Episode 173: Fooling Around

Welcome to the History of English Podcast, a podcast about the history of the English language.

This is episode 173, Fooling Around.

In this episode, we're going to look at the development of English comedy in the early modern era.

We'll do that by examining some of William Shakespeare's early comedies.

We'll also distinguish Shakespearean comedy from other types of comedic performances which had been popular for centuries.

And we'll also look to Italy to see how developments in literature and drama there had an influence on the theater of Elizabethan England.

And of course, as always, we'll see how those developments shaped the English language.

But before we begin, let me remind you that the website for the podcast is historyofenglishpodcast.com, and you can sign up to support the podcast and get bonus episodes at patreon.com/slash historyofenglish.

And one other quick note.

At the end of the last episode, I mentioned that I was going to discuss Romeo and Juliet this time, but I've decided to wait until the next episode to discuss that play.

Since this episode will focus on developments in comedy, it doesn't really make sense to include a tragedy about young lovers.

But we will look at Shakespeare's fascination with Italy in this episode, and that will provide some important context for the story of Romeo and Juliet next time.

Now, before I delve into a discussion about English comedy during the Elizabethan period, I hope you have a good sense of humor.

And if you're feeling a bit run down, maybe this episode will pick you up because, as we all know, laughter is the best medicine.

That may seem like an old proverb, but it's actually found for the first time in the early 1900s.

Nevertheless, the sentiment is widely accepted, and in fact, humor itself is derived from the practice of medicine.

Well, at least the word humor is derived from medicine.

In earlier episodes, I discussed the concept of the four humors, the four bodily fluids that determined one's health.

It was a concept that can be traced back to the ancient Greeks, and it was still the dominant view in Elizabethan England in the late 1500s.

But by that point, the word humor had started to acquire a new sense.

The word was applied not only to a person's physical condition, but also to his or her mental condition, or state of mind.

So if you were in good health and in a positive state of mind, you were said to be in good humor.

And from there, the word humor came to refer to something that caused a person to be happy.

By the mid-1600s, that modern sense of the word is clearly attested in English.

Now this episode is partially about humor, in the modern sense of the word, not the medical sense.

It's about the use of humor to entertain audiences during the Elizabethan period, and the ways in which writers like Shakespeare presented humor in their plays.

It's also about the language of humor, and that's an important place to begin, with the intersection of language and comedy.

As humans, we can find humor in many different things.

Obviously, if someone tells us a joke or recounts a funny story, that can make us laugh.

And if we see actors performing a humorous scene in a movie or television show, that can also be funny.

Of course, you might enjoy seeing a stand-up comedian perform a comedy routine.

All of those types of comedy rely on the spoken word.

But of course, we don't need words to make us laugh.

You might laugh at someone making a mistake or falling down or doing something silly.

You might enjoy Pratfalls or slapstick comedy.

You might laugh at a funny video of someone's cat or dog doing something funny.

And you might enjoy the performance of a clown or a mime, assuming you actually like clowns and mimes.

The fact is that humans have been entertained by both verbal and nonverbal comedy since the earliest forms of entertainment.

The ancient Greeks and Romans both had drama, by which I mean scripted stories performed by actors.

But they also had dancers and singers and jugglers and acrobats and magicians and mimes and many other types of entertainers.

But what really distinguished early drama from most other forms of entertainment was the use of words to tell stories.

Not merely reciting a poem to an audience, but the actual performance of a story by actors pretending to be other people, and reciting dialogue that had been written ahead of time.

It's that connection between theatrical performance and language that makes the study of drama so important for linguists.

It's fascinating to see how the use of specific words by a performer can make people laugh or cry or think or react in some other way.

As literacy spread over the course of the 1500s, people took advantage of the printing press to purchase relatively cheap books about many different topics, and that included joke books, or jest books as they were commonly called at the time.

The first English jest book was called A Hundred Merry Tales, and it appeared in 1526.

But over the following decades, more and more were published.

They contained riddles, funny stories, and popular folk humor.

Many of them contained English versions of fables and stories that had previously appeared in French, Spanish, or Italian collections.

While jest books appealed to an audience of readers, it wasn't the only type of humor that many of them enjoyed.

They also found pleasure in puns and malapropisms and other types of wordplay that were designed to entertain and amuse readers.

And those were the same literary devices used used by playwrights like the recently deceased Christopher Marlowe and the new writer attracting attention around London named William Shakespeare.

And that's part of the reason why the rise of the Elizabethan theatre coincided with the rise in literacy in England.

The use of wordplay and eloquent language in those plays appealed to an audience who was becoming accustomed to those literary features in the books they were reading.

