[In the following essay, Cox explores Shakespeare's blending of comedy and death, principally through the use of laughter and clowning, in his tragedies.]

As death coverges with humor in Shakespeare's tragedies, our sense of the grotesque reaches its highest pitch. Death is now literal and ominous. It cannot be averted as in the comedies by a symbolic gesture of humility but must be confronted at its most hideous and awesome. As death becomes more terrifying, so its convergence with gaiety becomes increasingly discordant. Many critics, such as Susan Snyder in The Comic Matrix of Shakespeare's Tragedies, see in Shakespeare's mingling of "Kings and Clownes" intimations of tragic absurdity. Commenting on the grave-maker scene in Hamlet Snyder insists that the graveyard questions the grounds for all action; for death, which renders human remains indistinguishable, indicates a meaningless world.¹ Images of death, however, do not for the Renaissance Christian negate all meaning. The skull dissolves only temporal meanings and questions actions for temporal ends. The Antic Leveler points its bony finger not at the existence of an immortal soul, but at earthly fame, beauty, and knowledge.

That death's grimace often expresses scorn and mockery is indisputable. In George Wither's emblem "This Ragge of Death," for example, the poem explains the grim meaning of the skeleton's smile: ". . . and marke what ugliness / Stares through the sightlesse Eye-holes, from within: / Note those leane Craggs, and with what Gastlinesse, / That horrid Countenance doth seeme to grin."² Death's scoffing smile starkly underscores life's transience and our own foolishness when we trust in life's illusion of permanence. The meaning of death's smile is often more complex, however, evoking not only a sense of mockery, a stark reminder of our inescapable destiny, but one of gaiety and joy as well. Wither's "Death is no Losse" . . . provides an example of the skull that both jeers and celebrates. The scene places in the foreground a large skull poised upright on an hourglass. In its eye sockets, the crevices of its temples, and the corners of its mouth, long strands of wheat protrude as though they are growing from the head. As the hourglass supports the skull to indicate life's brevity, a glowing candle stands upon the skull, illuminating the entire scene with its brilliance. While the hourglass and the candle pull together the ideas of death and life, so too do the background vistas. The scene on the left shows a bleak city and a procession of mourners delivering a casket for burial. On the right, a pleasant country scene suggests life's simple joys. A cottage with smoke rising gently from its chimney sits comfortably on a hill. In front of the cottage, workers are shown busily harvesting wheat. The accompanying poem clarifies the meaning of this smiling death's head. Like the wheat, the poem explains, we must lie in the earth awhile, "But, from that Wombe receives another Birth, / And, with Additions, riseth from the Clay." The grave then becomes not a "Place of Feare" but rather a "Bed of Rest. "³ This memento mori thus serves as a reminder not only of death but also of the bliss that awaits beyond the grave.

Like this emblem's hopeful message, Shakespeare's plays often blend death with the comical so as to suggest an unquenchable life force whose energy either emerges at moments of intense tragic awareness or develops within a comic context into a transforming and creative power. This paradoxical union of death and life finds an analogue in the comedy of Christian redemption in medieval and Renaissance thought. For death not only provides a portal to eternal life and an agon to test sincerity of belief, but also, by showing people their own nature, death encourages the requisites of remorse, humility, and faith. Thus the medieval preoccupation with bodily decomposition reveals not merely morbid sensuality but a desire to reify spiritual awareness. An anonymous work entitled "A Sermon of the Misery of Mankind" explains that, for the faithful "bodily death is a door or entering unto Life, and therefore not so much dreadful (if it be rightly considered,) as it is comfortable; not a mischief but a Remedy for all mischief . . . not a Sorrow and Pain, but to Joy and Pleasure."⁴ By thinking on the grave, the faithful real-ize the duality of their natures: for they share with beasts the inevitability of death and with angels the spirit that enables escape from death's confines. Recognition of this hybrid nature and of the precarious stance between death and life is cause for uneasy but hopeful laughter. Charlotte Spivack explains that "Endowed with a perspective of his own incongruity, man is afforded laughter as a means of reconciling the contrary aspects of his nature."⁵ Thus humor's frequent convergence with death in medieval literature and art should not be surprising, for the terms rationali, mortali, and risus capax interlock in the medieval conception of humanity.⁶

As in Christian comedy, so too in Shakespeare's comedies and romances death functions as an instrument of self-knowledge and regeneration. Unlike the Christian emphasis on celestial affairs, however, Shakespeare centers on temporal renewal.⁷ Feigned or imaginary deaths, like that of Hero in Much Ado About Nothing, imminent deaths, like that of Claudio in Measure for Measure, and real deaths occurring either off stage or before the play's action begins, such as the deaths of Mamillius and Antigonus in A Winter's Tale, provide frequent plot complications whose resolutions depend on the characters' capacity for human understanding. Initially frustrating happiness, death opens the way to remorse, repentance, and compassion. Sympathetic action thus surmounts death and the comic catastrophe ensues.

