Cómo sacar la partitura de cualquier canción

 © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 D. Derrin, H. Burrows (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Humour, History, and Methodology https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56646-3_2 2. The Study of Past Humour: Historicity and the Limits of Method (1) Conal Condren1 University of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW, Australia My thanks to Dr Hannah Burrows and Dr Daniel Derrin, for the invitation to give this paper in Durham, July 2017, to the other discussants and to Dr Marguerite Wells, Dr Mark Rolfe and Averil Condren. The Problem of Universality G. B. Milner’s taxonomic coinage, Homo ridens, encourages the belief that a sense of humour, evidenced in laughter, is a deining characteristic of Homo sapiens.1 The universalist proposition can almost be put syllogistically: laughter signi ies humour, laughter is universal, and therefore humour is also. Thus Bremmer and Roodenberg, who reject a formally universalist position, nevertheless hold that a large-scale history of humour is possible because humour is found in whatever is intended to make us laugh or smile.2 Even this cake-and-eat-it universalism is problematic, so I want to shift the angle of approach. In his reformulation of Leibniz’s law of identity, the logician David Wiggins argues that designating two things a and b as the same presupposes a general classi ier under which they can be subsumed: thus a and b are the same both being instances, or expressions of H (in this case humour). But if H can subsume a and ~a, b and ~b, assertions as to sameness are empty and the classi ication may be close to meaningless.3 In this light, it is not enough to treat H (humour) with an open-ended generality, attributing to it a diversity of forms, for that is to beg the question of what is it we are actually talking about.4 The postulation of humour as a concept somehow independent of language only disguises the evasion. To draw on Michael Reddy’s analysis of the family of metaphors commonly used to rationalise this bifurcation: once seen as a rei ied concept, humour becomes something to be packaged, conveyed and revealed, and relatively undamaged, in multi lingual contexts: hence it can be thought to be stable but have different forms.5 If taken for granted as part of a conceptual realm, humour might even be inferred from the absence of linguistic dressing; laughter is evidence enough. This propositional circularity may amount to little more than a euphemistic way of accommodating the world to the semantics of our own tongue; more clearly, it is a means of avoiding the conspicuous absence of humour or a direct equivalent for it in most languages for most of their recorded histories. Even restricting ourselves to English, the word humour looks less than conceptually stable. Consider the following partial descriptors in its ambit: wit, farce, absurdity, jokiness, playfulness, satire, comedy, levity, the nonsensical, the wry, the whimsical and ironic. It is through use of such a ield of words operating conceptually—that is, being used at varying levels of formality to organise, assess and discriminate, that we identify something putatively as humorous. From such a sprawling terrain diverging accounts readily sprout, such as Michael Billig’s ‘three great theories’ of humour—incongruity , release and superiority , each of which captures something of the uncertain reach of humour.6 The instability of humour itself partly derives from its associated terms, such as play and nonsense sometimes operating beyond the humorous. Certainly, something has to be posited as lying beyond the humorous for the very idea of it to have meaningful discrimination; but this delineating domain of what is usually designated the serious, is neither straightforward nor decisive. Seriousness can be a dimension of a joke, and since antiquity traditions of serio ludere writing would appear systematically to have violated a irm distinction between the serious and humorous—if that is, ludere, to mock, involves humour. The phrase is invariably translated as if it must: through the humorous say what is serious. It is to af irm the universality of humour by sleight of hand and to avoid a question that needs addressing. Only from around the early eighteenth century has humour been used as the general classi ier we now rely on and through which claims as to universality are made.7 The Earl of Shaftesbury used it casually in much this way, treating raillery as a kind of humour.8 Much before then, however, there was no single expression with humour’s modern function.9 And to project this back into the more distant past, redescribing surviving evidence to accord with a universality thesis, is itself distorting. This is especially so if humour and laughter are treated much as an asymmetric unity: all laughter expresses humour, although not all humour occasions laughter.10 Such unexamined preconceptions help explain why theories of laughter before the eighteenth century can be treated as theories of humour. Historically speaking, that is precisely what should not be taken for granted. The case of Hobbes and ‘superiority theory’ will be discussed by way of conclusion. As Daniel Wickberg points out, the now familiar notion of a sense of humour appears as a characteristic of individuals only relatively recently.11 It is the result of a complex and highly contingent history, involving an expansion in the range of the word sense; and the separation of humour from humoral medical theory, in which, on the cusp of the seventeenth century, the humours (vital luids) had come to refer to the temperamental types they were believed to help explain. In fact, the Latin literature suggests that there was little reliance on the explanatory power of the humours12; but as humoral theory was popularised, the humours became associated both with stable character and with changing moods. Only, Wickberg argues, after humour became a discursive construct, an erratic process during the seventeenth century, occurring in tandem with the gradual abandonment of humoral theory, were the conditions in place for people to begin talking about a sense of humour. This locution capitalises on sense as awareness or appreciation and so presupposes self-consciousness about humour: one can hardly unknowingly have a sense of humour. The expression is also part of a linguistic chain reaction. Humorist becomes a person intentionally writing or performing in a humorous vein and ceases to designate someone who is risible or unduly subject to an imbalance of the humours. In French humoriste as peevish still carries the older meaning. The adverbial form humourously was shifted away from the capriciousness of humoral imbalance, to refer to conduct that might beit someone trying to amuse. And a sense of humour required the contrastive adjectival neologism humourless also seeming to date from the mid-nineteenth century.13 Keeping such now submerged linguistic shifts in mind, it seems naıve to assume that all languages will have an equivalent expression for what has become humour’s classi icatory reach. Indeed, in the eighteenth century, the French regarded its generalised standing as speci ically English and were slow to accept it; and sens de l’humor can still be taken to refer to something characteristically English. And in French now, the English loan word humor is given greater intension than in English, by being distinguished from humeur, as variable mood or disposition. Classical Greek gave us comedy but had no word