The same elevated language that turns off so many people today was the very thing that audiences wanted to hear in the late 1500s.

They wanted to hear actors recite dialogue that blurred the line between poetry and prose.

And writers like Shakespeare were more than happy to give them what they wanted.

In fact, Shakespeare's use of humorous wordplay is one of the things that makes his writing stand out among his contemporaries.

And in the early part of his career as a playwright, he spent a lot of time composing comedies.

In fact, most of his comedies were composed in the first half of his career.

That included plays like The Comedy of Errors and Love's Labors Lost, which we explored in the last episode.

It also included plays like The Taming of the Shrew, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, and The Merchant of Venice, which we will examine in this episode.

Those are some of his earliest comedies, and though they aren't necessarily his most revered works, they do suggest that he had a particular interest in light-hearted stories as a young playwright.

But as we've seen in prior episodes, none of those plays were being performed on the stages of London during the period from 1592 to 1594.

During that period, early in Shakespeare's career, most public gatherings in London had been banned due to a severe outbreak of bubonic plague.

That period of lockdown had a significant impact on the burgeoning theater scene in the city.

Some of the acting companies managed to eke out a living by leaving the city and traveling around the country, giving performances where they could.

But many of the acting companies simply ceased to exist during that period.

The theaters were finally allowed to reopen in May of 1594.

The plague had subsided, and the gathering of audiences was no longer considered to be a threat to public health.

In the wake of the lockdown, two major acting companies emerged from the rubble.

As we saw in a prior episode, the Rose Theater, south of the Thames, was owned by Philip Henslow.

His detailed accounting records survive, and they indicate which plays were performed at the Rose and how much money each performance generated.

Well, Hinslow was also the business manager of an acting company called the Lord Admiral's Men, and the Lord Admiral's Men survived the plague and continued continued to perform primarily at the Rose.

Christopher Marlowe had written primarily for that acting company before he was murdered, and the Lord Admiral's men continued to perform the place of Marlowe and other writers at the Rose.

The other major acting company that survived the plague was known as the Lord Chamberlain's men.

That was the company that Shakespeare primarily wrote for, and by the following year we have written evidence that he was an official member of that company.

He would remain a member of that company, as a writer, an actor, and an investor, until his retirement a couple of decades later.

As the name implies, the company's patron was the Lord Chamberlain, whose name was Henry Carey.

He was the head of the royal household, so he was in charge of the Queen's entertainment, and that meant that his actors usually performed the plays that were featured at the royal court.

In fact, after Elizabeth's death and the arrival of James I, they became known as the King's Men.

But performances before the Queen or King were relatively rare.

For the most part, the actors performed at the oldest permanent theatre in London, called simply the Theatre.

It was located in the northern suburbs of London, and its principal investor was a well known actor named Richard Burbage.

Interestingly, before they went their separate ways, it appears that the Lord Admiral's men and the Lord Chamberlain's men actually performed together for a short period when the theaters initially reopened.

They had probably traveled together in the countryside over the prior two years, and according to Philip Hinslow's records for the Rose, the two companies performed a variety of plays together in June of 1594.

Those plays included some dramas by Marlowe, as well as Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus, which we looked at in the last episode.

They also performed a play which is identified in the records as The Taming of a Shrew, which was apparently an early version of Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew.

The play itself is set in Padua, a city in northern Italy.

The story centers around two sisters.

The elder sister is named Katerina.

She is assertive and difficult and is the titular shrew.

She has a younger sister named Bianca, who is sweet and pretty and is being pursued by by several men.

The problem is that the girl's father will not allow the younger sister to marry until the elder sister is married, so the men pursuing the younger sister have to figure out a way to find a husband for the elder sister.

One of the young men finds a suitor named Petruccio, and he marries the elder sister.

He then deprives her of food and clothing and disagrees with everything she says, and he eventually wears her down to the point that she becomes obedient to him, thus the taming of the shrew.

The younger sister marries one of her suitors, and another of her suitors marries a rich widow.

And at the end of the play, the three now married men debate whose wife is the most obedient.

After placing a wager, they each send a servant for their respective wives to see which one will come in the most obedient way.

And Petruchio's wife, Katerina, the shrew, is the only one that comes.

So he wins the bet and surprises the other two men with how well he has tamed her.

Now, obviously, this play isn't going to win any feminism awards these days, and modern audiences tend to find the plot to be problematic.

For that reason, it isn't performed all that often today, but it is very much a product of the time in which it was written.

The play hasn't had much of an impact on the English language, probably because it isn't one of Shakespeare's more popular plays, but he did introduce the word bedazzled in the play, and in an early passage he gave us an early use of the phrase all of a sudden, meaning suddenly.

