THE BRITISH INSTITUTE OF FLORENCE THE ITALIAN ASSOCIATION OF SHAKESPEAREAN AND EARLY MODERN STUDIES Advisory Board Mariacristina Cavecchi, Università degli Studi di Milano Giuliana Iannaccaro, Università degli Studi di Milano Donatella Pallotti, Università degli Studi di Firenze Alessandra Petrina, Università degli Studi di Padova Laura Tosi, Università degli Studi di Venezia “Ca’ Foscari” Humour in Shakespeare’s Arcadia Selected Papers from the “Shakespeare and his Contemporaries” Graduate Conference Florence, 23 April 2015 edited by Roberta Mullini and Maria Elisa Montironi The British Institute of Florence 2017 Humour in Shakespeare’s Arcadia. Selected Papers from the “Shakespeare and his Contemporaries” Graduate Conference. Florence, 23 April 2015 / edited by Roberta Mullini and Maria Elisa Montironi – Firenze: The British Institute of Florence, 2017. © The Contributors, 2017 ISBN (online) 978-88-907244-4-2 http://www.britishinstitute.it/it/biblioteca/biblioteca-harold- acton/events-at-the-harold-acton-library Graphic design by Roberta Mullini Front cover: Will Sommers, by Francis Delaram, active 1615-1624 [Public domain], via Wikimedia at the site https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Will_Sommers#/ media/File:WillSommers_engraving_300dpi.jpg.. Back cover: Four figures contemplate the inscription on a tomb in Arcadia. Etch- ing by Etienne Picart after Nicolas Poussin, 1653. Wellcome Library, London. We act in good faith in publishing this material here. However, should they exist, any legitimate copyright holder is invited to contact the editors. This publication has been double blind peer reviewed. This is an open access book licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), which means that the text may be used for non- commercial purposes, provided credit is given to the author. The complete legal code is available at the following web page: <http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/legalcode>. Published by The British Institute of Florence Lungarno Guicciardini, 9, 50125 Firenze, Italy http://www.britishinstitute.it/it/ Contents Roberta Mullini and Maria Elisa Montironi Introduction 11 Roberta Mullini The Play [not only] of the Wether: Gender, Genre, and Wordplay in a Very Early Modern Comed y 27 Rebecca Agar Behind the Laughter: The Use of ‘Low Comedy’ in The Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth 53 Allison L. Steenson The ‘Register of Fame’: Authority and Irony in Alexander Montgomerie’s Sonnets ‘In Prais of the Kings Vranie’ 73 Maria Elisa Montironi Food Imagery in Robert Armin’s Foole upon Foole 97 Charlène Cruxent ‘You nickname virtue.“Vice” you should have spoke’. The Humouristic and Offensive Potential of Nicknames in Shakespeare’s Plays 139 Contributors 157 Index of Names 161 Acknowledgements First of all we wish to thank the Italian Association of Shakespearean and Early Modern Studies for offering us the opportunity to edit this book. Our gratitude also goes to the British Institute of Florence and its Director Julia Race for hosting the 2015 Graduate Conference, during which the papers selected for this collection and other contributions were delivered. It was a very pleasurable occasion for young and … less young scholars to meet in the elegant Harold Acton Library on the bank of the Arno. Special thanks go to Luca Baratta for allowing us to use the template he had developed for the 2014 pro- ceedings, to Jeanne Clegg for her reading of part of the introduction, and to Alyson Price for the care shown in the copy-editing of the articles. We are also grateful to Alessandro Zanarini for his help in the graphic design of the two covers. Roberta Mullini and Maria Elisa Montironi Roberta Mullini and Maria Elisa Montironi Introduction But now that I haue taught men to be sory, I wil ate[m]pt again to make them mery, and shewe what learned men saie concernyng laughter, in delityng the hearers whe[n] tyme and place shall best require. (Thomas Wilson, The Art of Rhetorique , fol. 74r) 1. Theory and Practice of the Comic in Early Modern Times The IASEMS Graduate Conference, held at the British Institute of Florence on 23 April 2015, was entitled – like its predecessors – “Shakespeare and his Contemporaries” and subtitled “Humour in Shakespeare’s Arcadia: Gen- der, Genre and Wordplay in Early Modern Comedy”. In spite of Shakespeare featuring twice – in both title and subtitle – it is significant that only two (and a half) pa- pers out of the twelve listed in the programme actually dealt with Shakespeare (either his language generally speaking, or his plays). 1 Evidently most conveners were 1 The 2015 Graduate Conference was enlivened by the participa- tion of a large number of young scholars, but contrary to previous editions when Italy was the most widely represented country, on this occasion foreign speakers coming from various European countries were the majority (they were from France, England, Poland, Scotland and Ulster). © Roberta Mullini and Maria Elisa Montironi, 2017 / CC BY-NC-ND Published by The British Institute of Florence ISBN (online) 978-88-907244-4-2 Roberta Mullini and Maria Elisa Montironi attracted by the more specific terms in the subtitle and by the wider domain opened up by the phrase ‘his contem- poraries’. This means that the general theme of ‘humour’ inflected according to the categories listed was accepted as stimulating and as encompassing various research fields. 