for the modern humour, and so Demotic has taken it as a loan word (χιουμορ) around which related terms are gathered, most without obvious classical roots. Whether or not the ground was prepared by its Latin antecedent, the English humour has proved a remarkably successful export. It, and the phrase a sense of humour, is now found in most European languages, though in fewer Asian and African ones. It is not in Korean, but is in Mandarin (from c.1924) and (presumably via Dutch) in Indonesian and Javanese. It is also in Maori, but seems not to have been taken up in Indigenous Australian languages exposed to English.14 The evidence of language raises an obvious question: if humour is the universal attribute so often assumed, why has it taken so long for this to be recognised, and why was the process of discovery apparently so ad hoc and Anglo-centric, possibly being carried in the baggage of trade and imperial expansion? In this light, the entailed self consciousness of having a sense of humour becomes problematic if the requisite conceptual vocabulary through which self-awareness can be expressed has been absent for so long among so many peoples. Part of the answer may lie in the dominance of psychology in the modern academic study of humour, a discipline geared to universal traits, proclivities, motivations and pathologies that discovered the analytic and explanatory value of humour from the late nineteenth century. Part may lie in the globalisation of the English language and the parochialism that can result from taking for granted successfully adopted words, or from their rei ication, their apotheosised status in a distinct conceptual realm. This can then be used to explain away, or rationalise, discordances between languages, and be posited as the content that other tongues more or less adequately convey. Such mechanisms of accommodating the world to English can disguise the fact that humour’s attendant ield of terms does not map neatly on to other languages, as only passing reference to French intimates. The point is reinforced if we move beyond Europe. Japanese has the loan words faasu, komedi, and the general humour as yumoa added to Indigenous terms in its associational ield, such as u itto largely cognate with wit. Not all languages have a speci ic, dedicated term for pun—the Italian bisticcio, for example, does punning double duty in also meaning an altercation, and so the periphrastic gioco di parole can be used. In contrast, Japanese has a number of words for the single English pun. Moreover, as Marguerite Wells has shown, the Japanese füshi, the term closest to satire , is often at odds with English use. This, beyond questions of transient speci icity that so often dog the study of satire, helps explain why British and Japanese satire can be mutually impenetrable.15 It is for such reasons that translation is by degrees approximate, a matter in Umberto Eco’s expression of ‘negotiation’ between cultures—a point Roman Jacobsen stressed many years ago with respect to puns, translating them can be a matter of ‘creative transposition’.16 The implication is that when we claim or assume a universality for humour, or a sense of humour, we can show that our own vocabulary organised around the word can impose some sort of order on the alien, and even that since the nineteenth century, many other languages have followed suit, becoming a little more like English; but it is uncertain that we are eliciting what is independently common to all, let alone what always has been. In post-Kantian terms, it is less a matter of ontology, what there is, than epistemology, how and through what conceptual vocabulary we seek to understand. But a familiarity with the point is long-standing. As Indira Ghose has also concluded, things are not inherently funny.17 The differentia of what we now call humour vary, leaving us with a universality that is best seen as a matter of family resemblance between overlapping notions and conigurations of vocabulary justifying the reliance on humour as a loose classi ier. Sometimes it is valuable in enabling interconnections within and analysis of evidence; sometimes it is harmless as a shorthand; but it is also potentially misleading when, as an analytic tool it is projected as being in or underlying the evidence.18 Rather, then, than taking humour as a given in historical analysis or a variably manifesting universal, it might seem that what is needed are methodologically secure criteria for determining the limits of the word’s classi icatory usefulness. Method, Genealogy, Semantic Continuity and Change Preliminaries aside, I want to stress the limitations of methodology by sketching some of the problems touching context, intentionality and reception that can derail the historical study of ‘humour’. I will do so mainly with brief illustration from early modern England, concluding with a single case—Thomas Hobbes on laughter. There are, however, two caveats. First, not all encounters with previous humour need be historical. Engagement can be a creative enrichment of an inheritance ensuring vitality and expressing contemporary tastes and priorities. Yet, as Daniel McKee has stressed in discussing the wit of Japanese surimono print poetry, connoisseurship, appreciation by our own standards and historicity should not to be confused.19 The second caveat arises from the instrumentalist character of methodology, taken here as the formulation of the procedural rules furthering a given activity. As historical writing varies in its discursive rigidity, so methodological considerations will have uneven sway. If history is just genealogy, writing about the past insofar as it relates to the present, there is greater methodological tolerance than if it aspires to the historicist rigors of attempting to eradicate anachronism and myth-making. Certainly not all genealogy can be mistaken for history. The formulaic 14-generation Anglo-Saxon pedigree, probably modelled on the lineage of Jesus (Matt 1. 1–17), was what the archaeologist Sam Newton has called an adjustable ‘tally’ of names assembled for the purposes of propaganda and negotiation.20 But albeit modi ied by some desire to understand the past as such, genealogy is driven by the blandishments of relevance. It thus requires principles of evidence selection, predication and narrative construction that engage either in a critical or in a celebratory fashion with the here and now. To do so it often involves redescribing evidence through salient modern terminology. All these requirements compromise the historicist imperatives designed to minimise the distorting presence of the present in the past. Throughout I shall assume a fairly historicist austerity. If the identi ication of past humour depends upon the use of a conceptual ield of terms in its ambit, insuf icient awareness of change can be a means of inadvertent genealogical re-shaping, to the extent of myth-making. This can occur by nothing more sophisticated than simply taking Plato’s or Aristotle’s relections of comedy and laughter as theories of humour. Where, in contrast we have the reassurance of semantic continuity, for example, in the word satire, overlooking shifts in meaning can have a similarly distorting effect. A word may have, as C. S. Lewis argued, a ‘dangerous sense’, in that our meaning might make sense of the evidence, but the usage might actually have been only subordinate or absent at the time of writing.21 Since the 1960s satire has become entrenched in the lexicon of humour. But over the longue durée it has focused overwhelmingly on moral and political critique