SOURCE: Timpane, John. “‘I am but a foole, looke you’: Launce and the Social Functions of Humor.” In The Two Gentlemen of Verona: Critical Essays, edited by June Schlueter, pp. 189-211. New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1996.

[In the following essay, Timpane surveys the significance of humor in Renaissance society, particularly focusing on the character of Launce in Shakespeare's The Two Gentlemen of Verona.]

Humor performs a wide range of social functions, some of which contribute to the way in which social institutions reorganize. Humor keeps ideas in circulation; it can also generate new ideas, float hypothetical consensus, and clarify problems. Because it can do all these things, humor can be involved in the way people change their minds.

A test case is Launce of Two Gentlemen of Verona. Although one of the earliest, if not the very first, of Shakespeare's comic efforts, Launce nevertheless seems an assured performance within the kindred traditions of clown and fool.¹ Launce is an excellent example of how humor acts as a communal testing and teaching tool with the potential to contribute to social change.

Shakespeare's humorous characters are well known for corroborating themes and issues local to their plays. As many readers have felt, Launce teaches as much about love, pity, and human relations as any character in Two Gentlemen.² In his total (and totally unrequited) love for an uncaring dog, he is a very funny parallel to Valentine and his love for Sylvia. He is also a comic corrective to the inconstant Proteus. But Launce does much more. He also prompts thinking about male behavior, social organization, obedience, and language. These issues transcend any single play, and Launce's work with them amounts to social work. My argument is that Launce's social work contributed to the way Elizabethan society was changing in the 1590s. He fits into a set of practices—which today we call “humor”—that perpetually questions received ideas.

To explore the possible social functions Launce could have performed, let me conceive of humor in Shakespeare's theatre as a form of material exchange. Shakespeare and company are putting forth a product for which the audience pays money. What were they paying for? Nostalgia, for one thing, and all the ambivalence nostalgia suggests; silliness, for another, a particular way of seeing and subverting standards for human behavior; ambiguity, which calls on the mind to think for itself; and improvisation, an explosive challenge to normative ideas. These four elements characterize the Renaissance laugh. Shakespeare and company knew and exploited the audience's desire for them, in which project he was abetted by the original material conditions of performance. When Launce says, “I am but a foole, looke you” (3.1.263), he downplays his importance, but a closer look reveals how much there can be to laughing at something that is “only” a fool.

1. NOSTALGIA

Shakespeare never abandoned fools and clowns. He worked more with fools, and much more with court fools, than his contemporaries did.³ From Two Gentlemen of Verona to The Tempest, from Launce to Thersites to Autolycus, Shakespeare stayed with clowns and fools even when they had become a subject of ridicule by other writers and dramatists.⁴ Such idiosyncratic loyalty to clowns suggests a strong nostalgia for a simple, unified village communitarianism as opposed to a complex, disparate, urban commercialism.⁵

At first glance, nostalgia—from Greek words meaning “a longing to return home”—would seem to be the gentlest and most politically innocent of passions. If we consider nostalgia closely, however, especially in a comic figure such as Launce of Two Gentlemen of Verona, we may discover that its commercial exploitation actually helps promulgate potentially subversive alternatives to accepted ideas. Consider the material conditions surrounding Launce. A theatre is built as part of a nascent industry dedicated to the exploration of communal fantasies. Already there is a great deal of danger in that arrangement, as Philip Stubbes, the Council of London, the puritan theorists, and the players and writers themselves knew well. Onto the stage of that theatre staggers Launce, who incorporates many evocations of minstrelsy and foolery of an earlier age. Whoever may have played him—William Kempe, let us say, with Richard Cowley as Speed—was a master of just this sort of humor, time-tested, as popular in the city as in the provinces. Nostalgia is being bought and sold. Writer seeks to prosper from, and audience agrees to pay for, the evocation of a nostalgic catharsis.

Launce is a product of Shakespeare's anticipation of the audience's nostalgia for such figures. (He either knew or guessed that many in his audience felt displaced.) Kempe, a great clown, presents the audience with his personal version of Shakespeare's idea of what the audience wants: a funny, nostalgic fool, complete with the explosive, surprised humor that attends improvisation. (Kempe was far better-known than Shakespeare when and if he played this role; his own extensive and respected personal experience of minstrels, fools, rogues, and vagabonds is also for sale.) Actor, player, and audience are playing with group and personal experience.

In his first speech, Launce announces that “I have receiv'd my proportion, like the prodigious Sonne” (2.3.3-4). Malapropisms appeal to the audience not only for ridicule but also for happy identification with the malaprop, who portrays himself as the prodigal son out to make his way in the city (here, the Duke's court). Most beholders probably had read or heard stories and plays about country lads who came to London to be ruined, a popular moral cliché visible at least as early as the interlude Youth (1510), which the younger Shakespeare periodically echoes. Shakespeare here rings a change on this favorite theme. Plays like Youth and Hick Scorner concerned the power of Hatred, which has “made a vowe for ever to dwell in Englonde” (Hick Scorner 381). The city moralities embodied a conservative horror at the immoral tumult of urban life, the “Falshode, Favell, and Sotylte, / Ye, theves and hores … Lyers, bacbyters, and flaterers … Braulers, lyers, getters, and chyders, / Walkers by nyght, and grete murderers … Oppressers of people” (369-79).

In Launce, however, Shakespeare exorcises the freight of social conflict in the prodigal son motif. It's obvious that Launce won't be ruined: being a fool, he is impervious to ruin. In 3.1, Launce announces that he is in love with a “Milke-maid.” Despite his urban setting, the prodigious son falls for a symbol of the pastoral. A sweet moment, happily sweet, and rapidly punctured as the picture of this rich, toothless harridan fills out. All these are appeals to the audience to feel nostalgia for old, familiar types. Such catharsis is potentially subversive because, nostalgia being a longing for return home, its expression and exploitation suggest that writer and audience feel not at home in some important way. People make commerce out of saying they are displaced. They create, admire, and presumably identify with comic throwbacks. Such behaviors undermine their allegiance to the present order, in which each man is to stay in one place, do one thing, and be content. Nostalgia on this scale, packaged, locatable, repeatable, commodified, is a communal wish that things were otherwise. Nostalgia thus illustrates the doubleness of humor: it can aid in complacency and containment while probing and questioning normally invisible ideologies. A character that audiences find sympathetic, sweet, comfortable—like Launce—can elicit attitudes and behaviors that challenge what the audience members think they think.

2. SILLY HUMOR

“Blessed,” “childish,” “vulnerable,” “innocent,” “trivial”—in any sense, Launce is silly. Launce's devotion to Crab, his volunteering to be whipped and stocked in Crab's place, is very silly. When Proteus entrusts him with taking a dog as a present to Sylvia, he manages to have said dog “stolne from me by the Hangman boyes in the market place, and then I offer'd her mine owne, who is a dog as big as ten of yours, & therefore the guift the greater” (4.4.55-58), all of which is extremely silly, as well as embarrassing to the very serious Proteus.