While Shakespeare's comedies and romances make explicit death's regenerative powers by providing happy endings, his tragedies suggest merely possibilities for communal reordering. Risible elements thus blend with moments of death to promote the audience's sense of freedom from destruction and hope for social restoration. Juliet's deathlike sleep amid servants who jest of her wedding night, Hamlet's encounter with the merry gravemakers who quibble and sing while unearthing skulls, Cleopatra's visit by the jovial clown who bears the "pretty worm of Nilus," and Macduff s greeting by the equivocating porter who bids him enter Hell-Gate point at once to the unceasing dialectic of death and life and to our potential for future rejuvenation. We realize the intimate relation between death and its victims while we simultaneously sense, through the jovial nonchalance of the clowns, a cyclical order extending beyond personal tragedy. Herbert Weisinger's theory of tragic structure and John Holloway's discussion of ritual pattern in Shakespeare tragedies provide a context for understanding the function of risible moments in Shakespeare's tragedies. Both Weisinger and Holloway agree that it is our engagement with the protagonist as he or she undergoes a journey towards death that accounts for our sense of the tragic. Holloway explains, "It is rather that we make contact very directly with the experience through which the protagonist passes in the course of the play. The issue is not, what kind of man Hamlet is; but what he does. Or rather, what he both does and undergoes; how one can describe the whole volume of the experience through which he passes, as one who both acts and suffers the actions of others."⁸ For both Weisinger and Holloway, great tragedy awakens in us a paradoxical feeling of suffering and joy as it imitates the ritual of death and resurrection. Weisinger explains that "our response to tragedy is a response deeply rooted in the past of man, which tragedy has the power to evoke afresh."⁹ The pleasure that we take in suffering is not a per-verse desire for another's pain or for our own but comes from our awareness of "a rational order" that extends beyond an individual's death: "The tragic occurs when by the fall of a man of strong character we are made aware of something greater than that man or even man-king; we seem to have a new and truer vision of the universe. . . ."¹⁰

Although neither Weisinger nor Holloway addresses the issue of the comical in Shakespeare's tragedies, Weisinger offers numerous examples of the festivals, maskings, and orgies that in ancient primitive rituals played a part in the society's slaying of the god-king. The comical elements in Shakespeare's tragedies serve a similar function, allowing the audience an occasion to complete its identification with the sacrificial victim and then begin to release him or her. The medieval cycle plays lend support to this theory, for the death of Christ is almost always accompanied by games and farce. V. A. Kolve emphasizes the distancing effect of the tortores' games: "The horror of the Passion is controlled by constantly breaking the flow of its action. As the judges, scorners, tormentors, and executioners become totally absorbed in each new and limited game which they take up, so too is our attention diverted in turn: the Cornish making of the nails, and the premature Chester dicing are notable examples."¹² Kolve also recognizes the irony implicit in these games and its regenerative value. While the torturers feel that they control the game, we realize by Christ's composure amid all their noise and laughter that they are unwitting participants in a cosmic game: "The tortores play with Christ, but we must not forget that Christ is playing too—that He is in the game, by His own choice, to serve His larger purposes. And the game must go as God intends."¹²

Sir Philip Sidney's defense of tragic purity in An Apologie for Poetry may shed further light on the irony implicit in comic-tragic blending:

But if we marke them [the ancients] we shall find that they never, or very daintily, match Horn-pypes and Funeralls. So falleth it out that, having indeed no right Comedy, in that comicall part of our Tragedy we have nothing but scurrility, unworthy of any chast eares, or some extreame shew of doltishness, indeed fit to lift vp a loude laughter, and nothing els: Where the whole tract of a Comedy shoulde be full of delight, as the Tragedy shoulde be still maintained in a well raised admiration.¹³