and never amounted to the relative tidiness of a ‘literary genre’—a genealogical convenience cut from poetics to it the nineteenth-century discipline of English Literature. John Donne’s irst satire (c. 1595) begins ‘Away thou fondling motley humourist’.22 Formally this is to quash expectations that the satire has anything to do with what we call humour, but such expectations would not have been strong, a point suggested by the distinction made in Donne’s day between satire and comic satire, and by Donne’s usage of ‘humorist’, designating the risable, even despicable. A 100 years later, a dictionary deinition had deemed satire to be any discourse of sharp reproof.23 No humorist motley or otherwise in sight. To paraphrase T. J. Mathias, satire was neither pleasant nor desirable but a necessity for public order, often seeming severe.24 Hence, Jane Austen’s reference to Mr. Darcy’s satirical eye; it was not humour twinkling, but a generally censorious demeanour that, as she remarked, might generate fear.25 Similarly with laughter: though referring to precisely the same ubiquitous physiological contortions of the face with accompanying decibels, it has had a decidedly messy history if one considers questions of function, expression, meaning and register. As I have indicated, for the historian to take it as evidence of a sense of humour is a case of petitio principi—and contradicts what people have previously thought laughter expressed. I think we can identify six broad, often entangled patterns of usage evidenced certainly from 1500 to 1800. First, was what I shall call rhetorical laughter, held to be expressive, not of humour, but of contempt. There is, wrote George Puttenham, something indecent about laughter, even when justi ied.26 He discusses only the propriety of laughing at, so much was laughter associated with aggressive rhetoric, a response to be stimulated usually by demeaning and isolating a victim. No man, wrote Samuel Butler, fully laughs without showing his teeth.27 Unsurprisingly Jesus was held never to have laughed, neither according to Cicero should the wise man, and instructed Lord Chesterield, neither should the gentleman. The smile expressed love, the laugh disdain.28 This understanding, now generally gathered under the rubric of ‘superiority theory’, attracted most attention in antiquity and in early modern Europe29; and because the provocation of rhetorical laughter was censorious, it helped form a contingent association with the moral indignation of satire: satire might stimulate laughter not because it was funny, but because it was damaging. Such laughter, however, could also be the hallmark of a philosophical posture towards the human condition as a whole, foreclosing on any sense of superiority . This was the laughter of Democritus, and, via Lucian to be adopted by Erasmus, More, then Robert Burton. It contrasted with the perspective of Heraclitus whose compassion for the world made him weep for it—a contrastive topos popularised by Montaigne.30 Secondly, there was what has been called festive laughter. This has been explored largely through the later theories of Bakhtin and the carnivalesque.31 There is an allegorical quality to Bakhtin’s theories in that they may tell us as much or more about alienation in the USSR than they do about the world to which they were formally applied.32 Despite the dangers of relying on Bakhtin, the festive was important from antiquity, some of the earliest examples coming not from the oppressed whose subversive laughter was the whistling of a safety valve controlled by an elite (the Bakhtinian image); but rather, as Noel Malcolm has pointed out, from within and for elite circles themselves.33 But either way, it is not easily or necessarily distinguished from aggressive laughter. Rhetorical laughter is overwhelmingly about purpose, it might infuse any situation. The festive tells us more about where, who and when—social framing—than it does about purpose, though it could be justi ied as releasing inner tensions, as the physical act released air from the lungs. A highly ritualised tradition of festive laughter has been identi ied in Japan by Goh Abe. In seven Shinto festivals, the rights to hold hospitable laughing occasions, Warai-kō, have been handed down within selected families for hundreds of years.34 Such evidence indicates that the festive may take on a dangerous sense as it is stretched to accommodate occasions for laughter in very different cultures. Third, in his commentary on Aristotle’s Poetics (1570), Ludovico Castelveltro discusses spontaneous laughter of the sort that might be generated by the unexpected meeting of old friends.35 There is, fourth, the much studied laughter associated with ‘gallows humour’ as a mode of coping with immediate horror, such as the apocryphal punning wit of Cicero to his executioner: there is nothing proper in what you are doing but make a proper job of it. Fifth, there was also what we might see as the laughter, or rather mirth of Christian rejoicing. For John Straight, merriment amounted to a Christian of ice or spiritual duty.36 The of ice might, as it did for Isaac Barrow, stretch to sanctioning innocent jollity and good fellowship. These associations, now making the relationship between humour and laughter seem self-evident, only gradually assumed the prominence they now have.37 This suggests that laughter’s register might vary, that although a general descriptor for a physical act, and perhaps sometimes operating as a synecdoche for what we retrospectively classify as humour, it might also be redescribed as mirth or rejoicing when it was to be sanctioned under the aegis of good humour, that is benign character. In commending ‘merriment’, ‘jollity’, ‘rejoicing’ ‘cheerfulness’ and ‘gladness’, Straight never once mentions laughter. It may have been displaced to be implicit in what he dismissed as ‘hellish’ as opposed to ‘holy joy’.38 Barrow referred to laughter only passingly in his concern with jesting, foolishness and facetiousness.39 There is then, the danger of focusing on what may not always have been the most important word or a word so laden with negative connotations that it might be avoided. Sixth, and in contrast, Robert Burton in The Anatomy of Melancholy gives considerable attention to remedial laughter. This activity could have been much as Hobbes regarded singing, something to be practiced for the sake of the lungs and if done badly, kept well clear of innocent by-standers. Overall, the tumbled modes and dynamism of laughter and its largely uncharted semantics make its study intricate. The facile appeal of Homo ridens, and the easy presumption that laughter evidences a sense of humour, requires discounting the ambiguities and indeterminacies we need to confront in identifying the ends it might have served. The inclination now, for example, is to laugh with Falstaff. Andrew Bradley treated him as a igure of blissful, rejoicing humour, revelling in a freedom to be celebrated. This image is still commonplace.40 Enjoying him is a matter of connoisseurship in McKee’s sense; but historically speaking, Falstaff was an image of cowardice and corruption, at one, as Dover Wilson argued, with the forces of iniquity in the miracle plays and well known in Shakespeare’s day as a representation of evil to be enjoyed because it would be overcome.41 The anti-masques that preceded the court masque performances of the seventeenth century continued the tradition. It is, I think, unlikely that Shakespeare would have expected very much sympathy for Falstaff when he was rejected by young King