General

Question 1

What is the Hobbesian definition of comedy?

Answer 1

• comedy is a depiction of a social threat that becomes reappropriated into a comic scene in order for society to gain superiority over it

Question 2

What is the ‘shrew’ and where does the trope originate?

Answer 2

• sixteenth-century Italian tradition, commedia dell’arte
• empowered with savage witticisms, the ‘shrew’ is the apex of contemporary anxiety regarding feminine harnessing of language

Question 3

What does Tina Packer suggest about Shakespeare’s reorientation of his focus on gender in his later comedies?

Answer 3

“I think something happened, somewhere around Love’s Labour’s Lost… something happened to him where he suddenly ‘got it’ about women and there was a profound shift in his writing”

Question 4

While critical reception has predominantly overlooked this, what does Andrew Zurcher unpick about the contemporary euphemism of “head on her shoulders” in Much Ado About Nothing?

Answer 4

• euphemism for sexual climax, making the insinuation that Beatrice would not appreciate an incestuous sexual experience highly inappropriate

Question 5

What is the 16th-century ‘ordeal by water’?

Answer 5

• mode of torture endured by suspected witches and sustained in the public consciousness by high profile texts such as King James’ 1597 ‘Daemonologie’