In this passage Sidney explains that the mistake play-wrights often make is in confusing delight with laughter. Although laughter and delight may arise from a single incident, the two are in themselves opposed. Delight "has a joy in it" and springs from things proportioned and apt. Laughter, on the other hand, is "a scornful tickling," arising from things disproportioned and incongruous. Sidney here considers laughter as satiric, as vituperatio. Thus while they may appear simultaneously, Sidney explains, laughter does not spring from delight, as many believe. Illustrating his point, Sidney refers to the brawny, heavily bearded Hercules who, dressed in woman's clothes, spins the distaff of Omphale. Delight and laughter here arise at once, "For the representing of so strange a power in love procureth delight: and the scornfulness of the action stirrith laughter" (140). While censorious laughter and delight are often independent responses, as Sidney holds, there may at times exist a paradoxical affinity between the two. If we examine closely Sidney's image of Hercules' spinning the distaff, we find that laughter and delight are not merely simultaneous occurrences but are interrelated effects. While delight does not here induce laughter, laughter does increase our delight. It is our laughter, mocking though it is, that informs us of the intensity of Hercules' passion, of his willingness to sacrifice his identity and his dignity for the love of Iole.

Just as comic degradation is essential to delight in the case of Hercules, it is similarly important to tragic joy in the cases of Hamlet, Macbeth, Cleopatra, and Juliet. Through the clowns' foolishness and through their satirical jibes, we glimpse the frailty and the folly of the protagonists and this in turn heightens our awareness of their passions and their tragedies. In act 4, scene 3, of Romeo and Juliet, Juliet gives her imagination free reign to the horrors of premature burial and then lifts the dreaded vial to her lips with the pledge, "Romeo, Romeo, Romeo! Here's drink—I drink to thee" (58).¹⁴ The potion, whose virtue she fears, recalls the Friar's earlier correlation of human qualities with natural elements:

For nought so vile that on the earth doth live
But to the earth some special good doth give;
Nor aught so good but, strain'd from that fair use,
Revolts from true birth, stumbling on abuse.
Virtue itself turns vice, being misapplied,
And vice sometime by action dignified.

(2.3.17-22)

Juliet's dangerous and defiant action suggests this moral ambivalence where good may "stumbl[e] on abuse" and vice find dignity in action. Both perspectives collide when laughter permeates the scene of seeming death. Juliet's drinking of the potion visually suggests suicide and is an unwitting preparation for that final action. The echoing words of the Friar thus push on to their bitter conclusion: "And where the worser is predominant / Full soon the canker death eats up the plant" (29-30). As Juliet swallows the potion, we realize her physical and spiritual jeopardy as well as her desperation and pain. No sooner does she fall into a deathlike sleep, however, than we are propelled into the world of comedy. We enjoy the domestic hustle and bustle of the Capulet servants who are preparing for the day's wedding festivities. Old Capulet's officious ordering of the servants, Angelica's bawdy jests and exaggerated lamentations, and Peter and the musicians' farcical quarrel suggest something comical about Juliet's situation and about Juliet herself. The implied ridicule of these earthbound creatures allows us to feel more intensely Juliet's isolation and foolishness. Like Hercules, Juliet suffers comic degradation. But in proportion to their foolishness, her passion and commitment also touch the sublime. By refusing to honor her parents' wishes and marry Paris, Juliet has estranged herself from the compromising world of ordinary humanity. Her actions, though impudent and rash, demonstrate her willingness to risk defamation, madness, and death to be rejoined with Romeo.

