The rhetoric of humor in Elizabethan England

Historians of rhetoric all but ignore the rhetorical practice of jesting, even though many rhetoricians, from antiquity to the eighteenth century, view it as a powerful rhetorical strategy available to speakers for managing rhetorical situations. My project responds to this neglect and offers a historical pragmatics of what it means to tell a joke in Elizabethan England. In order to complicate and enrich my study, I extend the range of what counts as a "rhetoric manual": in addition to canonical rhetorics, I examine courtesy manuals, self-help books, jest-books, comedies and other texts which offer recipes for persuasion or examples of persuasion in action. Finally, my project complements Bakhtin's study of medieval and Renaissance laughter which views humor from the bottom up, from the perspective of the populace, and which sees in carnival laughter energies that subvert the official world. Elizabethan rhetorics, by contrast, view humor from the top down and construct it as a socially conservative force, although the many gaps and contradictions in this construction suggest that jesting is always a flirtation with disorder and always calls upon energies from below. My first chapter examines the types of situations available to orators for jesting in Elizabethan England and the rhetorical dynamics of those situations. The remaining three chapters focus on how the rhetorics construct each participant in a joking exchange: the subject matter or butt of a joke, the speaker, and the audience. In these three chapters, I attend especially to the ambiguities and contradictions that arise in the rhetorics' discussions of jesting, and I argue that these ambiguities and contradictions reproduce ambiguities and contradictions not only inherent in the practice of jesting, but also in the social order itself.