Silliness feminizes,⁶ as is clear from the entire history of Western laughter, from the Commissioner of Lysistrata and Gelasimus of Stichus on up through Keaton, Chaplin, the Marx Brothers, and Monty Python's Flying Circus. Where men are generally expected to be centered, controlled, unpassionate, and strong, Launce, along with many silly clowns before and since, is centrifugal, disorganized, weepy, clumsy, and weak. Launce fits within what amounts to the great western mockery of the male, in which thousands of male clowns—think of Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon in Some Like It Hot—don dresses, speak in high voices, swivel hips, fret, complain, and are reduced to tears. Not to deny the deep-seated antifeminism in this tradition; only to acknowledge the reverse reciprocal, that silly humor solicits and interrogates what it is to be male.

Many Elizabethans tacitly supported the ideal of men as reserved, centered, and controlled. Such an ideal existed long before books such as Castiglione's Courtier codified it. Lewis, Count of Canosse, prescribes a “meane” for the courtier to follow, “betweene this excellent grace, and that fond foolishnes” (271).⁷ Men should be “lowly, sober, and circumspect” (275) and not act “as those lustie lads doe, that open their mouth and thrust out wordes at a venture they care not how” (276). Emphasis on restraint and control reaches a climax as the Count approaches his definition of “grace.” The respectable male

governeth him selfe with that good judgement that will not suffer him to enter into any folly: but let him laugh, dally, jest, and daunce, yet in such wise that he may alwaies declare him selfe to be wittie and discreete, and every thing that he doth or speaketh, let him doe it with a grace

(282)

Polonius may be a busy old fool, but his “precepts” to Laertes would not have been unfamiliar to the audience. Nor are they now:

                                                  Give thy thoughts no tongue,
Nor any unproportion'd thought his act,
Be thou familier, but by no meanes vulgar …
Give every man thine eare, but fewe thy voyce,
Take each mans censure, but reserve thy judgement

(1.3.59-61, 68-69)

Launce proposes alternatives. Whereas the Count and Polonius advise men to avoid situations that can render them emotionally exposed or vulnerable, Launce volunteers his feelings and lays himself open to punishment. His first line is “Nay, 'twill be this howre ere I have done weeping: all the kinde of the Launces, have this very fault” (2.3.1-3). Protestations of weeping bracket his opening monologue. Later, he announces that “He lives not now that knowes me to be in love, yet I am in love” (3.1.265-67). All the kind of the Launces—clowns, that is—do have the fault of being openly and violently emotional, from the complaining Dromios of Comedy of Errors, often weeping, often bested, pleading doglike for affection, to the now-jubilant, now-fearful Autolycus. Think of Harpo Marx, continually miming tears, laughter, and infatuation. Launce's protestations of excessive sorrow—“why man, if the River were drie, I am able to fill it with my teares: if the winde were downe, I could drive the boate with my sighes” (2.3.51-54)—would be clichés except that the cause is a dog rather than a person. Men with a surplus of labile, causeless emotion are comic.

As for vulnerability, Launce seeks it. His most heroic and silliest act is to be whipped instead of the farting Crab, “to take upon me a fault that he did” (4.1.14), which even he is aware is to be “one that takes upon him to be a dog indeede” (4.1.11-12). I hope the reader finds this funny, because, wonderful to say, it still is. For love of Crab, Launce will do things he knows are pointless, and he will share his feelings about them with anyone who will listen (no one on the stage, but everyone beholding the action). It has become a truism that the judgment in humor moves downward on the social scale,⁸ but, in fact, audience response to clowns is more complex than that. As discussed below, clowns judge themselves before the audience judges, thus rendering judgment redundant and freeing the audience to turn judgment in any social direction (toward peers, masters, powerful men and women). “Judgment” is a front for the testing of concepts central to the maintenance of culture. No audience would have laughed at Launce only out of scorn. Robert Weimann has shown that characters such as Launce call on the audience to laugh with as well as at them. In Two Gentlemen, he argues, laughing with the audience “serves, perhaps for the first time in Shakespeare's work, as an essential means of organizing, controlling and evaluating experience through a larger comic vision” (35).⁹ If Launce's appeals for delighted sympathy are successful, the audience will evaluate and reevaluate comic alternatives to the masculine codes of restraint.

That is, virtue lies in flying off the handle; sincere helplessness is superior to the facade of control. Such an alternative is crucial in a play exploring how men in love should act. Launce thus plays foil to at least two unfeeling males, the first being Crab: “now the dogge all this while sheds not a teare: nor speaks a word: but see how I lay the dust with my teares” (2.3.30-32). The second is Proteus, who, as Silvia tells him, “cannot love where he's belov'd” (5.4.44). Silvia and Valentine persuade Proteus to be true, not only to his most authentic feelings (his love for Julia), but also to the male standard of constancy: “It is the lesser blot modesty findes, / Women to change their shapes, then men their minds” (5.4.108-09). True, Launce adheres to a similar standard, since he is always true to Crab—but he flings it down and dances upon it where his master is concerned, and, in his constant laments about his authentic feelings, he explores (and invites the audience to explore, through laughter) some ways out of the emotional straitjacket prescribed for men.

Compare Launce with Pinky and Chiccolini (Harpo and Chico Marx) in Duck Soup during the scene with Edgar Kennedy as the tough-guy lemonade vendor.¹⁰ They trade hats with him, mimic him, and work that marvelous trick in which he ends up holding their legs. With his manhood under intimate attack, the vendor is reduced to a hilarious, frustrated horror. He's rougher and tougher, but the Marxes are more mobile, more aware, more open—as if in relinquishing masculinity they gain in humaneness and freedom.

Launce is definitely humane. Feminine qualities imposed on a male template allow him a scope that a non-humorous male can't have, which forces us to recognize something not much discussed. Although ideals of male strength and restraint dominate western social institutions, these ideals have long coexisted with uneasiness about the consequences of such restraint: the coldness, humorlessness, and lack of sympathy called for in masculine standards.

3. ESPIèGLERIE

Ambiguity can produce changed relations. A particular kind of ambiguous jesting, which I would like to call espièglerie, reached a peak in the sixteenth century. Espièglerie is polyvalent jesting in which ridicule is ambiguously distributed. An excellent example is jest 53 in Tales and Quicke Answeres (1535?), “Of hym that sayd he was nat worthy to open the gate to the kynge”¹¹:

As a kynge of Englande hunted on a tyme in the countie of Kent, he hapt to come rydynge to a great gate: whereby stode a husbande man of the countrey, to whom the kynge sayde: Good felowe putte open the gate. The man perceyvynge it was the kynge, sayde: No and please your grace, I am nat worthy: but I will go fetche mayster Couper that dwelleth nat past ii. myles hense, and he shal open to you the gate.

