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"A Man In A Painted Garment:" The Social Functions Of Jesting In Elizabethan Rhetoric And Courtesy Manuals, Christopher Holcomb

Faculty Publications

Many Elizabethan rhetoric and courtesy manuals offer jesting as a powerful rhetorical strategy for managing specific situations. Although highly pragmatic, the manuals' treatments of the subject imply a sociology of humor that classifies jests according to the broader social functions they serve: jests which preserve existing social relations and jests which disrupt, or even challenge, them. What eludes this classificatory scheme, however, are the properties of jesting itself. Jesting is always a flirtation with disorder and often serves conservative and disruptive functions simultaneously. If this is so, then the manuals' discussions of jesting replay (and magnify) ambiguities and anxieties characteristic …