ABSTRACT
Lyly’s dictum that “soft smiling, not loud laughing” is the desired audience reaction to comedy can be related to other, earlier, Elizabethan texts, including Sidney’s Defence of Poesy, whose complaint that “our comedians think there is no delight without laughter” is quoted in Chapter 4. Among other still earlier Elizabethan texts that share this aesthetic, George Gascoigne’s comedy The Glasse of Gouernement, for instance, warns off mere seekers of entertainment – “[An] Enterlude may make you laugh your fill” – which, incidentally, gives information about the usual expectation of audiences at interludes.1 Instead, Gascoigne’s prologue announces the instructive power of the comedy to follow, although that comedy was probably a closet drama, not intended for performance. Gascoigne’s friend George Whetstone’s Promos and Cassandra (printed 1578) complained in its preface about other comic authors “not waying, so the people laugh, though they laugh them (for their folleys) to scorne: Many tymes (to make mirthe) they make a Clowne companion with a kinge …”. As Andrew Gurr points out, this complaint is perhaps tongue-in-cheek, since Promos and Cassandra itself makes use of the device of having a clown and a king on stage together.2 Best-remembered now as a source for Measure for Measure, Promos and Cassandra was, however, “apparently unperformed” in Whetstone’s lifetime.3 Once again, though it can be taken as evidence for an alternative aesthetic, the preface to Promos and Cassandra actually tends to confirm rather than deny the proposition that in practice early modern comic theatre aimed to make its audience laugh.