(sig. F.)

The compiler of Tales and Quicke Answeres usually appends some moral or summation to the jests, but none appears here. That's why it is one of the funniest printed jokes in the sixteenth century. This husbandman is either unbelievably stupid or unusually crafty. If the former, the joke is aimed at the husbandman and all stupid peasants. If the latter, the joke is aimed at the king and titled classes.

But in a practice seen throughout the century, the joke is constructed so that we cannot tell, revealing what Pierre Bourdieu has called “the double reality of intrinsically equivocal, ambiguous conduct.”¹² Bourdieu coins this phrase to describe how empowered classes disguise exploitation; I point the term in the other direction, to describe how the less powerful classes disguise resistance. For resistance, without a doubt, is in this jest. Whether the peasant is stupid or crafty, the king is left sitting alone on his horse, and the gate is still closed. Either he waits for a long time, or he gets down and opens the gate himself. Either way, his order has not been followed; either way, he must get down from his horse.

One wonders how this clever joke would have struck a Londoner reading it in 1535, the year after Henry VIII became head of the Church of England. It is both similar to and different from other jestbook entries of the period. Barbara Bowen notes that in the Renaissance jest

We are in a firmly hierarchical, conservative universe, in which most kings are wise and magnanimous, most peasants are stupid, and most women shrewish, obstinate, and sexually insatiable. … But if we look at the question of who verbally outsmarts whom, we see that there are many exceptions to the stereotypes.¹³

If there are many exceptions, then the exceptions are not exceptions. Espièglerie was an intrinsic part of Renaissance humor.

To quote Louis Cazamian: “How greatly does doubt serve the ends of humor, when humor lies in the oscillation of thought between two alternatives and in the impossibility of turning the probable, that relative value, into that absolute, certainty!”¹⁴ In jest 53, ridicule attaches both to the King of England and to the husbandman. In the same way, Falstaff's joke at Shrewsbury—“Rebellion lay in his way, and he found it” (5.1.28)—may be aimed either at Worcester (who claims he has not “sought” the rebellion) or the King (who asks rhetorically, “How comes it then?”); its ambiguity invites beholders to consider both men as abusers of language and power, proposing a position from which neither king nor rebel can claim legitimacy. This sort of jesting, which had long existed, simply explodes in the sixteenth century—as a direct result of social conflict. Religious and political change had turned the world inside-out the year before Tales and Quicke Answeres was published; food riots and sporadic unrest marked the London of 1597-1598, when Falstaff was in process. Thus the heavy taste of resistance. Since the effect of espièglerie is to arouse radical humorous ambivalence, it makes sense that the most frequent occasion for ambivalence would be the class system; this effect marks espièglerie as a form of carnival.

Espièglerie is an appropriate name, deriving from Eulenspiegel, name of the ultimate in ambiguous jest-figures, who subjected both himself and his targets to ridicule. (Even the name is ambiguous, meaning “Owl-Mirror” in High German but “Wipe-Ass” in the lower German dialect of Braunschweig, his home district.)¹⁵ Such humor, rightly understood, is truly ambivalent humor, a kind we have surely lost. As is well known, Eulenspiegel triumphs out of defeat; no one can determine with certainty whether the fool is a genius or an idiot. Minds are kept oscillating between the probable and the certain, to follow Cazamian's formula—which is healthy for the beholders as thinkers but which also reveals new possibilities and proposes new relations as that oscillation continues.

Now, it's hard to “best” someone who announces he's a fool—and that is why most stage fools announce their own foolishness loudly (“I am but a foole, looke you”), anticipating and thus blunting the opponent's main charge. Although Proteus calls Launce “yond foolish Lowt” (4.4.65), his epithet lacks power, partly because of Proteus's own situation, mostly because Launce has already anticipated and confirmed his status as lout. It is also difficult to “best” someone with such tenuous control of words and deeds that certainty about intentions is impossible. From his first entrance, Launce makes nothing clearer than his lack of control over his emotions, his words, his dog, his staff, his shoes. This advertisement immediately moves Launce, with Eulenspiegel, beyond normative standards.

If fools were only foolish, they would not be dangerous. But fool figures in the Eulenspiegel line combine idiocy with shrewd insight, as does Launce: “I am but a foole, looke you, and yet I have the wit to thinke my Master is a kinde of a knave” (3.1.263-64). This truly startling statement forces beholders not to take Launce only humorously. In the same way, anglicized as Howleglas, Eulenspiegel convinces everyone in the town of Maybrough [Magdeburg] that he is about to fly off the top of the town hall. He flaps his arms, and the entire town rushes to see him. When they have gathered, he jeers at them (“a hole town ful” of fools)¹⁶ for having believed him in the first place. The townspeople grant him his point: “And than departed the folke from thence som blaming him & som laughing saying he is a shrewed fole for he telleth us the truthe” (sig. B. iiii).

A second comic hallmark of Eulenspiegel is the technique of taking a turn of phrase, a command, or a word absolutely literally. Again, because his opponents can never tell whether he is shrewd or merely thick, the fool retains a certain authority over the near-mystical disaster that ensues as he takes words at face value. (Speed recognizes this penchant in Launce: “Well, your old vice still: mistake the word,” 3.1.284). In one excellent tale, Howleglas comes to an inn where he is informed that the visitors “eate for mony.”¹⁷ Howleglas seats himself with the richest men at the table and stuffs himself until covered with sweat. When the hostess demands to be paid, Howleglas demands money from her, saying that she told him he could “eate for mony”: “Thynkest thou that I wyll eate so much and laboure my selfe so sore as I dyd, not to be payd for mi laboure?” In a single tale, Howleglas manages to upend both social structure and the entire relationship between labor and sustenance.

When it comes to words, Launce's lack of control is what gives him control. The ambiguity of his foolishness gives him a certain authority over the mayhem he causes. Where Speed exists within the action of the play, Launce exists to prevent action, and no one can be sure (although any may suspect) that he intends such obstructionism. Consider what he does to Speed. In 2.5, Speed welcomes Launce to town. So far, Speed has proven the quickest wit on stage, having bested Valentine in 2.1. But Launce explodes all of Speed's words into misunderstanding and bawdry. When Speed asks how it goes with “your Mastership,” Launce takes it as his “master's ship.” When Speed asks “how stands the matter” with Proteus and Julia, Launce replies “Marry thus, when it stands well with him, it stands well with her” (2.5.20-23). Is he stupid, crafty, hard of hearing? Launce could be, to adapt Susan Purdie's happy phrase, a master of discourse,¹⁸ or he may be the abject slave of words. By the end of the scene Speed is crying out, “Why, thou Whorson Asse, thou mistak'st me” (2.5.47) before giving up and accompanying Launce to the alehouse. If humor is a form of exchange, with Launce it's hard to know what one is exchanging for what; since Launce both takes and gives language inappropriately, neither Speed nor the audience can gauge Launce's game, if there is a game, rightly. (Speed seems to have his suspicions—why else call Launce's verbal mistakings “your old vice”?) Launce's seeming lack of control with language gives directors and actors wonderful latitude in interpreting the part, allowing wide scope for some fruitful improvisation.

