230228 Comedy and/as Social Discipline in Shakespeare (S) (SoSe 2024)

“Laughter in a group has a social control function as well. Through laughter the emotional climate of the group may be controlled. Hence, laughter must have evolved to change the behavior of others. For example, in an embarrassing or threatening situation, laughter may serve as a conciliatory gesture or as a way to deflect anger.”
“Social hierarchy is involved too. According to superiority theory, we laugh at jokes that focus on someone else's mistakes, stupidity or misfortune. We feel superior to this person, experience a certain detachment from the situation, and so we are able to laugh at it, schadenfreude.” (from: Jeffrey E. Nash, “Using Laughter and Humor to Teach Furtive Sociology”, Michigan Sociological Review, Vol. 34 (Fall 2020), pp. 106-128

Laughter – as a phenomenon that is both biological and cultural – can be friendly or aggressive, inclusive or marginalising, harmonising or subversive. It can express relief, a compliment or schadenfreude. In a space like the theatre, which mirrors the audience to itself in the fiction enacted on stage, laughter is even more complex. What is the relation between laughter, the genre of comedy and social order and social discipline in early modern English theatre? What kind of laughter was it that greeted the magically induced sexual intercourse between Titania, the Fairy Queen and a weaver-turned-ass, when all the world knew that Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth I styled herself ‘Titania’? How does society control a man who embarrasses himself and his wife with his jealous rages? How do men and women laugh with and about each other when love and marriage are at issue?
Comedy is the genre that demonstrates to the audience how social conflicts can be resolved so that society can survive. We will analyse how Shakespeare did this in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Much Ado About Nothing and The Merry Wives of Windsor.

Bibliography

We are going to read (most of) three plays: A Midsummer Night's Dream (c. 1595); The Merry Wives of Windsor (c. 1597) and Much Ado About Nothing (c. 1598/99). You need to read these plays in the form of annotated critical editions, preferably from the New Cambridge, Oxford or New Arden series. Under NO circumstances can you use just any old online version of the plays, or - *shudder* - school editions or German translations. -