Laughing and Weeping in Early Modern Theatres

Matthew Steggle

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780754657026
• eBook ISBN: 9781351922999
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Literaturkritik

Did Shakespeare's original audiences weep? Equally, while it seems obvious that they must have laughed at plays performed in early modern theatres, can we say anything about what their laughter sounded like, about when it occurred, and about how, culturally, it was interpreted? Related to both of these problems of audience behaviour is that of the stage representation of laughing, and weeping, both actions performed with astonishing frequency in early modern drama. Each action is associated with a complex set of non-verbal noises, gestures, and cultural overtones, and each is linked to audience behaviour through one of the axioms of Renaissance dramatic theory: that weeping and laughter on stage cause, respectively, weeping and laughter in the audience. This book is a study of laughter and weeping in English theatres, broadly defined, from around 1550 until their closure in 1642. It is concerned both with the representation of these actions on the stage, and with what can be reconstructed about the laughter and weeping of theatrical audiences themselves, arguing that both actions have a peculiar importance in defining the early modern theatrical experience.

Chapter 1
Renaissance constructions of laughter and weeping

In the Introduction to their collection Reading the Early Modern Passions, Gail Kern Paster, Katherine Rowe and Mary Floyd-Wilson talk about the difficulties involved in writing a cultural history of emotion, particularly with regard to the early modern period. It is, they write, a mistake to attempt to talk about the passions as if they could be described as coherent entities, or even as coherent states of being: "they comprise, instead, an ecology or a transaction ... [they] transverse the Cartesian division between physiology and psychology."¹ If these dicta apply to a project to discuss early modern passions, then they apply even more strongly to an attempt to write a cultural history of two of the most notable outward manifestations of those shifting and restless ecologies. What follows will move from medical, to religious, to social discourses around laughing and weeping, to build up a sense of the cultural profile of these actions in the period.

Taking cues from pseudo-Anstotelian and pseudo-Hippocratic medical texts, and from rhetorical writings by Cicero and Quintilian, many medical writers of the Renaissance considered the problems of weeping and laughter. While competing accounts differed on points of detail, Quentin Skinner summarises their main points of agreement as follows: "Among the elements common to laughter and weeping, these writers single out the fact that they are peculiar to humankind, that they are largely uncontrollable, and they seem to be almost unnaturally vehement reactions to some inner movement of the soul".² Much of the energy, particularly on discussions of laughter, went into attempting to define the nature of the comic stimulus; what it was that made something funny to its recipient. In a sense, the failure even of these contemporary accounts to reach a firm and definitive consensus can be measured against the axioms of Paster, Rowe and Floyd-Wilson, since these accounts tended to look for universal examples of the pathetic or the risible, and sought, in effect, fixity in passions. Learning from their failures, therefore, this account looks to describe not so much the Renaissance pursuit of definitions of the risible and lamentable, nor the psychological mechanisms one might suppose to be invoked by those stimuli, but rather the descriptions of and attitudes to the observable bodily phenomena they caused. Similarly, and for the same reasons, this study stands at something of an angle to the main thrust of most recent writing both on laughter and literature, and on tragic affect and literature. It is not interested in the nature of the comic, or the tragic, or the feelings they produce, so much as in particular and external physical effects.

"Laughter" and "weeping" are both terms which denote syndromes: collections of related physical symptoms with a common cause. A good place to begin is with Renaissance descriptions of those syndromes, using mainly two representative examples of Renaissance medical thought, Timothy Bright's Treatise on Melancholy, and, first, the Traité Du Ris (1579) of Laurent Joubert (1529-82). Joubert was a Montpellier-based doctor and academic who became personal physician to the King of France.³ The Traité Du Ris, the fullest Renaissance description of the physiological working of laughter, is only one of a number of medical works he published in his lifetime, and is notable for offering an entire theoiy of laughter, although this theory starts not with the physical reaction itself, but with a discussion of the nature of the ridiculous. For Joubert, laughter is not simply a sign of joy or of sorrow, but arises from a mixture of pleasure and displeasure at this particular kind of stimulus: "Laughter, then, is provoked by deeds or words which have the appearance of ugliness and are not worthy of pity, except perhaps at first blush". In this idea, whose origins are Aristotelian, Joubert is at odds with other theorists who hold that it proceeds solely from joy, and at odds with others who believe that it derives from a form of hatred (a tradition which goes back to Quintilian, and forward to Thomas Hobbes's famous definition of laughter in the later seventeenth century as "a suddaine Glory arising from suddaine Conception of some Eminency in our selves by Comparison with the Infirmityes of others, or with our owne formerly").⁴

Furthermore, following Plato, Joubert believes that "laughter comes from an emotion in the heart and not from the brain"; it is the "laughable matter, carried first to the heart through the conduits of the senses", which causes the heart to suffer spasms.⁵ Laughter's effects start with these movements (45); these movements are transmitted to the diaphragm (47), thus affecting the lungs and causing heaving of the chest, interrupting the voice, and substituting instead the sound of air being forced out of the lungs. Hence, audible laughter arises straight from the lungs, rather than being produced by the voice or the tongue (50). Then, the effects of this agitation propagate upwards into the head. As a consequence of the need for rapid breathing, the mouth opens, the lips stretch and the chin moves (51); the face wrinkles, especially round the eyes; the eyes themselves sparkle and grow tearful (55-6). The face reddens, coughing may ensue, and one's drink may shoot back down one's nose (58). "The arms, shoulders, thighs, feet and entire body can be moved by dint of laughing" (58), while further effects include an aching stomach, sweating and incontinence. The list of possible symptoms of laughter concludes with loss of consciousness and sudden death (61); laughter, for Joubert, can be a medical emergency.