Whether intended or not, his victory over Speed is complete as of 3.1, the lengthy and ludicrous review of the “Cate-Log” of Launce's beloved milkmaid, after which Launce informs Speed that Valentine is waiting for him. As Speed runs off, Launce remarks, “Now will he be swing'd for reading my Letter” (5.1.382-83). Even here, the intention to communicate intention is ambiguous: Speed may be swinged, but it will be for keeping his master waiting, not for reading the catalogue.

As of the end of his part, Launce has gotten Speed into trouble, has delayed Valentine, and has humiliated Proteus. None of his victims can be sure he meant to victimize them. Still, as of 4.1, Launce's rounds are a little too complete. No one can dismiss the suspicion that Launce may have been looking for a way to play the cur all round.

Once again, resistance. As with jest 53 of Tales and Quicke Answeres, as with Falstaff's jest at Shrewsbury, ambiguity produces new positions, new possibilities—it gets the beholders to think thoughts they might not otherwise have thought. They may consider Speed, Proteus, and the absent Valentine as gullible. They may be led to sympathize with one who values his personal ties (Crab) above those to his supposed superiors (Proteus). Dog is king, servant is still servant, and master becomes—irrelevant.

4. IMPROVISATION

We have forgotten the sort of laughter that the minstrel's audience prized most: the explosive, delighted surprise as a “merryman” put together jests, quick answers, improvised plays, poems, and dances seemingly on the spot. This was the kind of laughter that Tarlton reportedly was a genius in eliciting—and Kempe of all Elizabethan clowns was most often mentioned by contemporaries as Tarlton's heir.¹⁹ Granted, the craft of the improviser, one to which the audience readily assented, was to prepare for any and all humorous situations. Improvisers had the benefit of centuries of minstrel traditions—conventions of rhyming, jesting, dancing, and singing—into which they could fit almost any topic. If minstrels were any good at the craft, no situation should ever force them to improvise totally without preparation. So much was well understood by the audience as the jester's work; these rules were invoked consciously as part of the artificial structure of the performance. In The Merchant of Venice, Lorenzo praises Launcelot, who has just run rings around him in an impromptu wordgame:

O deare discretion, how his words are suted,
The foole hath planted in his memorie
An Armie of good words, and I doe know
A many fooles that stand in better place,
Garnisht like him, that for a tricksie word
Defie the matter.

(3.5.65-70)

For improvisation to “work,” professional improvisers had to invoke these performance-structures, then induce the audience to forget they knew them.

Launce is funny because improvisation is funny. Improvisation involves a show of the performer's talents, wit, and mastery of body and language. Beholders can weigh the speed of his associations, the justness of his quips, his power over his material. But the improviser holds the balance of power over his audience, in that they can't be certain what's coming next. (No more may he, but he does know that, whatever it is, he will be the source.) When Shakespeare incorporated improvisational space into Launce, it was this power over the audience, or at least the illusion of it, that he wanted.

Improvisation is potentially subversive because it suggests that social relations are provisional, subject at any time to revision. When actors improvise a dramatic situation, they immediately create, and have the power to rearrange, symbolic status relations. Inevitably, the improviser brings status to the surface, challenges the audience's perception of the underlying causes of human behavior. That means, as Keith Johnstone notes, that improvisation can change the way people see social reality: “Once you understand that every sound and posture implies a status, then you perceive the world quite differently, and the change is probably permanent.”²⁰ Improvisation can awaken the audience's unease, make visible what they take for granted.

I once saw the musician Richard Thompson introduce himself to an audience this way: “Hello, I'm Richard Thompson, and you are the audience. This may change at any moment.” Thompson's delightful words emphasize the unpredictable nature of the audience-performer relationship. With patterned yet seemingly anarchic abandon, the improviser can constantly shift the positions and relations of performer, beholders, and subject/butt. That paradoxical impression—control next to irrepressible, anarchic wit—is what makes improvisation funny, and what makes it potentially destabilizing.

Launce enters Two Gentlemen of Verona leading his dog Crab and weeping. The sheer length of his first monologue suggests that Launce is to be played by the “master merryman,” the most experienced clown in the troupe. I invite the reader to read the following long section and try to keep from imagining improvisational space in it:

Nay, 'twill bee this howre ere I have done weeping: all the kinde of the Launces, have this very faulte: I have receiv'd my proportion, like the prodigious Sonne, and am going with Sir Protheus to the Imperialls Court: I thinke Crab my dog, be the sowrest natured dogge that lives: My Mother weeping: my Father wayling: my Sister crying: our Maid howling: our Catte wringing her handes, and all our house in a great perplexitie, yet did not this cruell-hearted Curre shedde one teare: he is a stone, a very pibble stone, and has no more pity in him then a dogge: a Jew would have wept to have seene our parting: why my Grandam having no eyes, looke you, wept her selfe blinde at my parting: nay, Ile shew you the manner of it. This shooe is my father: no, no, this left shooe is my mother: nay, that cannot bee so neyther: yes, it is so, it is so: it hath the worser sole: this shooe with the hole in it, is my mother: and this my father: a veng'ance on't, there 'tis: Now sir, this staffe is my sister: for, looke you, she is as white as a lilly, and as small as a wand: this hat is Nan our maid: I am the dogge: no, the dogge is himselfe, and I am the dogge: oh, the dogge is me, and I am my selfe: I; so, so: now come I to my Father; Father, your blessing: now should not the shooe speake a word for weeping: now should I kisse my Father; well, hee weepes on: Now come I to my Mother: Oh that she could speake now, like a mov'd woman: well, I kisse her: why there 'tis; heere's my mothers breath up and downe: Now come I to my sister; marke the moane she makes: now the dogge all this while sheds not a teare: nor speakes a word: but see how I lay the dust with my teares.

