Both the linguistic detail and the cultural ramifications of Shakespeare's comic language are extremely complex. In order to elucidate them, what I propose to do is focus on four interrelated themes, illustrating each one by reference to one or two particular plays: rhetoric and society in Love's Labor's Lost; logic and laughter in As You Like It; gender and language in Measure for Measure and As You Like It; and context and quotation in Twelfth Night.

Rhetoric and society

A chief resource for the language of Shakespeare’s comedies and a source of the ideas about language debated in them is the art of rhetoric. Elizabethan rhetoric has often been associated almost exclusively with stylistic ornamentation and obscure names for figures of speech, but for the Elizabethans much more was at stake in their adaptation of this ancient art of persuasion to social and literary uses of the English tongue. An ideal of eloquence and its constitutive power for social organization was key.