In rhetorical terms, the pun is something of an anomaly. It is not a category the ancient authorities recognised, nor is it to be found in any sixteenth-century handbook of rhetoric. Aristotle and Quintilian are silent on the subject; Puttenham doesn't mention it, nor does Peacham, or Hoskins, or Day. One might conjecture, considering its marked absence from their treatises, that Renaissance writers had no use for the word – that they didn't know what punning was. And one would be half right. The Elizabethans and the Jacobeans did pun, of course: they were notorious for the practice. But that isn't what they called it. This detail did not, however, discourage subsequent commentators. ‘The Age in which the punn chiefly flourished,’ writes the early eighteenth-century critic Joseph Addison in the Spectator, ‘was the Reign of King James the First.’ His incredulity at the insidiousness of the device, which he considers a very low form of wit indeed, is barely concealed; that it should be found in the most serious works of the greatest writers of the time is, for him, particularly bewildering: ‘The sermons of Bishop Andrews, and the Tragedies of Shakespear, are full of them. The Sinner was Punned into Repentance by the former, as in the Latter nothing is more usual than to see a Hero weeping and quibbling for a dozen lines together.’