Whether Shakespeare's or Ralph Crane's, the colons indicate improvisational space. So do the colons in Launce's monologue in 4.4:

When a man servant shall play the Curre with him (looke you) it goes hard: one that I brought up of a puppy: one that I sav'd from drowning, when three or foure of his blinde brothers went to it: I have taught him (even as one would say precisely, thus I would teach a dog)

These colons, most of comparable length, establish a rhythm of statement and pause, statement and pause. A good comic actor (as Kempe) will use that rhythm and those pauses to improvise bits of humorous action. Recall that in 4.4, Launce has recently suffered a beating. Perhaps Kempe and company want Launce to be weepy throughout the production. In both 2.1 and 4.4, then, the actor could wring his hands or mop his eyes or do some comic business with staff, hat, and dog before continuing. If one bit gets a laugh (let's say that Launce mops his eyes with his hat at the first pause, with Crab at the second, realizes his error, and wipes his eyes with his hat), the actor can build on it for more laughs (putting the staff down to wipe his eyes with the dog, then wipe the dog's eyes with the hat, then wipe his eyes with the hat). Here are the first lines of 2.1 again; what good comic could resist filling those elastic spaces with what Richard Andrews calls “elastic gags”?²¹

Nay, 'twill bee this howre ere I have done weeping: all the kinde of the Launces, have this very faulte: I have receiv'd my proportion, like the prodigious Sonne, and am going with Sir Protheus to the Imperialls Court: I thinke Crab my dog, be the sowrest natured dogge that lives: My Mother weeping: my Father wayling: my Sister crying: our Maid howling: our Catte wringing her handes, and all our house in a great perplexitie, yet did not this cruell-hearted Curre shedde one teare:

Note the timing of the last six colons: four very short, a fifth short colon with a ludicrous anticlimax, and a longer three-part colon with a ludicrous climax. Shakespeare's sense of timing, miraculously intuitive, affords excellent opportunities for improvisations of all sorts. Think of the opportunities for miming the maid, father, sister, and cat. There is a great deal of deictic language, giving the actor much to do in moving from one this to another. The actor is to use his hat, shoes, staff, and dog as props/actors impromptu. As of “Nay, Ile shew you the manner of it,” Launce becomes a writer/director/producer orchestrating a dramatic rendition of his experience. Keir Elam has commented that Launce has to “decide which signified dramatis personae he must assign to his paltry set of sign-vehicles” and “inevitably discovers that the sign-vehicles are perfectly interchangeable.”²² Swapping signs, signifiers, and signifieds, Launce proposes challenges to normal ways of thinking, jogging the audience to imagine for themselves what any one symbol might be a symbol of—and then watching that linguistic and conceptual relation change. In its density, speed, and resourcefulness, Shakespeare's humor characteristically challenges the audience to stay with the funny characters on stage. Sociologists speak of “effectance motivation”—the pleasure we derive from having our abilities fully tested.²³ The very nature of Launce's humor motivates the audience to enjoy the exercise of its faculties. Within a system pretending unchanging authority, such training of individual faculties could tend to be subversive. Launce prefigures the mechanicals' perplexity over role and player in A Midsummer Night's Dream: “I am the dogge: no, the dogge is himselfe, and I am the dogge: oh, the dogge is me, and I am my selfe.” Launce gets it so wrong that he gets it right: Launce is Launce playing the dog. (Launce, hilariously enough, never thinks of letting Crab be Crab.)

Some actions are clearly scripted. Launce kisses his left shoe, makes a face at its stink, and pronounces it like “my mothers breath up and downe.” Many other actions, however, are left to the actor. Exactly what will he do with his staff to demonstrate his sister's “moane”? What business will take place with the hat to show it is “Nan our maid”? What will he do with Crab? Is Crab being carried or led on a leash? No matter what choices the actor makes, a great deal of foolish putting down and arranging of dog, hat, and staff will be necessary.

Will he keep the shoes on or take them off? Kissing of shoes, whether they be on or off, is usually comic. What will he do with the right shoe during and after the kiss? (A question to be asked. Launce says the shoe “weepes on” after being kissed. Perhaps the shoe is weeping so hard it cannot speak?) June Schlueter tells me of a performance in which the actor demonstrated a shoe with a hole in it and flipped his middle finger through the hole as he said “this is my father”—signifying the paternal penis to be fit in the hole of the other shoe, that is, Launce's mother. How slippery is the shifting qualifier this! If Crab was played by a real dog, and that dog acted as most dogs do on stage, a further element of the unpredictable would have been added. A live dog was not an absolute necessity; a good clown could make the audience howl just as loud with a stuffed dog, especially if he had to carry it (more fumbling with hat, staff, shoes, puppet!) or drag it along on a leash.²⁴ For our age, however, Crab has become a live dog's part. Consider Richard Moore's performance as Launce in the Royal Shakespeare Company's 1991-1992 production of Two Gentlemen of Verona. Crab was played by a real dog named Woolly. Real dogs are not written down: they are a hors du texte. Reviewer Paul Nelsen wrote,

Since the real pooch used in this production is an endearing sight gag, appropriately named Woolly, that commands attention with impromptu behavior, Moore's ability to engage a crowd's hearts and minds is all the more remarkable. On the occasion of this performance, during Launce's 4.6 recounting of Crab's misbehavior at the Duke's dinner, Woolly undertook dogged ablutions of private parts that could not be ignored by the audience. By virtue of well-timed takes and inventive connections with the text at hand, it was Moore who got the big laughs.²⁵

If Moore could do it, so could Kempe. Both the writing and what it allows—the behavior of the famous Kempe, and perhaps a live dog—contribute to the world often conjured up in improvisation, one in which all relationships are provisional and subject to change at any time. Stable relationships are thrown up in the air; settled questions are thrown open; we are reminded of the power of point of view to modify our perception of reality.

Printed and dramatic fools alike call on originators and audience to collaborate in creating a forum for subversion. Such improvisation cannot but produce challenge and instability where the market of attitudes is concerned. In their book Improvisation, John Hodgson and Ernest Richards note that “improvisation is a means of exploring in which we create conditions where imaginative group and personal experience is possible. It is the spontaneous human response to an idea or ideas, or a set of conditions.”²⁶ Shakespeare and Kempe set up conditions for individuals and group to imagine alternatives to the things they have been taught and think they believe.

Let me hazard some concrete referents for such instability. All over 1590s London there were such referents: a daily influx of inhabitants; haphazard, unchecked construction; filth and violence in the streets; the poor and vagrant, whose existence indicted the administrators of the Christian state; the frustrated energy of the gentry, the merchants, and other citizen classes, whose successes posed a threat to old representations of social hierarchy. Add a backdrop of religious and political groups struggling to take the moral stage. Shakespeare and his audience lived in a time of social upheaval and severe cultural dissonance. His very job—to patch together stories from different sources into a commercial product—called attention to this dissonance. He was a totalizer, a bourgeoise artisan whose practice yoked together characters, situations, and values from a plethora of different sources into a jangling congeries that resisted coherence.²⁷ He was literally creating emotions and ideas that had not existed before. For his efforts, he eventually got to put “Gent.” after his name. Changing positions; new alternatives; social reorganization. I am the dog; no, the dog is me.

My point is that people were thinking hard about how life was changing, that humor was one such kind of thinking, and that such thinking begets more such thinking. Think of the generosity of Kempe's acting. He must be able to gauge the audience's desires and let them into his performance; he must modulate his own desires, his habits (what worked with Launce the last time) in tune with the conditions of the moment. He must let himself, to some extent, be guided by the concrete situation of performance. Such generosity means that his acting is a transaction with whatever audience and conditions he faced.