Henry; even less that the rejection expressed any authorial ambivalence towards Henry. To have embraced Falstaff, would have signalled complicity in corruption and incipient tyranny, as Shakespeare makes abundantly clear. In act 5 of Henry IV, Part II, Falstaff is prepared to steal horses in order to rush to Henry that his own de facto rule of cronyism and revenge might begin. The confusion of our enjoyment of a riotous character with historicity, arises through misunderstanding the resonances of laughter; and it helps misread the dramatic point of Falstaff’s fall from grace. It announced the emergence of heroic virtue from the counterpoint between East Cheap and a malfunctioning court. There are, then, problems enough where the lexicon of humour is semantically stable; but with a new word come others. Initially, wit had referred to qualities in the ambit of consciousness and intelligence, but by the end of the sixteenth century, its range was being extended to encompass laughter in its rhetorical mode. Thus, Falstaff claims, early in act 1 scene 2 of Henry IV, Part II, that nothing ‘tends to laughter more than I invent, or is invented on me. I am not only witty in myself, but the cause that wit is in other men’. In effect, I laugh at them because they deserve it. Wit then gradually came to embrace the sort of deft utterance that creates a shock of amusement. It is thus cognate with what laughter often indicates—surprise and delight; and by the latish seventeenth century, it is personi ied in people called wits, those who can be expected to amuse in such an elegant fashion. In MacFlecknoe, (1678/82) Dryden made the point relentlessly against the hapless Shadwell, heir apparent to the kingdom of dullness and stupidity, the enemies of wit, (lines 199–202). Often the point of evoking wit was to deploy its antonyms—as Cowley put it in his short poem ‘On Wit’ (1656), only by negatives could it be deined. This, however, hardly stabilised a precise meaning, especially in relation to the similarly variable humour. Sometimes they were opposed, as when Dryden distinguished the reinements of wit from the vulgarities of humour; sometimes, as Congreve remarked, they were taken as much the same42; Margaret Cavendish bundles together wit, humour and satire as virtues characteristic of her husband’s plays.43 In such relections we have humour as a discursive construct and by the eighteenth century, a general classi ier, pre-conditions for forming the notion of a sense of humour. Thus far my point has been to stress the gradual process of change that sees important meanings eventually established in the ambit of humour and that help illustrate that word’s own shift to an encompassing category; but in such processes older patterns of use might survive. Such continuity hardly makes the historian’s task easy; and other than by warning of the possibilities, methodology can give little help. I suspect wit’s early modern uses on the cusp of what we call the humorous may have been occasioned by direct or vicarious familiarity with Castiglione’s Il cortegiano, (1528, trans 1561). For central to Castiglione’s work was his neologism for a vital quality of lightness of style in aristocratic accomplishment, sprezzatura. The extended use for wit, still carrying older meanings of deft intelligence, may have functioned as an attempted translation of sprezzatura for which there was only periphrasis in English. Certainly much of the meaning of the Italian overlaps with the newer, seventeenth century connotations of wit that by the early eighteenth century were common-place. How far the word helps clarify and accentuate, as Nietzsche would put it, a name that lets us see what is already before us44; and how far wit creates a new licit style of expression, solidifying humour’s discursive standing, are possibilities with which the historian needs to consider, but can hardly do so if humour is taken as a universal given. So far I have touched only on problems arising from the immediate semantic context, but if we move beyond that, we confront contextualisation more generally. Context and the Idioms of Historiography Contexts, including traditions of activity, are expressions of Dilthey’s notion of the hermeneutic circle, the bi-conditional relationship between general and particular: each is understood in interplay with the other.45 This requires a distinction between context and background; contexts I take to be only those surroundings that directly elucidate the problematic identity. The distinction is dependent on the sort of enquiry undertaken and so contexts are functions of the questions we ask, less historical realities per se, than historiographical necessities. As contextualisation is a matter of privileging a certain sort of evidence, so contexts are shaped in turn through the changing understanding of what we place within them; and the more detailed the examination of the problematic object, the more contexts it might suggest. If the object of study, such as a joke book, comes directly under the auspices of humour, then it initially suggests a context of the same sort, such as a tradition of joke book production and recycling of jokes, or a topos of joking also found in other contemporaneous writings. It may, however, also lead to publishing history, distribution, reading networks, modes of social consolidation and exclusion, even of paper making, type-setting and watermarks, contexts that can rapidly leave the joking aside for changing priorities.46 Humour can be a key to what lies beyond it.47 This applies even to something as apparently insulated from broader rami ications as nonsense poetry, a clear tradition of which existed in the early seventeenth century48; and this is a hitherto unexplored context for the reception and use of More’s Utopia, a work whose opaque seriousness is itself a partial function of nonsense— signalled in the pun of the title Utopia, a play on the dipthongs eu and ou that creates a neologistic homonym quite lost in English. Yet, conversely, a humorous context can become unexpectedly relevant: consider the case of Haydn’s ‘Farewell’ symphony, (no. 45 F# minor, 1772). When put in a context of its reported performance, the point of its scoring and structure is shown to carry a partially jesting injunction to Haydn’s patron Prince Esterhazy that the musicians were homesick. On the autograph, the scoring annotation ‘nichts mehr’, (nothing more) refers only to inal passages by oboe and horn, but in later copies it applies, seriatim to all but two violins who conclude the work alone; each of the other players having left the stage in turn. Circumstantial evidence points to this having happened on the irst performance.49 It follows then, both that the non-humorous might be enriched by a context of humour, and humour itself might need to be placed in other surroundings, extending as far as the preconditional patterns of social relationship that make jesting possible.50 Contextualisation, then, is a necessity of procedure not a panacea; contexts are always porous and can raise as many questions as they answer—they keep the historian in business. History, as Maitland said, may be a seamless web, but historical writing is not. Independently of contextualisation it involves distinct but easily confused idioms of description, and of analysis and explanation, on which historians rely when described evidence becomes problematic. A historical description requires minimising the imposition of later values, concepts, purposes and vocabulary. But this descriptive integrity might be violated when the