Humour in Shakespeare: ‘Art and Artifice in Shakespeare’

Abstract

The greatest comic dramatist since Aristophanes - assuming that Shakespeare is ineligible to compete – sprang into fame with a genial satire upon the metaphysical exquisites of the blue salon of the Marquise de Rambouillet.  Very different was the mood and purpose of Shakespeare in his ‘Pleasant conceited comedy’.  Admittedly he set out to make fun of the sophisticated and metaphysical wits of London.  By a happy coincidence Shakespeare, at an almost identical point in his career, came upon the London stage with a ‘Pleasant conceited comedy’ called Love’s Labour’s Lost, in which the exquisites of his own time and country were brought to book.  It is instructive to compare the spirit in which these two men of genius approached a very similar enterprise.  Their subject was the same; they had a like intention, which was to be amusing at the expense of the verbal and sentimental affections of the period.  Their audience in both cases was a select company of persons passionately addicted to the follies at which they were invited to laugh.  These follies, moreover, had a superficial resemblance.