ABSTRACT
An audience would frequently see and hear laughter represented on the early modern stage. Alan C. Dessen and Leslie Thomson’s indispensable Dictionary of Stage Directions notes that in their corpus of early modern English drama performed between 1580 and 1642, a corpus containing around 22,000 stage directions, laughter is signalled “roughly forty times, often with no more than the basic term”.1 These explicit stage directions will be discussed below, but first it should be noted that they are outnumbered by a factor of perhaps twenty to one by one implied stage direction, namely the phrase “ha ha ha” and its longer variations.