2 The general convergence in favour of the ‘sunny’ side of the term ‘Arcadia’ was certainly due to the pres- ence of the rich subtitle of the conference, focussing on ‘humour’ and ‘comedy’, with some of their possible de- clensions. As a consequence, all papers read in Florence avoided talking about the dystopian meaning connected to the phrase ‘Et in Arcadia ego’ which Nicolas Poussin inscribed in his picture Les Bergers d’Arcadie (The Ar- cadian Shepherds, 1637-38) to remind his public of the presence of Death even in the prelapsarian happiness and joyful world of Arcadia. Indeed, during the conference the memento mori function of Poussin’s inscription was totally ignored, while all speakers concentrated on the festive, joyous and playful aspects of a positively idyllic reality (even when satire, court life and wordplay were at stake). 3 Nevertheless, the editors have decided to use an engraving from Poussin’s painting for the back cover, whereas the front cover hosts a portrait of Will Sommers, Henry VIII’s fool, i.e. the image of a professional of jests, worldplay, and humour. 2 The first section of this introduction is by Roberta Mullini, the second by Maria Elisa Montironi. 3 The Arcadian world of pastoral poetry was also unmentioned during the conference, certainly because of the emphasis on hu- mour and comedy (for a study of the influence of Iacopo San- nazaro’s Arcadia on English culture see Alessandra Petrina, “Iacopo Sannazaro and the Creation of a Poetic Canon in Early Modern England”, Parole Rubate / Purloined Letters 14:4 (2016): 95-118). 12 Introduction But what is ‘humour’? As a word, in early modern times it was not used to define a person or a thing pro- voking laughter, since it was strictly connected to Galenic medicine and its theory of the four humours governing the body. In their glossary of Shakespeare’s words, David and Ben Crystal do not include any meaning which might link the word ‘humour’ to the comic sphere. 4 It is self-evident, of course, that the term used for the IASEMS conference draws on and finds its sense in our modern and contempo- rary culture, after Bergson, Pirandello, Freud, Bakhtin and many others. Inside the broad category of modern humour , in fact, we find puns, mirth, laughter, wordplay, comedy. Rhetoricians and philosophers have studied laughter in par- ticular, but whether we define it as Hobbes’s ‘sudden glory’, or Freud’s ‘the effect of comic pleasure’, or modify it by adjectives such as Meredith’s ‘thoughtful’, Bergson’s ‘punitive’ and ‘corrective’, Bakhtin’s ‘festive’ and ‘carni- valesque’, or Pirandello’s ‘bitter’ when connected to ‘the feeling of the opposite’, the object ‘laughter’ seems to re- sist any single definition and, on the contrary, solicits ever alert and mindful speculation. 5 4 David Crystal & Ben Crystal, Shakespeare’s Words. A Glossary & Language Companion (London: Penguin, 2002). 5 See Mikhail M. Bakhtin, Rabelais and his World (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1968); Henri Bergson, Le rire. Essai sur la signification du comique (Paris, 1900. Laughter . An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic , trans. Cloudesley Brereton and Fred Rothwell, Eastford, CT: Martino Fine Books, 2014); Sigmund Freud, Der Witz und seine Beziehung zum Unbewußten ( Vienna, 1905. Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, trans. J. Stra- chey, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud , vol. VIII, London: Hogarth Press, 1955); Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (London, 1651. ed. Richard Tuck, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); George Meredith, An Essay on Comedy and the Use of the Comic Spirit (London: Constable, 1897); Luigi Pirandello, L’umorismo (Lan- 13 Roberta Mullini and Maria Elisa Montironi Even if not called humour by early modern thinkers, the various nuances of the comic were certainly well known to and discussed by them via the teaching and the examples of classical rhetoric, and writers practiced it in their works (both narrative, poetry and drama). It is true that, as Manfred Pfister claims, ‘there was no original and incisive theory of the comic in Elizabethan England’, but there was what he calls ‘a rich, subtly differentiated, and heated debate about laughter, an “argument of laugh- ter”’. 6 It therefore seems worth outlining some early modern English theoretical and practical stances on laughter. In his Art of Rhetorique (1553), for example, Thomas Wilson entitles one chapter “Of delityng the hearers, and stirryng them to laughter”, and summarises Cicero’s advice to orators ‘concerning pleasaunt talke’ and the ways to move somebody to laughter.