A History of English Laughter: Laughter from Beowulf to Beckett and Beyond. Ed. Manfred Pfister (Internationale Forschungen zur allgemeinen und vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft, 57).

• Elizabeth Freund

“There is nothing in which people more betray their character,” Goethe observed, “than in what they laugh at.” The conclusion of Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost stages a delightfully selfreflexive deferral of the comic pleasures and resolutions proper to a comedy of courtship. Instead of festive nuptials, the ladies impose a year of lenten austerity to “purge” their suitors of a surfeit of wit. To be cured of his excessive jesting Biron is ordered to “jest a twelvemonth in a hospital” (“too long for a play,” he complains) and “move wild laughter in the throat of death.” “It cannot be” he remonstrates. “Mirth cannot move a soul in agony.”

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