The sacrificial victim, in this case Juliet, mingles the sacred with the profane, wisdom with foolishness. In ancient cultures, the distinction between king and god was constantly blurred. Since the god-king was associated with fertility and with the spiritual health of the land, it is understandable that in time he would become linked to a more humble symbol of fecundity and joy, the fool. Because he was associated with the earth's vital forces and perhaps because he was expendable and stupid enough to die willingly, the fool often became the surrogate king in ancient rituals of renewal.¹⁵ Exalted for a period of time, until his iden-tification with the king was complete, the fool would then be mocked, scourged, and slain. The victim's foolishness, as it indicates his humanity, provides the people with a bridge to the sacred. Realizing the interrelation of the absurd and the sublime, we should not be surprised to find a painting by one of the earliest followers of Christ representing the crucified lord with an ass's head.¹⁶ In the Corpus Christi cycles, Christ suffers similar indignities. The Wakefield Caiaphas in the Buffeting, for example, calls Christ "Kyng Copyn in oure game"¹⁷ while the tortores of the York cycle dress Jesus in white cloth, the dress of a fool, and make him the butt of their games and gibes.¹⁸ Here, of course, the plays satirize the torturers who do not see Christ's divine nature and the spectators who daily reopen Christ's wounds by their sins. The association of Christ with a fool is not merely ironic, however, for it points to the paradox at the heart of sacrifice. To suffer humiliation and death willingly for the salvation of another defies our most fundamental instinct of self-preservation and thus seems the height of folly. The action, on the other hand, is life-affirming. Because it is the highest demonstration of love, it is paradoxically the wisest and most sacred of actions.¹⁹ Unlike Christ, the tragic protagonist of Shakespeare's plays is not a deity who can carry the sins of the world and remain pure. He or she must fully absorb the evil to be purged. The term foolish thus bears a more sinister meaning when applied to the mortal scapegoats of Shakespeare's tragedies. Indeed, foolishness in the case of Macbeth is identical with the demonic.

The striking change in tone at the entry of the clowns in Shakespeare's tragedies suggests that we stand at an important juncture in the tragedy. We recall that comic interludes were sometimes used in medieval drama to separate distinctive movements of the plot. So, too, the comical intrusions in Shakespeare's tragedies may signal a directional change. In Macbeth, for example, the episode of the drunken porter separates the act of regicide from its necessary retribution. The porter, as his name implies, is a transitional figure. He stands between the starless night that seals Macbeth's murderous deed and the new dawn whose diffusive light directs Scotland to gaze upon bloody Duncan. As in Macbeth, so too in Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, and Antony and Cleopatra, the impertinent clowns signal the protagonists' changed or changing position in the play. The clown's gaiety in the face of death suggests an inversion of roles, for the protagonist is now discomfited. Although formerly secure, the center of society, the hero or heroine, is now exceedingly vulnerable. He or she has assumed the passive role of the scapegoat. Hamlet's return to Denmark, Juliet's swallowing of the Friar's potion, and Cleopatra's acceptance of the asp are all submissive responses to the call of death. Although Macbeth never submits to his destiny as fully as do the other victims, he nonetheless becomes increasingly numb and inert. The active champion of Scotland in act 1 will become in the acts that follow reactionary and defensive. Macbeth's sole endeavor will consist of warding off the dual furies, conscience and discovery.

Thus the clowns presage both death and life. With the exception of the burlesque figures in Romeo and Juliet, the merry harbingers bear no proper names. They are undeveloped, anonymous characters who appear suddenly, electrify the grim milieu with their indecorous antics, and disappear to be heard from no more. The startling appearance of these mysterious characters recalls the alarming image of death in the medieval and Renaissance Vado Mori and in the Dance of Death. Holbein's engraving of the queen and death is particularly relevant, for here death wears the cap and bells of a medieval jester. . . .²⁰ The inversion of roles in Holbein's Dance is bitterly ironic, for the queen, who on a former day might have commanded her fool to perform, is now herself ordered to dance by antic death. A similar inversion occurs in Shakespeare's tragedies. But while Shakespeare's antics approach their "victims" with the amused detachment of Holbein's jester, they possess an element of childlike innocence that is absent from Holbein's figure of death. Unlike Holbein's high-spirited skeleton, Shakespeare's sportive commoners are not court jesters. The distinction is significant, for the court or household jester in Shakespeare's plays is a sophisticated professional who uses his wit like a "stalkinghorse" to pierce the pretensions and illusions of his patrons. While Shakespeare's merry reapers delight in the duplicity of words like the professional jesters, they do not seem fully aware of the import of their quibbles and gibes. They seem hybrid creatures, partaking of the wit of clever jesters, like Lear's fool, Touchstone, and Lavatch, and the innocent gaiety of bungling fools, such as Bottom, Dogberry, and Elbow. It is their affinity to these naturals, their capacity for childlike joy, that turns satiric inversion, like that of Holbein's dance, into festive topsy-turvydom.²¹ Thus while "a scornful tickling" contributes to our laughter, our laughter also springs from a humane and generous delight. The function of Shakespeare's gay harbingers is then primarily saturnalian. And satire in these plays waits upon mirthful celebration.²²

