John Gay wrote the above lines in a letter to Alexander Pope, and it appears on his monument as an epitaph. Whereas his friend Jonathan Swift claimed saeva indignatio in death, the cheerful Gay's last message seems to express contemptus mundi. It coincides in spirit with a letter he wrote to Swift just after the first publication of his Fables. ‘I expect nothing, & am like to get nothing’, Gay writes, then, further down the page, ‘[t]he contempt of the world grows upon me, and I now begin to be richer and richer, for I find I could every morning I wake be content with less than I aim'd at the day before’. My aim in this chapter is to explore whether there is anything more than a conventional ironic gesture in Gay's epitaph, or defensive false modesty in a letter to a more famous friend. In particular, I will explore whether contempt is a dominant passion in his notorious ballad operas of the late 1720s, The Beggar's Opera and Polly. The two plays were separated at birth for very different stage histories, the former being an unprecedented hit that ran for an entire winter season and the latter being banned on stage to circulate only in print until performed in 1777. Since then Beggar's Opera has been a staple of the English stage and Polly largely neglected. In 1728–29, however, the two plays were an almost continuous political event central to a broad programme of satirical dissent against the regime of Sir Robert Walpole. Rather than treating them as qualitatively different – a great work focused on London low life and a minor work set among pirates and plantations in the West Indies – this chapter will read them as they might have been understood, at least by supporters of the Viscount Bolingbroke's Patriot Opposition, as a single political and dramatic arc. That is, to put it bluntly, a spectacular arc of mocking contempt for the first and longest-serving prime minister.

Laughing Gas

From 1797 to 1798 and again between 1803 and 1805, there was an outpouring of prints depicting Napoleon Bonaparte and the threatened – on many accounts, impending – invasion of Britain. The unequivocal message of the prints was that Bonaparte and the French army posed a credible threat to Britain, in particular around the south coast where the crossing of the English Channel, or La Manche, seemed an eminently practical possibility. Some prints were clearly fanciful and humorous, but even these had more serious components. For example, Isaac Cruickshank's scatological Bonne Farte Raising a Southerly Wind (Plate I: 1798) depicts Bonaparte bent over, his breeches pulled down, being fed a purgative to enable him to fart a stream of invasion balloons, men on horseback, guillotines and sundry military forces and apparatus across the channel. On the right, a huge fish delivers up members of the French Assembly to Dover, including Gaspard Monge, the mathematician credited with designing a giant raft for the invasion, to be welcomed by Charles James Fox who comments on the fragrant breeze. At the centre of the scene, in the middle distance, is Monge's huge invasion raft surrounded by accompanying smaller vessels. This representation is dramatically more realistic than most of the other elements in the picture.

Did people at the time think that this print was funny? How did they react and how were they meant to react to the invasion raft? It is one of the more popular prints today but it raises some difficult questions about who would laugh at it and why, and what the relationship might be between the humorous elements and the more realistic representations of danger in the print. And those questions need to be answered if we are to understand the creation and publishing of caricatures and popular prints, how designers and engravers might have conceived of what they were doing and the place that prints had in the political culture of the period.

One possible source for the printmakers’ construction of their craft, albeit much critiqued in the eighteenth century, was Hobbes's suggestion that ‘Laughter is nothing else but sudden Glory, arising from some sudden Conception of some Eminency in our selves, by comparison with the infirmity of others, or with our own formerly.’

Introduction: The Ambivalence of Laughter

Early modern dictionaries not only capture the ambivalence of laughter: through the preponderance of negative synonyms that they list – scorn, mock, jeer, fleer, scoff – they also encapsulate its strong association with derision, a word etymologically linked to the Latin ‘ridere’. This derisive strain is evident, for instance, in the way that – in the example above – Randle Cotgrave chose to group ‘ieast’ with verbs utilising the preposition ‘at’, rather than ‘with’. Even his onomatopoeiac ‘tighie’ (‘tee-hee’) is far from neutral, defined by the OED as indicating ‘the sound of a light laugh, usually derisive’. It is this disdainful perception of laughter that dominates early modern discussions of the phenomenon. As Quentin Skinner notes, ‘with the recovery of the classical theory of eloquence – one of the defining achievements of Renaissance culture – the classical theory of laughter was likewise revived’. This was a theory that associated laughter, above all, with contempt: Plato's Republic ‘foreshadows the central principle of Aristotle's analysis when he declares that laughter is almost always connected with the reproving of vice’; Cicero's De Oratore restricts laughter ‘to matters that are in some way either disgraceful or deformed’; Quintilian's De Institutione finds that laughter ‘has its source in things that are either deformed or disgraceful in some way’. Thomas Wilson consequently drew on a long-established tradition when he declared in 1553 that: ‘The occasion of laughter, and the meane that maketh vs merie […] is the fondnes, the filthines, the deformitee, and all suche euill behauior, as we se to bee in other.’