Joubert's influence can be seen in accounts including A Treatise of Melancholy (1586), by Timothy Bright (1549/50-1615), English physician, divine and writer on shorthand as well as 011 medicine. Bright's book is mainly a medical textbook devoted to the diagnosis and treatment of melancholy, and as such was in turn influential on later texts including Shakespeare's Hamlet and Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy.⁶ While it defers to Joubert on the subject of laughter rather than offering its own description, it does offer a usefully full anatomy of the syndrome of weeping:

Of all the actions of melancholie, or rather of heauinesse and sadnesse, none is so manifolde and diuerse in partes, as that of weeping. First of all it putteth finger in the eyes, and sheadeth teares; then it baseth the countenance unto the bosome; thirdly it draweth the cheekes with a kinde of convulsion on both sides and turneth the countenance into a resemblance of girninge, and letteth the browes fall vppon the eye liddes; it bleareth the eyes, and maketh the cheekes redde; it causeth the heade to ake, the nose to runne, & mouth to slauer, the lippes to tremble; interrupteth the speeche, and shaketh the whole chest with sighes, and sobbes.⁷

The prime cause of weeping, then, is a humoral imbalance caused by compression in the brain which leads to the excretion from the brain of a fluid in the form of tears which is also excreted into the nose and mouth to create the runny nose and excessive saliva noted as supplementary symptoms; the excretion of the tears, in turn, alters the balance of spirits in the flesh of the face, causing the facial symptoms.⁸ As Bright's initial account makes clear, these actions are perceived as happening sequentially ("First ... then ... thirdly"). The expression of the face becomes "a resemblance of girninge" - that is, gurning, or face-pulling. The expelled tears, in turn, have an effect further away still within the body, and are the direct cause of the sobbing: "when matter of grief inforceth teares, the Diaphragme, and the muscles receiue a weakenes, by reason of retraction of spirits, that they are faine for the dilatation of the chest to make mo pulls then one". This produces the respiratory symptoms. Thus, although, as both Bright and Joubert observe, there is in some respects considerable overlap between laughter and weeping in terms of their symptoms, these two accounts ascribe to them quite different fundamental aetiologies; weeping is caused by emotional distress, laughter by a more complex and specific mixture of joy and sorrow. Weeping moves from the brain into the head and downwards, laughter from the heart into the chest and upwards. In weeping, the tears are the first symptom, and audible effects come later: in laughter, the sobbing which makes the audible effects can lead to the tears.⁹

A similar observation of the similarity between tears and laughter is made by John Bulwer more than fifty years later, in a discussion of facial expressions. But again Bulwer differentiates the two, with tears, above all, the distinguishing point:

in the Face by Laughter the parts about the mouth are more emphatically affected: but in weeping the parts about the Eye; which compression expresseth teares, else there is little difference in their lines, as Painters observe, which consequently requires the action of the same Muscles in both.¹⁰

Joubert, Bright and Bulwer are illustrative examples of a Renaissance orthodoxy which holds that while the symptoms of weeping and laughter are similar, the points of origin are quite distinct.

As direct consequences of humoral imbalance, then, tears and laughter might seem to offer hope of a direct access to the interior experience of the subject. Bright believes that tears cannot be feigned: "tears cannot be counterfeited, because they rise not of any action or facultie voluntary, but natural". And yet, as Bright also notes, there is no easy relation between grief and tears: extreme grief cannot be expressed in tears, which Bright illustrates from the anecdote of King Amasis of Egypt, unable to weep at the death of his son but able to weep at the comparatively minor misfortune of a captured friend.¹¹ Weeping can also be brought on by joy, as Bright documents, and he also observes examples of melancholies weeping "without anie outward occasion", so that even without considering (as he does not) the problem of feigned tears, the question of what weeping means is problematic.

Similarly, accounts of laughter are troubled by phenomena such as laughter induced by a chest injury, or what Bright calls "counterfeit and false" laughter caused by

the midriffe moued disorderly with shaking by anie annoyance; and moueth also the chest, and muscles of the iawes and cheekes by consent of nerues, and so counterfeiting a laughinge gesture, wherein the heart taketh no pleasure.¹²

Bright describes the laughter brought on by tickling as of this sort. Here, too, one finds the idea of the sardonic laugh, which is said to take its name from a poisonous herb supposed by Dioscorides to cause its victims to laugh themselves to death.¹³ Even grief may cause this inappropriate laughter by making the diaphragm misfire, a phenomenon illustrated by Bright from the story of Hannibal laughing to hear of the distress of Carthage, so that laughter, like weeping, is ultimately ambiguous and mysterious. While in some ways laughter and weeping appear to offer unproblematic, non-linguistic access to subjects' consciousnesses, these accounts are clear that weeping and laughter do not do so reliably, and that they are physiological symptoms, which can have diverse causes. What Maijory E. Lange says about early modern tears is equally true of early modern laughter: both can be "attributes of an abundant variety of mental, physical, and spiritual states".¹⁴

Both weeping, and laughter, can be dangerous, indeed fatal, in excess. Nonetheless, Bright and Joubert con...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Abbreviations and Procedures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Renaissance constructions of laughter and weeping
• 2 Laughing on stage
• 3 Weeping on stage
• 4 Audiences laughing
• 5 Audiences weeping
• 6 Soft smiling?: Lyly and Jonson
• 7 Horrid laughter
• 8 Shakespeare's theatre of sympathy
• Bibliography
• Index