For the Love of Laughter: Early Modern Improv and Comedy

Last December, Folger staff were thrilled to host cast members from the Improvised Shakespeare Company for a visit. We shared collection highlights, like the second quarto of Hamlet, and personal favorites, like the Erasmus book of doodles. We also dove into the weird and wonderful history of early modern improv and comedy. In preparation for their visit, we ended up with 12 pages of notes on comedy. The notes have a glossary. 

Early modern comedy, much like comedy today, was a multifaceted and cathartic genre that delighted and challenged audiences. Within this period, we find comedy appearing on stage in many forms: interludes, afterpieces, jigs, farces, parodies, and drolls. We also find fans, critics, and everything in between. 

Ralph Roister Doister (circa 1550s) is one of the earliest known English comedies; only one copy of the first edition survives. Its prologue argues for the benefits of mirth and foreshadows the amusement the audience is hopefully about to experience: 

We present here a short list of items from the Folger’s collection to represent the expansive legacy of early modern comedy. 

Commedia dell’arte was a professional improvised comedy form that developed in Italy around 1550. Performers played stock characters and improvised dialogue inspired by plot outlines called “scenarios”. 

One of the first professional companies to attain recognition was I Gelosi (“The Zealous Ones”), founded by Flaminio Scala, who also published the first collection of scenarios. I Gelosi also included the famous husband and wife Francesco and Isabella Andreini.  

Isabella (1562-1605) was a talented actress, improvisor, and writer; only two years older than William Shakespeare, she was a respected professional performer in Italy at a time when women were not allowed on stage in England. 

Richard Tarlton, a stage clown with the Queen’s Men, was England’s first comic improvisor and celebrity. Within the play, the clown was often a rustic commoner ridiculed for his appearance and intellectual faults. At the same time, the clown was a transgressive character. Descending from the Lord of Misrule tradition, he had a unique agency to mock those in power, speak honestly about topical events, and challenge the social order.  

Tarlton set the mold for the clown as a semiautonomous comic specialist, exciting laughter through facial expressions, physical feats, verbal incomprehension, extemporaneous rhyming jests with audience members, and bawdy jigs. So great was his fame that after his death in 1588, his name was extended posthumously to inns, taverns, a fighting cock, and texts, such as this compilation of jests.  

His company lamented his loss with a scene in Three Lords and Three Ladies of London (1590) when the character Simplicity brings Tarlton’s picture on stage as a prop and said “the fineness was within, for without he was plain; / But it was the merriest fellow, and had such jests in store / That, if thou hadst seen him, thou would’st have laughed thy heart sore”. Nearly 50 years later, Richard Brome’s play Antipodes still named Tarlton as a comedic exemplar. 

Tarlton’s comic improvisation and antics paved the way for subsequent stage clowns such as William Kemp, Robert Armin, and Thomas Greene. 

The Wits is a collection of drolls, which are short comic scenes or playlets often adapted from existing plays. Drolls originated during the closure of London’s theaters (1642-1660) when full-length plays could not be staged. Actors skirted the ban by performing “peices of plays” at fairs and in taverns and public spaces. Through drolls, clowns became main characters on the improvised stages of the interregnum.   

Part I’s frontispiece depicts seven pre-Restoration comedic characters. Falstaff stars in the first droll in the collection, The Bouncing Knight or Robbers Robbed (adapted from William Shakespeare’s Henry the Fourth, Part One). And The Bubble (adapted from John Cooke’s The Cittie Gallant also known as Greene’s Tu Quoque) stars none other than Bubble, a character played by Thomas Greene of the Queen’s Men, who became famous for Bubble’s repeated catchphrase “tu quoque”. “Tu quoque,” meaning “you, too” is a rhetorical technique used to discredit an opponent’s argument like the modern “I’m rubber and you’re glue…” and follows the tradition of jesting with audience members that was a hallmark of early modern clowning. Part II jovially markets itself “for the merriment and delight of wise men, and the ignorant.”

The farce was another comedic genre that relied on exaggerated or ridiculous situations along with physical humor, satire, parody, and misunderstandings to entertain audiences. John Gay’s The what d’ye call it: a tragi-comi-pastoral farce was an afterpiece first performed after Nicholas Rowe’s tragedy Jane Shore (“Written in imitation of Shakespear’s style”). Afterpieces were bonus entertainments, spoken or sung and typically comic in nature, that followed the main performance. Gay’s afterpiece was a genre-bending hit performed 17 times in its first season. In the early 18th century, a play was considered successful if it ran for more than a week. 

It ends with this sage epilogue: 

John Gay’s most famous work was The Beggar’s Opera (1728), a satire set in the disreputable areas of Drury Lane and Newgate prison featuring highwaymen and thieves who behave like gentlemen. It was an instant hit, performed no fewer than 62 times. With it, Gay introduced a new comedic genre—the ballad opera—to the English stage. Incorporating old tunes from popular ballads, The Beggar’s Opera employed those ballads as a burlesque caricaturing Italian opera, which was popular amongst London’s elites, and paired it with topical political satire aimed at Robert Walpole, a polarizing politician and Britain’s de facto Prime Minister.  

The Beggar’s Opera was printed in two editions the same year it debuted. In the second edition, the music was printed from woodblocks and inserted into the text, as seen in this example of Air XLVII set to the tune of “The Happy Clown” (also coincidentally called “Walpole”): 

Ballad operas had a short-lived vogue. Nearly 100 were produced before the passage of Walpole’s 1737 Licensing Act, which created the office of Examiner of Plays in order to control and censor theatrical productions. 

This mid-18th century satirical print by William Hogarth attacks theater management, and the increasing popularity of farces and pantomimes. The scene depicts a farce rehearsal, cluttered with stock devices, including a ghost, a trapdoor, a flying dragon, and a dog. The statues of Comedy and Tragedy are obscured by advertisements for the new play, a combination of Dr. Faustus and Harlequin Sheppard. Shakespeare’s works hang as toilet paper. The caption assures the audience that while the bricks and rubbish on stage will be real, “the Excrements upon Jack Hall will be made of Chew’d Gingerbread to prevent Offense.” 

Arthur Murphy’s commonplace book shows a super-fan’s engagement with comedy. Murphy has extracted from Aristotle, Horace, Jonson, Dryden, Shakespeare, and others to organize and define many types of humor, essentially creating his own reference book of comedy trivia.  

Murphy also doesn’t hold back on telling us what he doesn’t value. A section on puns, under the heading “False Wit” per Joseph Addison’s categorization, has been abandoned after only a few entries.