Now that passage is interesting because it shows a development in the language that was common during the Elizabethan period but faded over time, and that was the use of the word sudden as a noun.

If you think about it, the word sudden is really an adjective, like a sudden explosion.

And it can also be used as an adverb, like he suddenly appeared.

But we don't really think of it as a noun.

I mean, what is a sudden?

It's not really a thing.

But in the late 1500s, it became common to use the word sudden as the object of an adverbial phrase, like at the sudden, or on a sudden, or of a sudden, which is the actual phrase that Shakespeare used here.

They were all different ways of saying suddenly by using the word as a noun.

Shakespeare used of a sudden in a passage where the servant of one of the suitors says, quote, I pray, sir, tell me, is it possible that love should of a sudden take hold?

End quote.

So of a sudden take hold rather than suddenly take hold.

It was just a more poetic way of saying the same thing.

A few decades later in the mid-1600s, the more modern phrasing appeared with the word all,

thereby producing the phrase all of a sudden.

But again, this phenomenon of using the word sudden as a noun soon faded.

Phrases like at the sudden and on a sudden largely disappeared.

But for some reason all of a sudden survived.

It's really just a vestige of that fad that was common in the Elizabethan period where people used the word sudden as a noun in that way, way, and in which Shakespeare provided an early example in The Taming of the Shrew.

Now this particular play is somewhat unusual in that it's really a play within a play.

And by that I mean that it has an introductory section that really exists separately from the main part of the story.

That introductory section adds some additional humor to the play, and it sets up the main part of the story that follows.

It features a character named Christopher Sly, who identifies himself as a tinker.

A tinker was someone who mended pots and kettles and other household utensils.

It was unskilled work, and as a profession it's been largely lost to history.

The term tinker may come from the word tin because most of those pots and utensils were made of tin.

Another theory is that the term comes from the tink tink sound that was made when a tinker would tap on the metal.

Well, the noun may have largely disappeared, but around the time that this play was written we find the term tinkering, which refers to the actions or work of a tinker.

And of course the word still survives in that sense.

If someone is trying to fix or repair something, they might tinker with it.

It usually refers to a clumsy or makeshift effort.

And that sense of the word tinker was around in the Elizabethan period as well.

And many tinkers were little more than beggars and con men trying to make a quick buck.

So when Christopher Sly identifies himself as a tinker, it implies that he's a bit of a rogue.

Well, the scene opens with a drunken sly in an alehouse.

He's broken some glasses and the hostess at the alehouse is yelling at him and telling him to leave.

He responds by saying, I'll not budge an inch.

And that's actually the first recorded use of the phrase not budge an inch in the English language.

Today we might say that someone refuses to budge an inch.

Well, even though Christopher Sly says he won't budge an inch, he's forced to leave the L house anyway, and he soon falls asleep outside.

While he is sleeping, a local lord stumbles upon him.

The lord has been hunting and he's accompanied by his hunting party.

When they come across the drunken sly, they decide to play a practical joke on him.

While he's still passed out, they take him back to the lord's residence and dress him in very nice clothing.

When Sly wakes up from his stupor, they convince him that he's a nobleman who's gone mad and believes himself to be a poor laborer.

One of the men says that Sly's doctors have recommended that he see a

pleasant comedy.

The doctors have determined that his sadness has congealed his blood and has led to frenzy or insanity.

Quote, Therefore, they thought it good to hear a play, and frame your mind to mirth and merriment, which bars a thousand harms and lengthens life.

So, as we can see, the proverb, laughter is the best medicine, may be relatively new, but the idea has been around for centuries.

Now, of course, the play that's going to be performed for him is the main part of the play involving the two sisters that I talked about earlier.

But Sly replies to the recommendation by questioning the concept of a comedy.

He says, quote, is not a commente a Christmas gambold or tumbling trick?

To which he is told, no,

quote, it is more pleasing stuff, end quote, and the play is described as a kind of history.

So what's that all about?

Well, that exchange goes to the whole idea of comedy as entertainment during the Elizabethan period.

First of all, instead of using the word comedy,

Sly uses the word commente.

That's a malopropism.

As we saw last time, a malopropism is what happens when someone intends to say one word, but instead he or she says a different word by mistake.

Some of Shakespeare's more dim-witted characters use malapropisms, and that's the case here.

But why would he refer to the play as a commentee derived from the word common?

And why would he suggest that a comedy is a Christmas gamble, which was a type of parlor game involving jumping and tumbling?

He also refers to comedy as a tumbling trick.

So he has a notion that comedy, or commente, is a common or base form of entertainment involving tumbling and physical activity.

But he's corrected and told that it's actually more pleasing stuff and a kind of history.