The porter scene of Macbeth illustrates the clown's affinity to death and life and his ability to bring us intimations of tragic joy. As the drowsy porter staggers to the gate to receive the early morning visitors, he brings to mind weary and disturbed Macbeth. We recall Macbeth's envy of the sleeping guards and of their innocent prayers. And we remember his chilling prophecy, "Cawdor / Shall sleep no more" (2.2.39-40). The thane and his lady's hasty change into nightclothes at the sound of knocking emphasizes the truth that Macbeth has killed sleep. As the porter underscores Macbeth's fatigue and regret, our sympathy rises for the already haunted thane. We realize too that Macbeth, having cut himself off from this life-nurturing balm, must soon die. The knocking's disturbance of the porter's sleep and its startling effect upon Macbeth tell us that retribution has wasted no time in pressing its claim. As the porter welcomes the imaginary reaper, "Come in time!" (2.3.5), he seems a genius of death, signaling Macbeth's irreversible movement towards destruction. The porter, however, with his humorous role-playing and indecent puns, is just as surely a figure of life. Macduff s persistent knocking and the porter's allusion to hell's gate bring to mind not only the sudden visitation of death upon sinners, a frequent motif in the literature of the age, but also, as Glynne Wickham has pointed out, the victory of Christ over hell in the apocryphal harrowing of hell.²³ Hell was often depicted in medieval plays and paintings as a castle, and Christ was shown to pound repeatedly upon the gate before bursting through and scattering the minions of hell. Macduff s entry into Inverness parallels Christ's entry into hell-castle and foreshadows Macduff s defeat of Macbeth and the resulting triumph of Scotland. The porter thus opens the door both to death and to life. The farmer, the equivocator, and the tailor whom the porter mentions must dance down the primrose path to the everlasting bonfire. We may imagine, countering their descent, the ascent of Adam and Eve, the prophets, and the patriarchs who are taken by the hand of Christ and escorted to Paradise. . . . ²⁴ And as we watch Macbeth prepare to follow the lesser sinners to hell, we sense Scotland's future victory and our own release from death. Like the farcical episodes of Marlowe's Dr, Faustus, the porter's comical greeting of sinners to hell diminishes the grandeur of the fallen hero. And the allusion to Christ's harrowing adds to the irony of Macbeth's fall. Medieval and Renaissance painters often depict Jesus as a knight, like Saint George, thrusting a sword into the mouth of the dragon and pressing its head under foot. In the first act the sergeant describes Macbeth's defeat of the rebel Macdonwald in somewhat similar terms: ". . . he unseam'd him from the nave to th' chops, / And fix'd his head upon our battlements" (1.2.22-23). The porter now shatters this heroic image. Macbeth is no longer the victorious defender of righteousness but a small, despicable rebel destined, like the farmer, the equivocator, and the tailor, for defeat.²⁵ Macbeth's shrinkage underscores his role as mock-king. Macbeth is a foolish and expendable usurper of majesty. By first eliciting our sympathy for Macbeth, the porter encourages us to accept him as our substitute. By then drawing forth our disdain, he prepares us for Macbeth's final diminution and readies us to release the shrunken king to his death. In act 5 Angus describes the diminished ruler as he awaits Malcolm's forces: "Now does he feel his title / Hang loose about him, like a giant's robe / Upon a dwarfish thief (2.20-22). Macbeth suffers an even more degrading death than Macdonwald. The tyrant's head is not merely "fixed . . . upon the battlement" but is severed from his body and held up in contempt before the armies. With the help of the sportive porter, we find hope in this grotesque emblem. For us, as for Scotland, "the time is free."

A chilling irony infuses such burlesque moments as that involving the porter, for the audience, more keenly than the protagonist, feels death's approach. Two sixteenth-century portraits utilizing the memento mori tradition may help to demonstrate the sympathy bred for the protagonist by the sudden entrance of Shakespeare's grosteque. In early illustrations accompanying vado mori lyrics and poems of the Dance of Death, representative figures such as kings, ladies, and knights are portrayed about their usual business. They do not seem to notice the grinning skeletons lurking behind them, weapons poised for attack. . . .²⁶ One moral poem reads,

This day I satt full royally in a chayre.
Tyll sotyll deth knokkid at my gate
And unavised he said to me, "chekmate"!