For Kempe, then, and for us if we are to imagine Kempe as Shakespeare's Launce, there is plenty a hors du texte. It does not do to claim that these conditions already implicitly exist as imagined in the text; no user of language can do that. A text for performance is a template, not a predestination. What actually happens actually happens, often quite without reference to the text, as Woolly's doggy ablutions prove. As Mikhail Bakhtin suggested, it's often what lies a hors du texte that counts.²⁸ Improvisation is a form of language that throws itself open to what is outside in order to discover possibilities latent in the act of throwing-open. Hodgson and Richards are therefore critical of “mere exhibitionism,” which they decry as a “self-centered form of acting [that] in its assertion of self denies discovery, which can only follow from a more generous approach” (13). For Kempe and company, discovery is all. A subversive generosity, then, lies in the invitation to the audience to create the moment.

Michel Jeanneret writes of the tendency of Renaissance art to “put down roots in a tangible reality” in order to avoid turning in on itself and becoming a closed system. Aware of art's tendency to autonomy of function, writers sought “a dialogue and a material exchange of goods with the audience, the fusion of speech and action, the involvement of the book in the heart of experience.”²⁹ Once again Launce appears as a token of exchange (you give us your money; we'll give you imaginative play in return), drenched in materiality (feet; dogs; tears; farts; toothless, alcoholic milkmaids), in the assertion of system (Launce as underclass idiot) and the subversion of system (Launce as smarter than his smarter masters). The Renaissance audience is laughing at and experimenting with history together. They laugh at the ways in which supposedly perpetual social order can be confused by ambiguous foolishness. They laugh at the slipperiness of words and associations, the delight when Launce, in his awkward scramble to describe the scene at home, reports of “our Maid howling: our Catte wringing her handes.” People and things switch places: staffs become sisters, shoes become parents (as do flipped fingers!), foot odor becomes breath odor. Miscere sermones! Here is the survival of the very things the moralists appeared to hate: mixture of registers, confusion of the defined, inversion of the established, the primacy of the imagination asserted symbolically through wordplay and improvisation.

Subversive indeed is the act of “creating conditions” for such exploration, creating a place “where imaginative group and personal experience is possible.” As mentioned, the theatre was created to welcome the assertion of individual imagination en masse. In the theatre, the imagination is made flesh, the audience, Shakespeare, and Kempe together explore their experience and ways to subvert and recast it. Money is exchanged to ensure all this continues.

Perhaps—though we cannot know—writer and audience were aware of their subversion. Public secular theatre was still a novelty. Its legal restriction to beyond the Thames was a fact not easy to forget—after all, just to get to the play you had to take a ferry or get across a bridge. (It's possible that Two Gentlemen was performed at the theatre in Newington Butts, a good mile south of London Bridge.) Finally, from what contemporary accounts tell us, the dramatic situation seems not to have allowed as much suspension of disbelief as does the hushed, well-behaved culture of twentieth century theatregoing. Conventions of behavior such as silence and attention were not always (if ever) at work. Andrew Gurr writes that “crowds at the amphitheatres were markedly noisier than those in the hall playhouses.”³⁰ People shouted approval as well as clapped. They threw things in disapproval, shouted out running criticisms, sat on the stage, and sometimes disrupted performances with demands that some other favorite play be put on instead. This behavior had two effects: it strengthened the crowd's solidarity, and it prevented an easy suspension of disbelief. Gurr writes:

Crowds strengthen their sense of identity, their collective spirit, by vocal expression of their shared feelings. The audience was an active participant in the collective experience of playgoing, and was not in the habit of keeping its reactions private.

(45)

Although the Elizabethan theatre was moving towards a more illusionistic relation between beholders and actors, audiences were, by our standards, comparatively alienated from the dramatic illusion, rendered more frequently conscious of both the play as play and of itself as audience.

While he did not shout prodeo larvatus before entering, Kempe-as-Launce was probably aware of himself as a miscreant in the eyes of many, and of his audience as a mass accomplice. In the war between players and puritans in the mid-1590s, Kempe danced jigs aimed at the enemies of plays. (He may have done so as a member of the Lord Chamberlain's Men, and with a certain young playwright's tacit or explicit approval.) How could Kempe not be aware?

How could members of the audience? They purchased tickets for places that announced their social class to the group. They looked around to see who had come. They laughed, and looked around while laughing, to measure and compare personal and communal reactions. As they did, they were taking what Jerry Palmer calls “different subject positions” (182), creating different viewpoints from which to judge the action. They criticized the performance as it went forward. All of these people had walked, boated, and ridden here to do just this. Hard not to be aware.

6. WHAT LAUNCE MAY HAVE DONE FOR THE BEHOLDERS

Humor plays a large range of social functions. But are those functions effective? Does humor change things? To know for certain, we would need to have the original audiences, be able to poll them (in a very sophisticated manner), and then make some sense of the results.³¹ But not even that would help us. Most people don't know the origins of their attitudes; they won't know whether hearing a certain joke or seeing a certain stage character contributed to the formation of this new idea or that attitude. None of us knows all of our origins; if we did, we would not be ourselves. Even if Shakespeare's first audiences were available to us somehow, in the full extent of their memory and self-knowledge, we would be left at the end of the day with only an educated guess.

And that isn't bad. My guess is that humor was an important part of the moral and cultural environment around Shakespeare's audience. People used humor as a common currency with which to exchange and test ideas. Some humor supported the dominant discourse and some did not. Since humor has many disparate origins, it could not but introduce into that moral atmosphere many values that could potentially challenge received ideas. Individual beholders of Launce could receive these new ideas and apply them to their lives in many ways. My reverence toward authority might be qualified, or my irreverence strengthened, as a result of watching Launce thwart Proteus. I might feel more comfortable letting myself be silly or exposed or vulnerable in certain situations. I might experiment with my own thoughts, cultivate my inner reality, in ways that are humanly infinite. As you can see, these speculations lead to personalism and individualism. In a dynamic social setting like 1590s England, people may have been more likely to transpose ideas and values found in the theatre to the nontheatrical, “serious” realm. Launce did not bring on the revolution; on the other hand, it was only two generations off when he came on.

A huge number of scholars, both in the human sciences and in the literary disciplines, have chosen to emphasize the socially conservative, containing forces of humor.³² These forces are indeed strong, but they are not the only ones humor exerts. I take it that the aggregate of humorous practice in any society cannot but propose alternatives to the dominant discourse, challenging, recontextualizing, and interpellating established practices. Humor exerts pressure away from dogma and towards pluralism.

