UC Riverside UC Riverside Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Laughter in Early Modern Drama: Permission to Laugh Ourselves Into Stitches Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6f36b9s4 Author Antinora, Sarah Hill Publication Date 2016 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA RIVERSIDE Laughter in Early Modern Drama: Permission to Laugh Ourselves Into Stitches A Dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English by Sarah Hill Antinora March 2016 Dissertation Committee: Dr. Deborah Willis, Chairperson Dr. Heidi Brayman Hackel Dr. Rise Axelrod Copyright by Sarah Hill Antinora 2016 The Dissertation of Sarah Hill Antinora is approved: Committee Chairperson University of California, Riverside ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Portions of Chapter Three: Theatrical Cross-Gendering and the Laughter Response were published in the inaugural issue of Cerae: An Australasian Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies in 2014. The input from Cerae’s editorial team was invaluable, and my hope is that the rigorous peer review process impacted my approach to the dissertation as a whole. I also wish to acknowledge the contributions of the scholars who have shaped not only my dissertation’s focus but my career path. Numerous mentors at California State University at San Bernardino supported my academic pursuits, including Dr. Juan Delgado, Dr. Julie Paegle, and Dr. Sunny Hyon. I especially want to thank Dr. Jacqueline Rhodes and Dr. Bruce Golden, without whom I would not have discovered where the exact intersection of my interests lies. I have been incredibly well supported by the University of California at Riverside’s English Department. I owe a special gratitude to Tina Feldmann, our tireless Graduate Student Affairs Officer, and Dr. Stanley Stewart and Dr. Erith Jaffe-Berg, both of whom served on my oral exam committee and offered valuable feedback on my course of study. My dissertation committee’s support has been unwavering during this long process. I admire Dr. Rise Axelrod’s commitment to and impact upon the field of first- year composition. I am indebted to her for my interests in classical rhetoric and frame theory. Dr. Heidi Brayman Hackel shared the world of early modern drama with me. She is the audience I keep in mind in my quest for academic rigor. Finally, Dr. Deborah Willis has been a friend, a mentor, and a most dependable dissertation chair. iv Lastly, thank you to my grandmother for instilling me with the love of reading, my grandfather for believing in the power of education, my mother for being a strong emotional support, and my husband, without whom none of this would be possible or worth it. Thank you. v ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Laughter in Early Modern Drama: Permission to Laugh Ourselves Into Stitches by Sarah Hill Antinora Doctor of Philosophy, Graduate Program in English University of California, Riverside, March 2016 Dr. Deborah Willis, Chairperson This dissertation centers on the laughter elicited in early modern drama via text and performance. The project considers how moments of laughter are constructed—granting permission for an audience to laugh—and how that laughter reflects, reinforces, and alternately challenges societal frames of gender, ethnicity, status, and decorum. Chapter One: The Framing of Laughter, grounded in frame theory, explores the keys presented by playwrights, directors, and players that access a priori frames, the organizational structures one uses to understand the world. I argue that comedic moments in plays such as The Two Gentlemen of Verona prompt laughter by referencing culturally-held frames and that certain jokes are frames in and of themselves. Chapter Two: “Laughter through Tears”: A Physiological Connection uncovers the physiological connection between laughter and tears and considers how particular moments of early modern plays capitalize on this physical phenomenon in order to elicit specific gestures and reactions from audiences. Chapter Three: Theatrical Cross-Gendering and the Laughter Response is a close reading of laughter’s relationship with social constructions of gender. It especially vi focuses on cross-gendered players and characters and how an audience’s laughter, or lack thereof, reflects its anxieties stemming from issues of gender. Finally, Chapter Four: The Decorum of Laughter uses the lens of decorum to examine audience reactions to comedic plays that have been deemed inappropriate in certain cultural moments. “Laughter in Early Modern Drama: Permission to Laugh Ourselves Into Stitches” examines how and why we laugh, suggests what that laughter indicates about our core values and beliefs, and underscores laughter’s place as a trait of humanness. vii TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION………………………………………………………………………...1 CHAPTER ONE…………………………………………………………………………27 The Framing of Laughter CHAPTER TWO………………………………………………………………………...74 “Laughter through Tears”: A Physiological Connection CHAPTER THREE…………………………………………………………………….128 Theatrical Cross-Gendering and the Laughter Response CHAPTER FOUR………………………………………………………………………166 The Decorum of Laughter WORKS CITED……………………………………………………………………..