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shakespeare’s religious sensibility

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4 - What Made Shakespeare Laugh?
Stanley Wells, Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, Stratford-upon-Avon
Foreword by Stephen Fry
Book:

What Was Shakespeare Really Like?

Published online:

14 September 2023

Print publication:

14 September 2023, pp 89-114
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Summary

For the last chapter I decided that I wanted to write about Shakespeare’s sense of humour. I thought I would write about how – if at all – it is possible to know what made him smile and laugh. And I wanted to think about how this relates to our sense of his overall personality and of how that changed and developed over the years. But when I started actually to try to write the chapter, I began to think it would be a great deal easier to write a whole, rather long book about the subject than to try to encompass it within a single chapter. I also felt surprise that, so far as I know, no such book exists. Perhaps that is because it is easier to talk and write about tragedy, which we all know is a very serious matter, than about comedy, which it’s too easy to think of as a trivial matter.