historian turns to explanation: modern knowledge of bacteriology needs to be used to explain the Black Death, but not to describe contemporary reactions to the pestilence. Awareness of what W. B. Gallie called the voice changes between idioms is therefore crucial if description and explanation are not to be tumbled in mutually destructive confusion. As he argued, the use of words like ‘because’ often signal a shift from describing a state of affairs to making it more intelligible.51 And this brings me to questions of intentionality . Aspects of Intentionality The line between description and explanation can be unclear, and intentionality, and similarly translation help make it so, for they have, as it were, an interstitial modal status. On the one hand, to posit an intention in or behind something created marks a voice change to elicitation. It is a conjectural gloss and may delay a need for formal explanation. In short, given what we take to be a rational artefact, putative intention provides a reason for its being. Yet on the other hand, unlike giving the cause of an outbreak of plague, hypothesising an intention requires conformity to descriptive integrity. Speci ied intentions cannot historically speaking be anachronistic; and it is for this reason that they are sometimes misconceived as simply being in the evidence to be found, like invisible ink; but they are not, they remain forms of conjectural enhancement and explanatory power. That is, a commitment to the belief that in a play or painting we have a rational artefact entails positing some locus of agency and intentionality, but attributed intentions are conclusions elucidating or decoding it or glosses upon it, not simple discoveries.52 Universal agreement on the conclusions does not convert them into something else. Statements of intention explicit in a text, have a special meta status, in providing sign-posts for the reader ‘I now intend to show…’. Yet like any other aspect of a text they can generate questions about intentionality—especially if there is discrepancy between stated intention and performance of the sort often intimating humour, through for example, irony or litotes: ‘I wouldn’t dream of criticizing …’. Translation raises overlapping dif iculties, involving a voice change and a mediation of the evidence rather than a literal description. It may come close in inding a direct descriptive equivalent for original expression. But often this is not the case, especially insofar as translation of any given word or phrase may involve confronting rather different semantic surroundings and may seek to convey meaning, purpose or intention. Translation is also, though possibly only since the eighteenth century, a process more or less governed by a sense of historical integrity, probably resulting in compromises in cultural negotiation.53 For as Vives noted in the sixteenth century, once we invoke a notion of an informing purpose, or the meaning of the passage to be translated, the more we might need to compress or elaborate.54 For Madame Dacier, only an expansive prose translation could capture the inner spirit of Homer’s poetry. Thus she rewrote his epics to become part of a genealogy of Christian philosophy.55 Once more, humour can augment the dif iculties involved. Only recently has the homely levity of Hobbes’s verse translations of Homer been recognised as deliberately subversive rather than blunderingly inept.56 Dudley Fitts has illustrated from The Greek Anthology, how to convey humour might require abandoning strict replication, even historicity for something closer to contemporary analogy, Jacobsen’s ‘creative transposition’ beyond the problem of the pun.57 In most languages puns are to be expected, and they can be notoriously dif icult to elucidate even within a single language as it mutates. Not to see Shakespeare’s puns, as Coleridge knew, is to lose an aspect of his work. Frankie Rubinstein illustrates the point by recovering the intricacy of the puns on holy, holes and making whole the sole of a shoe in Julius Caesar ; and Indira Ghose has drawn particular attention to the thematic signi icance of the complex pun in the title of Much Ado About Nothing.58 In surimono, according to McKee, puns (speci ically jiguchi) and the more general word/picture play of kakekotoba can form the multidimensional image that unites sound, picture and the calligraphy of its poetic content. These pictorial poems revelled in playful cleverness, designed to amuse the recipient of the riddling gift.59 But the same sort of punning structure results in a hardly comparable humour in Heartield’s visual and verbal pun on the Nazi slogan millionen stehen hinter mir: it is a montage of a saluting Hitler accepting money from a huge igure standing behind him.60 So a universalist structural shell allows comparison, but does not show a universality of humour itself. Reading the multi-modal can be historically tricky not least as the symbolic resonance may well exceed an author’s interest or horizon of awareness; it can make the limits of intentionality dif icult to assess. In the early eighteenth century there was what might seem to have been a nonce controversy about punning: Joseph Addison excoriated it as a false wit.61 If it deied translation it was only noise. Others addressed the topic, taking his arguments to parodic extremes or directly defending the practice.62 It is dif icult to know what to make of this, partially forced as it was onto the template of debates about the ‘ancients’ versus the ‘moderns’ that gave an inlated seriousness to what might have been a series of jests. Indeed the controversy might have been a means by which innocent laughter assumed more prominence in understanding humour. Thomas Sheridan’s Ars Pun-ica (Dublin, 1719) does not acknowledge these preceding discussions, but it illustrates contextual under-determination and the consequent problems for specifying intentionality. Ars pun-ica is thematically Scriblerian. It is a pseudo-philosophical argument reducing punning to rigid rules to maximise and enforce its practice. There are apparently 79 rules, though we are blessed only with 34. Sheridan’s work is laden with puns itself, probably all intentional, but to what purpose? How serious was Sheridan in decrying the clari ication of language as a form of vulgarising impoverishment because it would eradicate the creative exuberance of punning? Was Ars pun-ica just play, a variation on a theme for the joy of ingenuity—illustrating how activities can generate their own momentum to create traditions of endeavour, or does a wider context of language theory complicate matters? For the work is decidedly paradoxical. The aim is to regiment language use in the name of fostering creativity. Sheridan was a theorist of language, and he paraded the philosophical pretensions of the work. The pseudonymous author modestly hopes for a Newton to unify the science; and we are given both physiological and moral deinitions of the pun (appropriate to scholastic philosophy). The physiological involves a parody of natural philosophical accounts of muscular movement in laughing63: the moral is the inal cause of provoking good fellowship through laughter; benign ‘Christian’ merriment would seem to be ascendant, speci ically as laughter, what harmlessly might be re-couched as celebrating a healthy sense of humour. Yet if Sheridan is satirising linguistic puri ication, and reductive rule-mongering, a Scriblerian bête noir, perhaps not. We have a case of plausible contexts complicating a reading of a work that might just have been a belated