If Shakespeare's romantic comedy heroines have more in common with clowns than has been recognised – both being liminal characters that can comment on the story's images of order and hierarchy – then it may be helpful to think about the way clowns (and some heroines) function in a group of plays that can most simply be labelled ‘post-comedy’: Measure for Measure, All's Well That Ends Well, The Winter's Tale, Cymbeline, and The Tempest. There are, of course, clowns in other Shakespearean plays post-1600, notably the serpent-bringer in Antony and Cleopatra and the Porter in Macbeth, but their appearance, though crucial to both plot and theme, is in a self-contained scene. One example of this style of comic writing will suffice.

The opening of Hamlet 5.1 – the ‘grave-diggers scene’ – is one of the longest scenes written specifically for clowns in the Shakespearean canon. It follows immediately, in the Folio version, after Gertrude's lyrical account of Ophelia's drowning to her brother Laertes (‘There is a willow grows askant a brook’). The two clowns (often, regrettably, reduced to one in modern productions) are onstage preparing Ophelia's grave. Their conversation begins as a pun-ridden vaudeville routine; the topic, suicide, the law, and class privilege. (Suicides were, under the law, forbidden burial in consecrated ground, but Ophelia is to be given a ‘Christian burial’ because of her status at court.)