ABSTRACT
During the final decades of the sixteenth century, the Universities of Cambridge and Oxford witnessed an unprecedented explosion of satirical drama on college stages. The writers of university comedies relied on in-jokes, on a communal sense of texts enjoyed or endured as part of the academic curriculum, and also, more subtly, on shared professional and epistemological concerns facing both the student and the scholar. These erudite authors used comedy to discuss the effects that learning could have on scholars, drawing on contemporary writing on the humours, particularly those texts which discussed the emotional and intellectual repercussions of study on an individual’s temperament. Through the exploration of psychopathology, university comedy and satire-rather than just offering recondite inkhorn entertainment for a college microcosm-deliberated on questions of contemporary epistemological value and on currents of institutional pedagogical reform. Both in these academic plays and in contemporary psychopathological writing, university authors discussed the social problem of graduate overproduction, linking this phenomenon explicitly with the perception that higher education was an inadequate preparation for life on graduation. At the same time, these writers represented the epistemological problem of how learning was thought to induce melancholy and dangerous fantasy. Authors who offered a discussion of such topics include Robert Burton, academic playwright and anatomist of melancholy; Thomas Tomkis, author of the Cambridge comedy Lingua; and the anonymous authors of the influential Parnassus trilogy, to name but a few.
