Shakespeare's Practical Jokes

"There is a mountain of work on Shakespeare's comedies but very little on what, in all the plays, can be described as comic. Since the subject is too vast to be tackled head-on, it is considered in this book via a number of practical joke episodes, some of them well known - the deceptions Hal and Poins practice on Falstaff, the tricking of Malvolio or Parolles - and others a little less so (the "Induction" to The Taming of the Shrew, for example). In order to define more closely the many different kinds of comedy Shakespeare can find in the practical joke, comparisons are made with the use of the beffa in both Boccaccio and later Italian writers, and with similar episodes from the work of Jonson. Frequent references are also made to practical jokes as they occur in later literature or in our current popular culture and, since comedy in the theater is so dependent on performance, there is an ongoing concern with questions of staging.^ Throughout the book, there is a running argument with Freud and Bergson, still always cited (surprisingly enough) as the two chief authorities on the comic, but the views of more recent theorists, such as Simon Critchley (from England) or Peter L. Berg