on one consistent personality. By contrast, Howleglas (the English version of Til Eulenspiegel) makes no pretense of fact or integrity. A random collection of medieval jests is hung about the hero's neck, and he plays a variety of inconsistent roles—now a fool, then a shrewd peasant, next a rogue, and then a country bumpkin or a pilloried apprentice. The only element holding one jest to another, besides the hero, is his passage from the cradle to the grave. Scogin's Jests is representative of such medieval jest-biographies.

Armin's Nest of Ninnies is an attempt early in the century to bring some balance into jest-biographies, combining the conciseness and plausibility of the Lives of the Philosophers with the lively story-telling of Howleglas. Fortunately we have the Nest of Ninnies in three successive stages and can see how the author transformed it from an earlier jestbook entitled Foole upon Foole, achieving integrity of six different biographies by imposing upon them the linking dialogue between the cynical Puritan Sotto and the lively lady named World. By some such process as this, jest-biography was easily absorbed into fictional biography, a genre that became increasingly popular as the century wore on, culminating in Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders.

Meanwhile, however, more conventional jest-biography continued popular also. Tarlton's Jests and the books about Hind (No Jest Like a True Jest) and Peters, even though concerned with nationally known figures only recently dead, still mix traditional jests with historical fact. But when the jests are treated in a style associated with the classical tradition, they are given the appearance of historical truth, making such jest-biography a natural tool for propaganda. A mixture of jest and factual record could easily create a noble rogue or a vicious monster. The books about Hind, the Cavalier hero, and Peters, the Puritan regicide, are clear cases in point. Modern conceptions of both men derive from their jestbiographies, even though there is ample evidence to prove them calculated myths.

In random collections as well as in jest-biographies it became increasingly harder to separate man from myth, especially when their styles no longer gave a clue to which was which or who was who. Pseudonymous jestbooks continued popular, and so did the practice of assigning jestbooks to notorious figures like Long Meg of Westminster or Mother Bunch. But now in the boldness born of competition, booksellers carelessly assigned jestbooks to people still living, like the court jester Archee Armstrong. As with Hind and Peters, the myth has outlived the man and Archee's modern reputation as a jolly good fellow derives from his association with the Banquet of Jests—a mythical association spawning another myth, since Archee was neither jolly nor good nor the author of the Banquet of Jests.