joke at Addison’s expense or elaborated only for the author’s amusement . The Imponderables of Reception Studying the reception of a work does not always settle issues of humorous intent, some responses to Sheridan’s work were decidedly vicious. That something is accepted as humorous does not mean that the humour is understood. As the Earl of Shaftesbury claimed, defensive raillery is intended not to be.64 Where humour is unacknowledged, neither does it mean that it has passed unrecognised. Swift remarked that Arbuthnot’s Art of Political Lying (1712) was too clever to be understood. Was he criticising his friend or denigrating the capacities of the audience? The pamphlet was a Lucianically elaborate and ingenious variation of the logical paradox of the liar. It took the form of a promotional puff for a subscription publication. As no satire had taken this form before, it lacks some obvious contextual sign-posts; although Arbuthnot had earlier played a practical joke on Queen Anne’s Ladies in Waiting, getting them to subscribe to a non-existent history of the Ladies in Waiting, detailing who among them had made the best wives. As Political Lying is just the bland synopsis of the contents of the irst volume there are no obvious clues as to its bogus nature.65 Nothing is said of the second volume, but incompleteness is itself a Scriblerian characteristic. Did it fool contemporaries? He had the book advertised, but did anyone commit to buying copies of it from the (genuine) coffee houses in which it would be placed? The only known person gulled by the satire was a twentieth-century American literary critic, who regretted the work’s loss.66 Lack of evidence, however, may also indicate disapprobation. If people did take Swift literally in advocating the Irish eat their children, it is unlikely that they naively thought he meant it, just that he was nasty.67 Not to see the jest could have been a form of riposte as much as it might have been obtuseness. Conversely, to read in humour where none was intended can be a mode of ridicule. As a curious variation of such refractions of reception, Roger Lund has pointed out that modern French linguistic theory after Barthes—that sees humans imprisoned in the independent free play of linguistic abstractions—was irst invented in the eighteenth century as a satiric reductio of a preoccupation with nominalisation.68 A theory invented to be laughed at ends up being taken seriously, like the compositional hoax of the poems of Ern Malley.69 Legal constraints may also be relevant factors in recognising or losing a facetious dimension. In both Roman and Common Law, un malicious intent could be a defence, but it was made vulnerable by the forensic option of assuming that the provocation of laughter expressed hostility and was designed to damage. Nevertheless, plotting humorous responses may be a means of delineating audiences, just as humour within a work may be an attempt to discriminate among them. The Case of Hobbes on Laughter Many of the imponderables I have canvassed can be illustrated by Thomas Hobbes’s relections on laughter. In The Elements of Law, 1640, he referred to ‘that distortion of the countenance we call LAUGHTER’ as the sign of a nameless passion, but the joy and triumph involved, ‘hath not hitherto been declared by any’. It is occasioned by what ‘must be new and unexpected’. He then called it a ‘sudden glory’ in our own superiority (or ‘vain glory’) over another or over our previous selves.70 In the abbreviated account in Leviathan , the claim to the originality of his theory disappears and ‘sudden glory’ is named as the passion ‘which maketh those grimaces called laughter’.71 Addison drew attention to Hobbes’s initial discussion in 1711 when he considered it curious that a man laughing heartily should be considered not merry, but proud.72 Since then, Hobbes’s relections have become so well known in the Leviathan redaction that its citation seems almost as obligatory as it is misleading in discussing theories of humour in general, and ‘superiority theory’ in particular. To this Hobbes has been routinely attached, either to epitomise it, or to commend his seminal originality in doing most to invent it from hints in Plato and Aristotle.73 To regard his discussions of laughter as advancing ‘superiority theory’, smacks, in Newton’s expression, of genealogical tallying— attaching a prestigious name and a few de-contextualised words to a species of theory we now believe worthy enough for the ornamentation of a pedigree. For although emphasising that a sense of superiority was something humans relish, especially given the discomforts of their natural equality, his theory is not of or about superiority per se. Indeed, his brief discussion embraces what is usually at odds with ‘superiority theory’ or seems to diminish its explanatory power, namely a capacity for self-mockery. And it concludes, with what would appear to contradict it, recognition of laughter as victimless, the socially af irming merriment Addison overlooked. In Hobbes’s emphasis on the new and unexpected, there are even intimations of ‘incongruity theory’ to which Kant’s name is conventionally and arbitrarily af ixed, as another big name for the tally; for it was common during the eighteenth century on earlier precedent to invoke incongruity and surprise in explaining laughter—William Preston would applaud Hobbesian theory precisely in these terms.74 For Hobbes, laughter expressive of a sense of superiority over another was, in short, given as a major, though not the only reason for the sounds and facial signs of human joy, and his emphasis is on the immediate cause of the suddenness in the glory.75 Hobbes’s discussion is offered to illustrate his account of the passions, reduced to the opposing drives of avoidance and attraction, and used to redeine the moral lexicon comprising words such as glory, courage , love, charity, anger , pity , weeping, lust as well as laughter.76 Insofar as Hobbes was attempting to make better philosophical sense of a familiar moral vocabulary, there was no need for the understanding of laughter itself to be innovatory, as Hobbes claimed it was. And historically speaking, as Quentin Skinner has shown, it was not, but was part of a sustained tradition of sophisticated commentary on Aristotle’s Rhetoric and the widely cited elaborations by Cicero and Quintilian.77 When Hobbes presented what Skinner says was largely an unacknowledged paraphrase of Quintilian, it may even have been a little old-fashioned and certainly familiar to his audience. Thus what strikes Skinner as ‘especially disingenuous’, therefore, are the ‘noisy protestations’ of originality, serving to show how out of touch Hobbes could be.78 If context is restricted to a clear tradition of discussing rhetorical laughter, and to the jangling discordances in the reception of Hobbes’s work, there the matter might rest. Yet, if context is augmented, a different intentional possibility takes shape. Certainly Hobbes upset people and was seen as an arrogant, boasting scoffer who did not properly address objections to his philosophy.79 He was also a man of great wit, and given to mirth that was not always other-directed and aggressive. Yet under-pinning all appears to have been an unshakable sense of his own philosophical signi icance. This, however, was more than the conceit of which he was accused. It was part of his conception of philosophy derived from Francis Bacon. In The Advancement of Learning (1605), Bacon had urged that to understand nature properly, to create a new philosophy, a new type of