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Fools And Fool-Makers: Types Of Comic Characters In Renaissance Literature, Russell J. Meyer

Quidditas

A common impulse in studies of the comic figure, in the Renaissance as well as more recently, has been to seek a single feature which marks all such characters. Most sixteenth-century theorists agreed that both ugliness and surprise play major roles in the success of a comic figure, but their concern on the one hand with the rhetorical powers of laughter and on the other with the moral effects of comedy led them to accept principles which do not actually reflect the experience of comic literature. In their search for a single consolidating feature of all comic figures, the Renaissance …