…202 viii INTRODUCTION In 1992, I returned home from college, and, as a special treat, I attended The Old Globe production of The Winter’s Tale in San Diego with friends. It marked the first time I attended a professional production. Although I had already taken a Shakespeare course, this play had not been assigned, and none in my party were very familiar with its premise. While the last two decades have caused much of this production to be erased from my memory, one moment is clear: the tonal shift that occurs at the arrival of the shepherd in Act III, Scene ii. The tragedy of the first three acts had been void of humor, and I can remember vividly not only stifling laughter at the shepherd’s arrival and early lines but looking around at others to see if they found him funny as well. Were we supposed to laugh here? Did we have permission? I now know, of course, that the arrival of the shepherd marks the infamous tonal shift of one of early modern theater’s most genre-bending works, but the above story illustrates a phenomenon that my fellow audience members and I were not the first to have experienced: the questioning of laughter’s appropriateness in a given situation and the contemplating of that laughter’s implications. I have entitled this dissertation “Laughter in Early Modern Drama: Permission to Laugh Ourselves Into Stitches”1 because these questions of intention and permission to laugh are ones that have greatly guided not only my experiences with drama but my academic interests as well. I am interested in how playwrights convey their intentions of humor in a particular theatrical 1 The idiom of laughing oneself into stitches comes from Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, when Maria concocts a plan with Fabian, Sir Andrew, and Fabian to humiliate Malvolio. She says, “If you desire the spleen, and will laugh yourselves into stitches, follow me” (III.ii.58-60). 1 moment and create the conditions to grant an audience permission to laugh. I am also interested in the effects of that moment of laughter—how it fits contextually within the work’s larger themes and character development and, more pointedly, what it reflects about not only the author’s but the laugher’s cultural views of gender, class, and race. This research lies in the intersection of three fields of study: comedy and laughter studies, the rhetorical emphasis on framing, and the theater, especially as related to performance and early modern compositions. While I do not intend for the following to be a complete literature review, I do want to begin with an introduction to the theories that ground the following chapters. As my focus is in uncovering how and why one laughs—rather than how and why Shakespeare and his contemporaries believed we laugh—the research that follows represents a current understanding of these fields of study. THE COMIC AS DISTINCT FROM COMEDY What is the comic and how does it differ from comedy? As Frances Teague notes in her introduction to Acting Funny: “The words tragedy and tragic, comedy and comic are clearly related, but they are…quite distinct. After all, comic moments occur in plays that are clearly not comedies, while not all comedies are comic” (11). She identifies the “largely uncomic comedy” The Merchant of Venice and the porter scene in Macbeth as examples that embody the distinction between comedy and comic. Yet, while the two terms are distinct, it is difficult to discuss one without referencing or differentiating it from the other, and—as the research outlined below will demonstrate—the formative 2 theories of comedy and the comic often focus on the very same questions of their respective reputation, purpose, and effect. The definition of comedy often begins with Aristotle’s Poetics. Incidentally, his work also serves as the foremost source arguing comedy as a lower form than tragedy, a reputation that generally still exists to this day. Aristotle claims that both tragedy and comedy are forms of imitation, a characteristic that he argues is innate in human nature. However, tragedy is an imitation of good men and noble actions, while comedy spotlights the ignoble or the ludicrous. He labels comedy as trivial and claims that lesser writers naturally write comedy as they do not have the talent to write tragedy. However, he also concedes that comedy is not “in the full sense of the word bad” (I.v). Instead, he argues that comedy has not been taken seriously and has no history—and, hence, has not developed and matured as tragedy has. While he leaves room for comedy to be taken seriously in the future, he sets the precedent of placing art forms in a hierarchy, with comedy being the lowest, tragedy occupying the middle tier, and epic being the highest art form. Both Teague and R.