Laughter in Early Modern Drama: Permission to Laugh Ourselves Into Stitches

This dissertation centers on the laughter elicited in early modern drama via text and performance. The project considers how moments of laughter are constructed---granting permission for an audience to laugh---and how that laughter reflects, reinforces, and alternately challenges societal frames of gender, ethnicity, status, and decorum. Chapter One: The Framing of Laughter, grounded in frame theory, explores the keys presented by playwrights, directors, and players that access a priori frames, the organizational structures one uses to understand the world. I argue that comedic moments in plays such as The Two Gentlemen of Verona prompt laughter by referencing culturally-held frames and that certain jokes are frames in and of themselves. Chapter Two: "Laughter through Tears": A Physiological Connection uncovers the physiological connection between laughter and tears and considers how particular moments of early modern plays capitalize on this physical phenomenon in order to elicit specific gestures and reactions from audiences. Chapter Three: Theatrical Cross-Gendering and the Laughter Response is a close reading of laughter's relationship with social constructions of gender. It especially focuses on cross-gendered players and characters and how an audience's laughter, or lack thereof, reflects its anxieties stemming from issues of gender. Finally, Chapter Four: The Decorum of Laughter uses the lens of decorum to examine audience reactions to comedic plays that have been deemed inappropriate in certain cultural moments. "Laughter in Early Modern Drama: Permission to Laugh Ourselves into Stitches" examines how and why we laugh, suggests what that laughter indicates about our core values and beliefs, and underscores laughter's place as a trait of humanness.