The N Town Death of Herod explores the dramatic potential of this tradition. We first see Herod rejoicing at the death of the innocents. But as he boasts his preeminence and gormandizes at a sumptuous feast, the figure of death approaches, unnoticed to any but the audience. The irony mounts as death exclaims:

Ow! Se how prowdely yon kaitiff sitt at mete!
Of Deth hath he no dowte; he wenith to leve evyrmore.
To him wil I go and geve him such an hete
That all the lechis of the londe his life shul nevyr restore.

(194.97)²⁸

By substituting a specific biblical personage in the place of the generic king, the N Town modifies the tradition of sudden death. Herod, however, is much more a type than a flesh-and-blood individual, and so the emphasis remains homiletic. We find the convention radically altered, however, in Holbein's portrait of Sir Brian Tuke . . . and in a portrait of a young man painted in 1524 and signed H. F. (Hans Fries).²⁹ The victims are now highly individualized. The figure of death still glares menancingly over its victim's shoulder. Unlike Herod, these men are prepared for death. Sir Brian Tuke, for example, points to a passage from Job, "Will not the small number of my days be soon ended?" Although the victims are pious, the irony in these paintings is nevertheless biting, for the distinctive personal quality of these gentlemen engages our sympathies. We pity these men as we cannot Herod, for Herod possesses no redeemable charcteristics. As we recognize the traditional memento mori context of these portraits, the finger of death turns towards us. Sir Brian Tuke and the young man painted by H. F. are not only Renaissance lords, but also Everyman. By modifying the convention of the unwary victim, the portraits pull together the personal and the homiletic. A similar irony penetrates Shakespeare's tragedies when the impish clowns come into view. As Hamlet asks the gravemaker for whom he digs the grave, we know, though Hamlet does not, that the grave is meant for Ophelia. We also realize that Ophelia's death has placed Hamlet in direst jeopardy, for it has doubled the ire of Laertes and his determination to take revenge. The gravemaker scene not only harbors irony, but it also overlays the specific and the general as in the portraits. The skulls of Ophelia, Yorick, and Alexander will mingle with that of "my Lord Such-a-one, that prais'd my / Lord Sueh-a-one's horse . . ." (5.1.84-85).³⁰ The scene thus allows us to experience a crucial moment in the story of Hamlet and at the same time provides us with a forceful reminder of our own mortality.

With an enhanced sense of mortal limitations, we begin to move beyond identification with those facing death toward a new identity. Self-knowledge, as the Renaissance typically perceived it, begins with an acceptance of mortality and culminates in understanding one's relation to God, people, and the cosmos. The mistaken choices of the heroes and heroines have made their premature deaths unavoidable. With the knowledge of their errors and a consciousness of our own limitations, however, we hold the opportunity to shape our own futures. After the initial shock of death's nearness subsides, we begin to enjoy the levity of the clowns who hint at the healing power of laughter and encourage us to enter their magical arena of play. Participating in their unconscious mockery, we begin to separate from those who must soon die. With this release comes a sense of freedom and hope. The clowns thus prepare us to realize and accept the unavoidable calamity that awaits the protagonist and simultaneously to anticipate the sense of freedom and reintegration that this death makes possible.

Notes

¹ Susan Snyder, The Comic Matrix of Shakespeare's. Tragedies: Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Othello and King Lear (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), 126.

²A Collection of Emblemes, Ancient and Moderne (1635) by George Wither, Book I, Illustr. 8 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1975); this facsimile by the Renaissance English Text Society reproduces the Newberry Library copy, Taunton imprint (STC 25900d; call number Case W 1025.98).

³A Collection of Emblemes, Book I, Illustr. 21. As numerous critics such as Barbara W. Tuchman and Johan Huizinga have discerned, the skeletons and death's heads were often expressions of the terrors of the Black Death.

⁴Certain sermons of homilies, appointed to be read in churches; in the time of Queen Elizabeth . . . (London: Printed for George Wells, 1687).

⁵ Charlotte Spivack, The Comedy of Evil on Shakespeare's Stage (Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh-Dickinson University Press, 1978), 25.

⁶ Ibid.,25. Also see V. A. Kolve's The Play Called Corpus Christi (Stanford Calif: Stanford University Press, 1966), 133-34: Diues et Pauper asserts that mirth is among the major purposes of medieval religious drama. The anonymous author "holds (on scriptural authority) that to play to God and for God is to please Him, that human joy and such humility as chooses to express joy in play and game are acceptable to heaven."

