Introduction

The comedy mines Shakespeare’s alleged lack of humour to hilarious effect. It riffs off topics like Shakespeare’s often implausible plots, and strews in fantasy words that sound vaguely Shakespearean (‘puffling pants’ or ‘saucy prancings’). For all the fun it pokes at Shakespeare’s terrible jokes, Upstart Crow mimics the comedic strategies that Shakespeare himself uses. Shakespeare often resorts to devices such as parody, verbal inventiveness, arch allusions to contemporary cultural developments, and self-reflexive jokes, playing games with the workings of humour. Remarkably, in a society in which eloquence in women was frowned upon, most of Shakespeare’s witty characters are women. Their legacy is reflected in a surge of vibrant female comedy in the contemporary world. In Shakespeare’s plays, jokes are used in the context of power relations, as implements of warfare to devastate others, or as a ploy in gamesmanship between rivals. Jokes are also utilised as a defence mechanism to defuse fear or anxiety.