Sine Dolore: Relative Painlessness in Shakespeare’s Laughter at War

How do we understand Shakespeare’s invitation to laugh in the context of war? Previous critical accounts have offered too simple a view: that laughter undercuts military ideals. Instead, this essay draws on the Aristotelian description of the laughable ‘deformity’ and Plato’s description of laughable ignorance in order to characterize Shakespeare’s laughter in the context of war more carefully as an expression of ‘relative painlessness’. It discusses how the fraught amusement of Coriolanus (Coriolanus), the reciprocality of Falstaff and Hotspur as laughable military failures (1 Henry IV), and the laughter of Bertram at Paroles (All’s Well that Ends Well) each engage with an ancient philosophical conundrum articulated poignantly by St Augustine: the requirement that a Christian civilization engage in war to defend itself against honour-obsessed aggressors without turning into a like aggressor itself. Shakespeare’s laughter at war enacts the desire for that balance

Book review : 'On farting : language and laughter in the Middle Ages'

Book review of 'On Farting: Language and Laughter in the Middle Ages' by Valerie Allen (2007). Palgrave Macmillan: New York. ISBN:9780230100398.3 page(s

Book review : 'The English clown tradition : from the middle ages to Shakespeare'

Book Review of: 'The English clown tradition: From the middle ages to Shakespeare', by Hornback, Robert, (Studies in Renaissance Literature, 26), Cambridge, D. S. Brewer, 2013, ISBN 9781843843566.2 page(s

Shakespearean comedy [encyclopaedia entry]

5 page(s

Rethinking Iago’s Jests in Othello II.i: Honestas, Imports and Laughable Deformity

An early scene in Act Two of Shakespeare's Othello is often cut or shortened. It is the one in which Iago jests with Desdemona while she waits and hopes for Othello to arrive safely in Cyprus (II.i.100–166). Critics and directors have found the scene jarring. Many productions have cut it and many editors dismissed it. This makes sense if one sees Iago's and Desdemona's exchange literally as farce, that is, as stuffing or filler. However, that perception flattens out what can instead be seen as a complex communal exchange of power and moral ideals and a delicate negotiation of a particular ethos – honestas – in a public setting, which cannot be characterized merely as an attack and a defence. This article develops a means of exploring the scene more fully by treating it as a serious dramatic exploration of Iago's persuasiveness and Desdemona's cleverness. I shall argue that the scene embodies a more complex exchange of social values than has been acknowledged. In doing so, I suggest that the rhetoric of jesting Shakespeare dramatizes here is a kind of efficacy that works by producing what is better described as a morally meaningful community than simply as a power structure facilitating self-interest in moral disguise