⁷ In Shakespeare and Christian Doctrine (Princeton:Princeton University Press, 1963), Roland Mushat Frye stresses the "need for a sane and informed secularism in the interpretation of the plays, because the plays are themselves primarily concerned with the secular realm." By "secular" Frye means "temporal and 'this worldly,' somewhat after the fashion of the Latin saeculum, referring to an age or a generation, rather than to the domain of the eternal" (7).

⁸ John Holloway, The Story of the Night: Studies in Shakespeare's Major Tragedies (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1963), 22.

⁹ Herbert Weisinger, Tragedy and the Paradox of the Fortunate Fall (East Lansing: Michigan State College Press, 1953), 228.

¹⁰ Ibid., 226. In Fools of Time: Studies in Shakespearean Tragedy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1967), Northrop Frye states that "The hero of tragedy ultimately includes the audience who form the substance of the hero . . . who participate in a ritual act of suffering in which the suffering is not real but the awareness of it is" (118).

¹¹ Kolve, Play Called Corpus Christi, 200.

¹² Ibid.

¹³ Sir Philip Sidney, An Apologie for Poetry, in English Literary Criticism: The Renaissance, ed. O. B. Hardison, Jr. (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1963), 139. Subsequent citations from this work will be given in the text.

¹⁴ Quoted from The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1974). All further citations and quotations of Shakespeare's plays come from this edition.

¹⁵ Enid Welsford, The Fool: His Social and Literary History (London: Faber and Faber, 1968), 68-69.

¹⁶ Harvey Cox, The Feast of Fools (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1969), 140.

¹⁷ Cited from David Bevington, ed., Medieval Drama (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1975), 542. Kolve discusses the convergence of laughter and the image of Christ in Play Called Corpus Christi, 181.

¹⁸The York Cycle of Mystery Plays: A Complete Version, ed. J. S. Purvis (London: S.P.C.K., 1957), 245. See Kolve, Play Called Corpus Christi, 184.

¹⁹ In King Lear, Cordelia exemplifies this selfless, Christlike love by risking her life to save the father who rejected her. Her death brings to Lear's lips the cry, "and my poor fool is hang'd!" (5.3.306). Although Lear uses the word "fool" as a term of endearment, it suggests the loyal jester who suffered with the King on the heath. And if indeed Lear's fool and Cordelia were played by the same actor in Shakespeare's day, as Sir John Gielgud believed, the relationship between folly and sacrifice becomes still more highly charged. In The Masks of King Lear (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1972), 318, Marvin Rosenberg emphasizes the visual and verbal imagery linking Cordelia and the fool: "Lear's tenderness with Cordelia recalls Lear's sheltering of Fool, his cross-grained love of both. . . . The two are joined by motif as well as character design: Lear's fool is someone who loves him, stays with him, pities him, suffers with him—who has been 'fooled' into holding on to his downhill wheel." While Cordelia serves as an emblem of Christian sacrifice, she does not perform the role of scapegoat in the pattern of the tragedy. It is Lear, wearing the coxcomb for ignoble reasons, who must perform this task. Referring to the "resurrection pattern" of King Lear, Northrop Frye says that "in the tragedy of isolation the hero becomes a scapegoat, a person excluded from his society and thereby left to face the full weight of absurdity and anguish that isolated man feels in nature" (Fools of Time, 118).

²⁰The Dance of Death by Hans Holbein the Younger: A Complete Facsimile of the Original 1538 Edition of "Les Simulachres & Historiees Faces de la Mort" (New York: Dover Publications, 1971), 26. My appreciation also extends to the Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

²¹ Robert Weimann, Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition in Theater: Studies in the Social Dimension of Dramatic Form and Function, ed. Robert Schwartz (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), 21. Weimann sees the connection between the idea of Utopia and topsy-turvydom as significant: "As early as the Roman Saturnalia such topsy-turvydom was associated with a Utopian dream of the Golden Age. The festive abolition of inequality and the playful exchange of roles between masters and servants defined the 'democratic character' of the Saturnalia, which ostensibly served to 'preserve the memory of the original state of nature where every man was equal.'" The sense of topsy-turvy inversion that pervades the comic-tragic moment of Shakespeare's tragedies hints at just such a return to equality and peace. Death, the great equalizer, ironically bears the seeds of a Utopian dream.

