ABSTRACT

The surviving accounts of late sixteenth and seventeenth-century audience responses to William Shakespeare’s comedies and histories indicate, first of all, that the popularity of these plays depended in part on their success in providing the pleasures of mirth and laughter. The comical parts of Shakespearean drama have indeed succeeded in making us not only laugh at others but also laugh with them, and feel joy and delight. The ancient Graeco-Roman world provided a precedent for yet another major dimension of readers’ and playgoers’ accounts of what makes Shakespeare so special. Shakespeare provides the audience with an occasion for considering those beliefs and attitudes as wisdom. Shakespeare himself acted in some of the plays, invested in the theatre companies that performed his plays, and depended for his income on how they fared at court and in the London theatre venues.