philosopher was required.80 It was a strident claim given the predominantly negative associations of newness and innovation, often synonymous with the destructive change that might stem from arrogance and a tyrannous disposition. Despite vulnerability to attack in such terms, as Richard Serjeantson has shown, philosophers in Bacon’s idiom began to emerge; Hobbes, along with Descartes, foremost amongst them, he was a ‘novatore’.81 What helped make a true, new philosopher was precisely a disregard of received authority. To paraphrase: everything should be taken back to irst reckonings built upon deinitions. Reliance upon the word ‘of an Aristotle, a Cicero , or a Thomas’ is not science but opinion; it makes the words that are wise men’s counters, the money of fools.82 Little wonder Hobbes rarely cited previous writers (especially classical authorities) even when in agreement with them, and that he emphasised his own distinctiveness.83 His clarion claim at the beginning of De cive, from which he never retreated was that in this work he had invented political philosophy. This begins to cast a different light on his assertion that none had declared laughter properly before him. If he could dismiss Aristotle on most things as dangerously misguided, it was easy to ignore the echoes of earlier laughter theory derived from him.84 There is a certain irony in the fact that modern authors in wanting an easy genealogy for the ‘superiority theory’ of laughter that will do double duty as a theory of humour have taken his claim to origination perilously close to face value—relying literally on ‘the authority of […] a Thomas’.85 More than this, Hobbes’s assertion as to his own ground-breaking signi icance, is in The Elements a work of scribal publication, not intended for print. There were many copies, but the audience would have been relatively narrow and cohesive, and stretching from his patron William Cavendish, at whose behest it was written. The two men were close friends, Cavendish had effectively his own court of philosophers, his brother Sir Charles was a distinguished mathematician, and William, now barely clinging to the skirt-tails of his second wife Margaret, (‘Mad Meg’) another Baconian novatore, was a man of parts. It is also relevant that the ancient writer Lucian was popular in the Cavendish circle. Margaret admits to familiarity with some of his work86; the Cavendish protege Jasper Mayne, also a friend of Hobbes, probably provided the Cavendish sponsored translations she knew.87 Lucian is one of the few ancients Hobbes treats with respect, even paraphrasing and half quoting (without acknowledgement). The signi icance is that Lucian was par excellence the philosophical scoffer, ridiculing philosophical authority, the pretension of its schools and the dogmatism of their opinions. His boast was that he had taught the philosophical dialogue to laugh—at philosophy. It is easy to see his appeal for a novatore, as a ground-clearing satiric precursor of true philosophy. Hobbes’s immediate audience was of like-minded men of letters; even William and Margaret Cavendish, both apt to feign ignorance of books, would have known something of the literature Hobbes ignores in asserting his own Baconian independence. It is possible, then, that what ‘hitherto hath not been declared’ about laughter is an in-joke against his own self-image as a philosopher and his dim view of antiquity. Not so much misreading his audience, as hoping to generate that sudden glory amongst them at his own momentary expense through a witty paradox about laughter itself. The novelty and surprise that for Hobbes causes laughter is occasioned by the surprise at a spurious claim to novelty. Such a gesture would have economically illustrated his own recognition that people laugh at themselves, a point that might also have been familiar from Erasmus’s famed emphasis on self-mockery in the Morae encomium. If we have such a relexive jest, it is neither pointed nor explicit; and perhaps that too is appropriate, for Hobbes concludes his discussion, possibly again echoing the widely known Erasmus, by noting that to avoid offence laughter should be at generalities, ‘abstracted from persons’, denuded, in short, of any nastiness, so ‘all the company may laugh together’. It is a clear recognition and commendation of innocent merriment as socially af irming, even egalitarian. This is something beyond the reductivism of Hobbes, superiority theorist of laughter/humour. Perhaps the members of his immediate circle did laugh together. And perhaps also this sense of audience explains why the possible joke disappears from Leviathan , a work intended for the press and a diversity of undiscerned and, as Hobbes anticipated, often undiscerning reader. I do not suggest this as a better account than Skinner’s; it may well be a case of over-reading, but simply to illustrate the following: that although Ockham’s razor encapsulates the logical virtue of explanatory economy, this can be a historiographical vice. Awareness of contextual porosity can have the merit of avoiding over-simpli ication and can also directly affect speci ications of conjectured intentionality. It follows that the more contexts are suggested by a work, the more complicated interpretation becomes. If a humorous dimension potentially exacerbates the situation, it is also the case that the hypothesis of humorous intent may help reine a speci ication of audience. And I cannot think of a methodological criterion by which such indeterminacies can be settled. If humour in the past has been under-explored by historians we may, then, have the beginnings of an explanation: humour augments the dif iculty of reading. The suspicion of it is enough to destabilise any interpretative comfort zone. As Sir Percy Percy said (Blackadder Two, ‘Money’), when given a whole afternoon to discover the secrets of alchemy and turn base metal into gold, ‘I like a challenge’. So should we all. Bibliography Adams, Robert M. Bad Mouth: Fugitive Papers from the Darkside. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977. Addison, Joseph, and Richard Steele. The Spectator. Edited by G. Hill Smith, 4 vols., London: Dent, 1906. Anderson, Don. The Sons of Clovis: Ern Malley, Adoré Floupette and a Secret History of Australian Poetry. Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 2011. Arbuthnot John and Pope Alexander. The Memoirs of the Extraordinary Life, Works and Discoveries of Martinus Scriblerus. Edited by Charles Kirby-Miller. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. 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Straight, John. The Rule of Rejoycing or a Direction of Mirth. London, 1671. Vives, Juan Louis. De ratione dicendi. Basil, 1536. Webster, James. Haydn’s ‘Farewell’ Symphony and the Idea of Classical Style. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Wells, Marguerite. ‘Satire and Constraint in Japanese Culture’. In Understanding Humour in Japan, edited by Jessica Milner Davis, 193–217. Detroit, Michigan: Wayne State University Press, 2006. Wells, Marguerite and Jessica Milner Davis. ‘Farce and Satire in Kyōgen’. In Understanding Humour in Japan, edited by Jessica Milner Davis, 127–52. Detroit, Michigan: Wayne State University Press, 2006. Wickberg, Daniel B. ‘The Sense of Humour in American Culture, 1850–1960’. Unpublished PhD Thesis, Yale University, 1993. Footnotes 1 Milner, ‘Towards a Semiotic Theory of Humor’, 1–30. Homo ridens overlaps with Johan Huizinga’s much earlier Homo ludens, a seminal study of play in the Middle Ages. 2 3 4 5 6 Bremmer and Roodenberg, Cultural History of Humour, 1. Wiggins, Identity and Spacio-Temporal Continuity, at length. See for example, Bremmer and Roodenberg, Cultural History, 1. Reddy, ‘Conduit Metaphors’, 164–201. Billig, Laughter, 5; Morreall, ed. Philosophy of Humor; Critchley, Humour, 2–4 attributing the tripartite classi ication to Morreall. 