ABSTRACT
This chapter examines early modern accounts of audience laughter, which is by no means the same thing as an examination of “the early modern sense of humour”, or of Renaissance comic theory as it is usually understood (that is, in broadly structuralist terms).1 This chapter does not seek to examine audience laughter as offering any access to the early modern mind; it is instead concerned with documenting that laughter as a phenomenon in itself, using those accounts in which it is described – accounts which are almost always complicated by the fact that they come from “literary” sources, and are without exception complicated by the circumstances of their survival in textual form. Accordingly, this chapter will weigh up what early modern accounts say about questions such as: how important laughter was to the reception of early modern plays; what can be said about what early modern audience laughter sounded like; and in what circumstances early modern audiences laughed.