Launce succeeds through silly lack of control—over emotions, over physical things, and over language. Thus he interrogates central tenets of masculinity. Further, his part is written to confuse mastery of discourse and submission to it. Nostalgia in Launce subverts the supposed allegiance to the time, place, and system in which one lives. Improvisational space built into the part allows Launce to switch positions of jester, butt, and audience; lover and beloved; dog and man; master and servant; fool and savant. In so doing, Launce and thousands of like characters invite the audience to think in free and anarchically combinatorial ways. As sheer mental and spiritual exercise, such thinking is healthy—and, since it appears that all combinations are equally available, works against the supposed unity of culture and ideology. Ambiguity is not only a cover for dangerous ideas (for not all or even most of these new ideas will be dangerous)—it is also the medium required for the greatest possible richness in this genetic recombination.

Nor was the theatre marked somehow as a “safe” place for such thinking. If anything, theatres were marked as dangerous in 1590s London. It is ludicrous to imagine that such thinking could be contained at the theatre site or within generic or conventional boundaries—as though the margins of the play and the walls of the theatre could hold thought. People entered and left thinking in these ways, and some of the thought that left with them was new.

Shakespeare created Launce in a tradition of silly, nostalgic, extemporaneous, ambiguous comic characters, a tradition transformed in the sixteenth century, freighted with overtones of class conflict, resistance and protest. Thus the challenges Launce floats to the picture of a stable, centered social reality were both traditional and current, both part of what clowns everywhere have always done and what clowns did at that moment—near the end of a divisive, troubled century that contained vast political, religious, and social upheavals that were far from over.

Human beings have evolved humor as a survival strategy, as a way to keep human relations changing and growing. Social reorganization never ends, and humor can always be part of the process. According to our model, then, Launce may well have helped change things, some small, some great. Some of his beholders changed their minds without knowing, and perhaps a few marked the change. If I were a writer and could be sure of so much, I would be more than glad: I would be awed.

Notes

1. Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor, editors of the contentious Oxford Shakespeare (William Shakespeare: The Complete Works, Original Spelling Edition [Oxford: Clarendon, 1986]) write that Two Gentlemen “may be [Shakespeare's] first work for the stage,” noting that Launce's monologues are “brilliant” and Crab “has the most scene-stealing nonspeaking role in the canon” (1). I have used the spelling and orthography of this edition throughout, especially because of the punctuation and its potential for indicating improvisational space. Because the scene and line numbering in the Wells and Taylor edition has not been universally adopted, I give the more conventional line enumeration found in The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974).

2. A classic statement appears in The Riverside Shakespeare, 145.

3. Enid Welsford, The Fool: His Social and Literary History (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1966), 251.

4. Sophisticated distaste for humor that was perceived as graphic and low (what we might call the Castiglione-Sidney line of attack) rises to a peak near the turn of the century and is sustained until the closing of the theaters. Hamlet's speeches against low, extemporizing fools are the best known examples. Other attacks appear in Joseph Hall's Virgidemarium (1597), the Parnassus plays (1599-1600), Ben Jonson's The Case Is Altered (printed 1609; written before 1599), Thomas Dekker's A Strange Horse Race (1613), several prologues by Marston, and Thomas Heywood's Gynaikeion, or Nine bookes of Various History Concerning Women (1624). By Brome's time, the “days of Tarlton and Kemp” could be depicted as an era “Before the stage was purg'd from barbarism.”

5. Terry Eagleton, in Shakespeare (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), finds a similar nostalgia to be a major structural element in Shakespeare's later plays. In his view, the later Shakespeare is trying to reconcile the excesses of nascent capitalism with the strong points of an idealized feudal past: “If this is what Shakespeare had in mind, then the bad news we have to break to him, in privileged historical retrospect, is that it is an illusion” (99).

6. It is important to write “feminizes” rather than “emasculates,” since silliness, far from subtracting important male qualities, often adds useful feminine qualities to the character of the presumptive male.

7. Baldassare Castiglione, The Courtier, tr. Sir Thomas Hoby (New York: Scribner, 1953), 241-618.

8. In the past thirty years, the sociology of humor has simply exploded. Everyone recognizes the important place (and functions) of ridicule in humor. By the same token, few believe, as Thomas Hobbes appears to have done, that all or most laughter is exclusively bent toward purposely hurtful derision. Henri Bergson gave one of the strongest, and latest, endorsements of this view, when in Le Rire he defined humor as an unconscious form of ridicule designed to humiliate and correct others (Laughter, tr. C. Brereton [New York: Macmillan, 1928], 135). Since then, understanding of the roles played by situation, group perception, occasion, and framing have refined notions of ridicule and where it is “aimed.” Essays by A. R. Radcliffe-Brown (“On Joking Relationships,” Africa 13 [1940]: 195-210) and by Mary Douglas (“The Social Control of Cognition: Some Factors in Joke Perception,” Man 3 [1968]: 361-76) study how ridicule disperses energies according to the relationships among the jokers and the structure conditioning those relationships. Thoughtful discussions appear in C. P. Wilson, Jokes: Form, Content, Use, and Function (London: Academic Press, 1979); in J. H. Goldstein and Paul McGhee, The Psychology of Humor (New York: Academic Press, 1972); and in Susan Purdie, Comedy: The Mastery of Discourse (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994), 60-70.

9. Robert Weimann, “Laughing with the Audience: The Two Gentlemen of Verona and the Popular Tradition of Comedy.” Shakespeare Survey 22 (1969): 35-42.

10. Bert Kalmar and Harry Ruby, writers, Duck Soup, Paramount, 1933, in The Four Marx Brothers in Monkey Business and Duck Soup (Letchworth, Hartfordshire: Lorrimer, 1981), 94-183.

11. Tales and Quicke Answeres, very mery, and pleasant to rede (London: T. Berthelet, 1535?).

12. Pierre Bourdieu, Towards a Theory of Practice, tr. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 179.

13. Barbara C. Bowen, One Hundred Renaissance Jokes (Birmingham: Summa, 1988), xvii-xviii.

14. Louis Cazamian, The Development of English Humor (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1952), 198-99.

15. See A. J. Krailshammer's chapter on Eulenspiegel in W. A. Coupe, The Continental Renaissance (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971).

16. “Howe that Howleglas would flee from the towne house of Maybrough,” in Here beginneth a merye Jest of a man that was called Howleglas, and of many marvelous thinges and Jestes that he dyd in his life, in Eastlande and many other places (London: T. Copland, 1528?), sig. B.iiii.

17. “How Howleglas came to the towne of Banberch and how he did eate for mony,” in Howleglas, sig. E. ii.

18. Susan Purdie, Comedy: The Mastery of Discourse (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993). Like all such studies (including mine), Purdie's cannot cover all the aspects of humor. Her sense that joke-telling is a form of exchange between jester and hearer, in which jesting utterances are so marked, is true for many but not all kinds of things we may find “funny.” I do, however, admire her notion that we tell jokes partly to have our mastery of discourse recognized. Of course, the jokes Launce tells, if he is joking, question his mastery rather than aserting it.