7 8 9 Bremmer and Roodenberg, Cultural History, 1. Anthony Ashley Cooper, Earl of Shaftsbury, ‘Sensus Communis’ 1.1. See for example, Barrow, Against Foolish Talking, 305–28, 306, 312. 10 See, for example, Billig, Laughter, at length; Ruch, Sense of Humor; Critchley, Humour, 2–3. 11 Wickberg, ‘Sense of Humour in American Culture’, 30–139; for brief but not entirely reliable comments on the pre-history of a sense of humour, see also Ruch, Sense of Humor, 1–10. 12 13 Maclean, Logic, Signs and Nature, 241–3. The OED gives 1847 as the earliest use, but negative neologisms can precede their positive forms. Words with the un preix provide good examples, see Dixon, Making New Words, 77. 14 I have consulted a number of lexicons through the extremely valuable Australian Society for Indigenous Languages (ausil) website. Although all had distinct and variably organised vocabularies of laughter, Walpiri, for example, having different terms for laughing in fun and derisively, none had accommodated humour or has a listed semantic equivalent, including New Tiwi, a simpli ied version of Tiwi with many English loan words. 15 Wells, ‘Satire and Constraint’,193–217; see also Wells and Jessica Milner Davis, ‘Farce and Satire’, 127–52, although the suggestion seems to be that farce does map pretty precisely on the faasu of kyogen. 16 Eco, Mouse or Rat; Jacobson, ‘Linguistic Aspects of Translation’, 222–239, 238. 17 18 19 Ghose, ‘Licence to Laugh’, 42–3. For further discussion see Attardo, Linguistic Theories, 5–7. McKee, Japanese Poetry Prints: 9–33, 10–11. I am grateful to Dr. Aoise Stratford for drawing this to my attention. 20 21 22 23 24 Newton, Origins of Beowulf, 55–63. Lewis, Studies in Words, 8–13. Donne, ‘Satyre I’, 129. Bailey, Universal Etymological Dictionary. Matthias, The Pursuits of Literature, 6–7. 25 26 27 28 Austen, Pride and Prejudice, chapter 6. Puttenham, Arte of English Poesie, 291. Samuel Butler, quoted in Farley-Hills, Benevolence of Laughter, 8. Resnik, ‘Risus monasticus’, 90–100, 90–1 on John Chrysostom’s claim about Jesus; Skinner, ‘Hobbes and the Classical Theory of Laughter’, 150, 174, 29 For a valuable survey, Skinner, ‘Hobbes and the Classical Theory of Laughter’, 14—176; see also ‘Why Laughing Mattered’, 418–47. 30 Montaigne, ‘On Democritus and Heraclitus’, 219–21; for a valuable discussion, Curtis, ‘From Sir Thomas More to Robert Burton’, 90–112. 31 32 33 34 35 Bakhtin, Rabelais and his world. Gurevich, ‘Bakhtin and his theory of carnival’, 54–60. Malcolm, Origins of English Nonsense, 117–24. Goh Abe, ‘A Ritual Performance of Laughter’, 37–50. Castelveltro, Poetica d’Aristotele, pt.2, pp.34b-62; Attardo, Linguistic Theories, 42. 36 37 Straight, Rule of Rejoycing, 2, 24–5. Barrow, Against Foolish Talking, 304–20 writing of innocent jesting and facetiousness; it is an understanding, speci ically of laughter that threads through The Spectator; Skinner, ‘Hobbes and the Classical Theory of Laughter’,162–4; Ghose, ‘Licence to Laugh’, 43 who both suggest that it gains increased attention from the eighteenth century. 38 Straight, The Rule of Rejoycing, 7; Farley-Hills, Benevolence of Laughter, 11 12, seems not to notice the absence of reference to laughter. 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 Burrow, Against Foolish Talking, 312. Rackin, Stages of History, 38–42. Dover Wilson, Fortunes of Falstaff, 17–35. Wickberg, ‘Sense of Humor’, 103–110, 106. Cavendish, Life, 202. Nietzsche, La Gaia scienza, para 26. Dilthey, Ideas Concerning a Descriptive and Analytic Psychology; The Understanding of Other Persons; Makkreel, Dilthey, 247–73, esp. 269–71, 333–4. 46 47 48 49 Some of the issues are raised in Brewer, ‘Prose Jest-Books’, 90–111. Bremmer and Roodenberg, Cultural History, 3. Malcolm, Origins of English Nonsense. Webster, Haydn’s “Farewell” Symphony, 1–3, 113–6, for a brilliant analysis: see also Bonds, ‘Haydn’, 57–91, for the interplay of wit and humor between words and music. 50 51 52 Ghose, ‘Festive Laughter’, at length. Gallie, Philosophy, 105–115. Gallie, Philosophy, 115 for the historian’s causal vocabulary as a matter of glossing a text. 53 On the late emergence of a historical rationale for translation, see Burke, ‘Cultures of Translation’, 7–38. 54 55 Vives, De ratione dicendi, III, 225–6. Dacier, Iliade d’Homère; similarly, it has been argued that the intellectual content of William of Ockham’s logic can only be properly revealed through modern notation. 56 Davis, ‘Thomas Hobbes’s Translations of Homer’, 231–55; and especially, Nelson, ‘General Introduction’. 57 58 Fitts, ‘The Poetic Nuance’, 42–7. Rubinstein, Dictionary of Shakespeare’s Sexual Puns, x-xiii; Ghose, Much Ado 114–17. 59 60 61 McKee, Japanese Poetry Prints, 12–13,188–90. Rose, Parody, 117. Addison, The Spectator, 228. 62 Nokes, John Gay, 231–3, discussing God’s Revenge Against Punning, and A Modest Defence of Punning, (Swift), a Defence of the Ancient Art of Punning, (possibly Arbuthnot); see also, Arbuthnot and Pope, Memoirs, 125–8, 262–3. 63 John Bulwer, Pathomyotomia (1649) 104–26, cited Kerby-Miller, ed. Memoirs, 277; the parodic account in the Memoirs, chapter 10, 133, may in some form have been known by Sheridan, via Swift. 64 65 Shaftesbury, ‘Sensus communis’, 1.2. An exception may be an arithmetical error about the number of chapters— Arbuthnot was probably the foremost mathematician of his generation. But the pamphlet is anonymous and Arbuthnot was notoriously careless about his own writings. 66 67 68 69 70 Adams, Bad Mouth, 43–5. Arbuthnot and Pope, Memoirs, 169. Lund, ‘Res and verba’, 63–78. Lund, ‘Res et verba’,63–78; Anderson, Sons of Clovis. Hobbes, Elements of Law, (1640) pt. 1. Ch. 9. sect. 13, 41–3; ‘our previous selves’ is a cumbersome, if precise formulation for laughing at ourselves, consequent upon Hobbes’s belief that we exist in the present, the past, however recent, being decaying sense. 71 Hobbes, Leviathan, vol. 2 ch. 6, 88–9; see also Skinner ‘Hobbes and the Classical Theory of Laughter’, 147–9. 72 Addison, Spectator, April, 1711, 174. 73 Roeckelein, ‘Hobbesian Theory’, vol. 1, 340–2, is entirely representative; Billig, Laughter, 37–56; for a timely critical discussion, Lintott, ‘Superiority in Humor Theory’, 357–58. 74 75 Preston, Essay, 69–76. In De cive, Hobbes very briely posits a wider range for gloria (vain glory) in mentioning laughter, but even this is quali ied. 76 77 78 79 80 81 5. 82 83 84 85 Hobbes, Elements, pt. 1, chs 9–10, 36–48; Lintott, ‘Superiority’, 352–6. Skinner, ‘Hobbes and the Classical Theory of Laughter’, 151. Skinner, ‘Hobbes and the Classical Theory of Laughter’, 155, 151. Parkin, The Taming of Leviathan. Gaukroger, Francis Bacon, 101–31. Serjeantson, ‘Hobbes, the universities and the history of philosophy’, 114 Hobbes, Leviathan, ch. 4 Hobbes, Leviathan, ‘Review and Conclusion’. Hobbes, Leviathan, ch. 46. It is true that he is sometimes seen as part of a lineage, preceded by Plato and Aristotle, for which similar distortions are required, on which see Lintott, ‘Superiority’ at length; he is nevertheless given an untoward preeminence in keeping with his own assessments. 86 Hutton, ‘Science and Satire’ 161–78; Cottegnies, ‘Utopia, Millenarianism and the Baconian Programme’, 71–92, 71–2. 87 Mayne, Part of Lucian Made English.