A History of English Laughter: Laughter from Beowulf to Beckett and Beyond. Ed. Manfred Pfister (Internationale Forschungen zur allgemeinen und vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft, 57).

“There is nothing in which people more betray their character,” Goethe observed, “than in what they laugh at.” The conclusion of Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost stages a delightfully selfreflexive deferral of the comic pleasures and resolutions proper to a comedy of courtship. Instead of festive nuptials, the ladies impose a year of lenten austerity to “purge” their suitors of a surfeit of wit. To be cured of his excessive jesting Biron is ordered to “jest a twelvemonth in a hospital” (“too long for a play,” he complains) and “move wild laughter in the throat of death.” “It cannot be” he remonstrates. “Mirth cannot move a soul in agony.”

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