19. For example, writing in 1612, Thomas Heywood claimed that Kempe succeeded Tarlton “as wel in the favour of her Majesty, as in the opinion & good thoughts of the generall audience” (Apology for Actors [London, 1612], sig. E 3). Robert Armin is named, famously, as Tarlton's heir in Tarltons Jests—but there are good reasons to believe that Armin himself may have written or compiled the work. See John P. Feather, “A Check-List of the Works of Robert Armin,” Library, 5th series, 26 (June 1971): 165-72.

20. Keith Johnstone, Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre (New York: Theatre Arts, 1985), 72.

21. Andrews coins that lovely term in his essay “Scripted Theatre and the Commedia dell'Arte,” in J. R. Mulryne and Margaret Shewring, eds., Theatre of the English and Italian Renaissance (New York: St. Martin, 1991). In this light, consider the old question of whether or not Shakespeare “gagged” his clowns. I don't see how a young playwright like Shakespeare could have presumed to “gag” an older, famous actor like Kempe. With Kempe, improvisation is what Shakespeare would have wanted. He knew that Kempe could exploit that space to get what everyone in the troupe wanted: a happy response from the audience. Shakespeare would have been crazy to object.

22. Keir Elam, The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama (London: Methuen, 1980), 14.

23. See Zigler, E., J. Levine, and L. Gould, “Cognitive Challenge as a Factor in Children's Humor Appreciation.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 6: 332-36.

24. Kathleen Campbell, in “Shakespeare's Actors as Collaborators: Will Kempe and The Two Gentlemen of Verona,” writes that Crab could possibly have been a stuffed doll. Philip Henslowe's diary for 1598 includes an inventory of properties for the Rose Theatre that includes “i. black dogge.” Campbell immediately writes, “but the comic effects of Crab's presence in Two Gentlemen seem to depend on the dog's being a living presence” [present volume, p. 187].

25. Paul Nelsen, review of Two Gentlemen of Verona, Royal Shakespeare Company, Shakespeare Bulletin 9.4 (1992): 15-17; this quotation on 17.

26. John Hodgson and Ernest Richards, Improvisation (New York: Grove, 1979), 18.

27. Nor were the writer's materials the only aspect of theatre that embodied and created these new possibilities. Walter Cohen, in his excellent study Drama of a Nation: Public Theater in Renaissance England and Spain (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 182-85, argues that the process of theatrical production itself did too. In a brilliant passage, Cohen reminds us that the public theatre was a composite mode of production, both part of the base and part of the superstructure: “The total theatrical experience meant more than, and something different from, what the dramatic text itself meant. The medium and the message were in contradiction, a contradiction that resulted above all from the popular contribution” (183). To the dramatic text, already a bricolage of jarring meanings, we must add the actual process of producing a staged drama based on that text, a process that subverts what it puts forward, changes subjects of king into critics of kings, critics of fools into critics of reason. Humor contributes even more complexity, even more potential for new thinking and changed relations.

28. Neither the Bakhtinian nor the Saussurian/Derridean approach covers language totally; each has tempered the other. For an interesting account of Bakhtin's qualifications on Saussurian linguistics, see Katerina Clark and Michael Holquist, Mikhail Bakhtin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press), 1984, 221-26.

29. Michel Jeanneret, A Feast of Words: Banquets and Table Talk in the Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 260.

30. Andrew Gurr, Playgoing in Shakespeare's London (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 44.

31. See Jerry Palmer, The Logic of the Absurd (London: British Film Institute, 1987), 183. Palmer's excellent study is mostly linguistic and semiologic, but he admits that we must leave these methods when we come to the question of the societal functions of humor. He suggests some empirical instrument such as a scientifically controlled poll—but not even this would answer the question, for the reasons mentioned.

32. Perhaps the most influential has been Freud, with his regrettably partial focus on the aggressive and tendentious aspects of humor. Arthur Koestler memorably restated and refocused Freud's point of view for the second half of the century in The Act of Creation (London: Hutchinson, 1964), as did Jan Kott in Shakespeare Our Contemporary (London: Methuen, 1964). A recent salvo on behalf of this view appears in Peter Gay, The Cultivation of Hatred (New York: Norton, 1994). There, in the midst of an extremely selective “survey” of humor theory (Bergson, Kierkegaard, and Kraepelin, all of whom are similarly fixed on aggressiveness), Gay asserts that “the aggressive dimensions” of humor “must claim preeminence.” While I don't question the aggression in humor, I must reject this claim to “preeminence.” Humor does so much else that a single-minded focus on aggression does little justice.

    Nearly as old is the notion that humor functions mainly as containment, as a cultural control mechanism to limit, circumscribe, recontextualize, or censor out-of-bounds behavior. Bergson, in Le Rire, wrote that “the clown functions for propriety as the villain functions for mores,” and some of his viewpoint survives in more recent containment theorists, among whom we may include Michel Foucault, Stephen Greenblatt, and others who feel that, to quote Keith Johnstone, “Laughter is a whip that keeps us in line” (84). Over time, champions of containment have tended to soften their definitions and depictions of what containment and resistance are and whether there are “ways out.” For most of his career, Foucault was quite pessimistic about notions of personal freedom. Only near the end of his career did he explicitly recognize the possibilities of “the undefined work of freedom.” (See Alexander Nehamas, “Subject and Abject: The Examined Life of Michel Foucault,” New Republic [15 Feb. 1993]: 27-36.) Greenblatt's work has been a true process, with the titular focus in Shakespearean Negotiations suggesting that containment and resistance are best understood as parts of the larger process of negotiation.

    Few would argue that humor and laughter are not bound up in the myriad negotiations over different forms of power that occur momently in human societies. Most containment theory, however, tends to claim only this or mostly this function for humor, ignoring the vast arena of purely formal play and the role of humor in social change. For me, the best thinkers on this subject are not literary scholars but sociologists. In his essay “A Phenomenological Analysis of Humor in Society” (in Humour in Society: Resistance and Control, ed. C. Powell and George E. C. Paton [London: Macmillan, 1988]: 86-105), Chris Powell writes that “life consists of organising experience in such a way that our sense of it makes us feel comfortable in balancing” control and resistance (99). For Powell, jokes expressing resistance also conjure up control—but neither one is lost. In his book On Humour: Its Nature and Place in Modern Society (London: Polity, 1988), Michael Mulkay writes that “humour can be both pure and applied” and “can have positive as well as negative consequences for the structure in which it occurs” (156). Most people don't use jokes as tiny revolutions, but the potential is there: “Humour can be used to challenge the existing pattern … but only when it is given meaning in relation to criticism and confrontation that is already under way within the serious realm” (177). Such confrontations were all around Kempe-as-Launce, confrontations bodied forth by the playhouse itself, its location, what was sold there, and how the audience behaved. Social tensions formed an extremely strong frame for almost any joke on Shakespeare's stage; the potential for social work in his humour was therefore very great.