²² C. L. Barber recognizes the interplay of abusive wit and high-spirited mirth as essential components of Shakespeare's early comedies. Stressing Shakespeare's affinity to Aristophanes, Barber refers to The Origins of Attic Comedy in which F. M. Cornford suggests "that invocation and abuse were the basic gestures of nature worship behind Aristophanes' union of poetry and railing." Through these "two gestures," the early comedies, explains Barber, move us "through release to clarification": "The clarification achieved by the festive comedies is concomitant to the release they dramatize: a heightened awareness of the relation between man and 'nature'—the nature celebrated on holiday"; Shakespeare's Festive Comedy: A Study of Dramatic Form and Its Relation to Social Custom (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959), 7, 8. More pointed than Barber in his remarks on the destructive-recreative power of folk humor is Mikhail Bakhtin in his introduction to Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 52-53. For Bakhtin the grotesque image that emerges from carnival suggests ambivalence: the image encompasses "simutaneously the two poles of becoming: that which is receding and dying, and that which is being born: they show two bodies in one, the budding and the division of the living cell. . . . Old age is pregnant, death is gestation, all that is limited, narrowly characterized, and completed is thrust into the lower stratum of the body for recasting and a new birth." Also see Peter Burke's Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (New York: Harper & Row, 1978), 201.

²³ In poetry of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance,death was often personified as knocking at its victim's door or gate. John Webster Spargo gives a detailed look at the relationship between knocking and death in his article, "The Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth: An Essay in Interpretation," in Joseph Quincy Adams Memorial Studies, ed. James G. McManaway, Giles E. Dawson, and Edwin E. Willoughby (Washington, D.C.: Folger Shakespeare Library, 1948), 269-77. Two excellent articles deal with the porter scene's allusion to the harrowing of hell: Glynne Wickham's "Hell-Castle and Its Door-Keeper," Shakespeare Survey 19 (1970): 68-74, and John B. Harcourt's "I Pray You, Remember the Porter," Shakespeare Quarterly 12 (1961): 393-402. Wickham explains that "On the medieval stage hell was represented as a castle, more particularly as a dungeon or cesspit within a castle, one entrance to which was often depicted as a dragon's mouth. Its gate was guarded by a janitor or porter. Christ, after his crucifixion, but before his resurrection, came to the castle of hell to demand of Lucifer the release of the souls of the patriarchs and prophets. . . . Christ's arrival was signalled by a tremendous knocking at this gate and a blast of trumpets" (68-69). Frederic B. Tromly, in "Macbeth and His Porter," Shakespeare Quarterly 26 (1975): 151-56, takes still another look at the scene. He argues against Harcourt's view that the scene functions to isolate Macbeth. For Harcourt, the scene works to humanize the tyrant by forcing us to recognize him in the ordinary porter. While critics tend to read the scene as either drawing us into sympathy with Macbeth or isolating us from him, they do not acknowledge that the scene in fact does both. The porter is the master equivocator, moving us to both pity and contempt.

²⁴The St. Albans Psalter, ed. G. Big, Studies of the Warburg Institute, no. 25 (London: Warburg Institute, University of London, 1960). My gratitude also goes to St. Godehard in Hildesheim, the owners of the manuscript.

²⁵ Harcourt, "I Pray You," 395. I agree with Harcourt that the porter's reference to the petty sinners serves to "destroy the pseudoheroic illusion."

²⁶ "Vado Mori" (British Museum, MS. Additional 37049, fol. 36r), reproduced in Douglas Gray's Themes and Images in the Medieval English Religious Lyric (Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972), pl. 10.

²⁷ Roman Dyboski, ed., Songs, Carols, and Other Miscellaneous Poems, EETS, e.s., no. 101 (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner and Co., 1907), 87-88.

²⁸ Cited from Bevington, Medieval Drama, 456.

²⁹Portrait of Sir Brian Tuke by Hans Holbein.Alte Pinakothek, Munich. Reproduced in Katalog der Gemalde-Sammlung der KGL. Alteren Pinakothek in Munchen (Verlag von F. Bruckmann, A.-G., 1908), 213. See also Frederick Parkes Weber, Aspects of Death and Correlated Aspects of Life in Art, Epigram, and Poetry: Contributions Towards an Anthology and an Iconography of the Subject, 4th ed. (College Park, Md: McGrath Publishing Co., 1971), 137, 796.

³⁰ My treatment of the regenerative implications of the graveyard scene in Hamlet may be found in "Saturnalian Sacrifices: Comic-Tragic Blending in Shakespeare's Hamlet," Explorations in Renaissance Culture 12 (1986): 87-104.