Regarded as a ‘merie’ response to regrettable things, there is thus a duality to early modern conceptions of laughter. This can be seen in Laurent Joubert's Traité du Ris, initially written in Latin in the 1550s and first printed, translated into French, in its complete form in 1579.

This volume argues that laughter and satire played significant roles in political processes and social practices in a range of historical contexts in early modern Britain. Their role was contradictory and ambiguous: laughter and satire both defined or solidified communal boundaries by confronting those who breached social mores and offered potent ways to challenge and corrode those boundaries. Satire did not necessarily provoke laughter, and not all laughter was satirical, but the two were often closely intertwined even though they had slightly separate histories and purposes: both raised questions about when they were appropriate and, as a result, both occupied a highly ambiguous and contested space. Both could foster common identities whilst at the same time being capable of dividing, attacking and subverting those identities, cultural assumptions or political and religious positions. Indeed, this vibrant duality, constructive and destructive, and the fundamental ambiguity about when laughter was appropriate, are reflected in the linguistic inventiveness of the early modern period, when new words to describe types of laughter were forged or when old words acquired new meanings.

To understand what past cultures laughed at, and why they found certain types of laughter objectionable in certain contexts, is to open a window onto the social mores and assumptions of those cultures: to understand in what ways they are both familiar and unfamiliar to us. Because laughter is an instant reaction, it speaks to the heart of those mores. In the words of Robert Darnton: ‘When you realise that you are not getting something – a joke, a proverb, a ceremony – that is particularly meaningful to the natives, you can see where to grasp a foreign system of meaning in order to unravel it.’ Getting the joke helps us to ‘get’ at fundamental assumptions in a given society or culture.

Monks, nuns and friars provided plentiful inspiration for satire and laughter in early sixteenth-century England. Jestbooks, ballads and satires penned in private letters or in published tracts all abounded with humour about those in religious orders. There was no theme more ripe for mockery, irony or satire than the perceived discrepancy between the ideal of strict observance to the rule of poverty, chastity and obedience, and the more sobering reality of monastic existence, a reality frequently expressed through the rhetoric of the seven deadly sins. The difference between ideal and reality was complicated by the monastic double bind ‘between the reforming imperative of withdrawal, and the social imperative of integration’. It was the inability to reconcile such disjunctures that provided the inspiration for much early modern satire, and it was on the theme of monasticism and the religious life in the 1530s that humour became politically charged. This humour, which had been used by those who sought entertainment or those who urged reform, took on new resonances in the 1530s. It was lent a new urgency by the political and religious upheavals of a decade that witnessed one of the greatest transformations in the lives and history of religious men and women in England. In 1534 the Act of Dispensation severed the link between the English monasteries and the pope. Under the authority of Henry VIII as head of the national Church of England, monastic houses were subject to visitations between 1535 and 1539, reports of which were sent to Thomas Cromwell. By 1540, monasticism had been virtually extinguished in England, forcing over ten thousand monks, nuns and friars from the confines of their rule or cloister back into the world. Traditions of anti-monastic satire were exploited by the Henrician government in order to construct a politicised discourse to justify the dissolution of the monasteries.

Anti-monastic satire was certainly not a cause of the dissolution of the monasteries, nor should its existence be read as reflective of widespread opinion that sought the destruction of the religious life. A. G. Dickens's emphasis on using this broad anticlerical discourse as a phenomenon to help explain the welcome acceptance of the Henrician Reformation has long been discredited.