This entire exchange reflects the difference between traditional English entertainment and the relatively new form of literary comedy that was starting to appear on the stages of London.

The new type of comedy that I described earlier had started to flourish in the wake of the printing press, and it was a type of comedy that the literate audiences of London wanted to see.

To better understand this distinction, we need to consider how comedy of the Elizabethan stage differed from the traditional forms of entertainment that were designed to make people laugh.

When we think of a Shakespearean play, we think about actors standing on a stage and either exchanging dialogue with each other or perhaps engaging in an extended monologue.

The focus is on the words that they're using and the way they're being delivered.

But traditionally, performers tended to make people laugh through physical activity or songs, not spoken words.

Traditional English comedy was largely unorganized and unstructured.

It tended to be more improvised and spontaneous, consisting of dancing, music making, tumbling, frolicking, sporting contests, and just having fun.

This type of activity was common at seasonal festivals and holiday celebrations.

Even when miracle plays and morality plays were staged in the late Middle Ages, this type of merriment was often employed alongside those plays.

People enjoyed light-hearted entertainment before and after the plays that told stories from the Bible and taught morality lessons.

And that's what Christopher Sly is referring to when he says that comedy is a Christmas gambold or a tumbling trick.

But the new type of comedy, composed by playwrights like William Shakespeare and rendered on the stages of London, used comedy in a different way.

It introduced comedic situations into the storylines, like confusion, mistaken identity, practical jokes, and the like.

In fact, this whole introductory section involving Christopher Sly is based on a practical joke and confusion, and even mistaken identity to a certain extent.

All of this can be traced back to the drama of the ancient Greeks and Romans, but it wasn't common in England until the rise of the theatre in the late 1500s.

English playwrights like Shakespeare adopted many of those Greek and Roman elements into their comedies, and also incorporated comedic elements into the dialogue they wrote.

The characters often used wordplay, like puns and malapropisms, and they exchanged witty remarks and sometimes witty insults.

It was a more deliberate and structured form of comedy.

So, while Christopher Sly anticipates frolicking and something typically found at a holiday festival, what he's about to see is more polished and designed for audiences that wanted to be entertained by the actor's words, not just the actor's movements and actions and silly faces.

Now, even though this new type type of theatrical comedy was based on Greek and Roman traditions, it was not the exact same thing.

Greek and Roman drama was actually more musical than Elizabethan drama.

Greek drama relied heavily on choruses.

Choruses were groups of singers who appeared between the scenes of the play.

They would sing and dance, and they were really a character in themselves.

Through the songs, the chorus would comment on on the action in the play and ask questions and express opinions about the storyline.

The chorus also helped to break the story into separate segments, which later became separate acts.

And of course, this is where we get the word chorus.

It's a Greek word, and it appeared in English during the early period of Elizabethan drama in the 1560s.

Some of the early English plays also used a chorus in the Greek fashion, but it soon disappeared.

By the time of Shakespeare, a couple of decades later, it had largely been replaced with an individual who served essentially the same role as the chorus.

Now Greek plays not only had a chorus, they also sometimes featured improvised songs, and dialogue was often accompanied by music.

This musical form of drama actually helps to explain the origin of Greek terms like comedy and tragedy.

Remember that in the Greek and Roman traditions, drama was the general term for stories presented on the stage in front of an audience.

And there were two types of dramas, comedies and tragedies, and they were very distinct genres.

They didn't really mix.

It's a bit of an oversimplification, but comedies and tragedies were distinct in part because they featured contrasting story arcs.

Comedies usually began with some kind of trouble or conflict, and they had a peaceful or satisfying ending.

By contrast, tragedies usually began with calm and ended with conflict, misery, destruction, and a fall from grace, so they had opposite trajectories.

Though comedies and tragedies evolved into distinct and contrasting art forms, both of those forms of drama actually had similar beginnings in ancient Greece, and those beginnings were tied to music and song.

The word tragedy literally meant a goat song in ancient Greek, and the word comedy meant a carnival song.

Tragedy combined the Greek word tragos, meaning goat, with an early form of the word ode, meaning a song.

So as I said, a tragedy was a goat song.

Even though most scholars agree with that etymology, they aren't entirely sure why it was called that.

The exact connection to goats is a little unclear.

One idea is that the word is derived from festivals where actors and singers dressed as satyrs wearing goatskins.

Another idea is that the most successful singer won a goat as a prize.

But regardless of the original connection to goats, the word tragedy passed from Greek to Latin and then into English during the Middle English period.

And just as a tragedy was originally a goat song, a comedy was originally a carnival or festival song.

It combined the ancient Greek word komos, meaning a festival with music and dancing, with that same early form of the word ode, meaning a song.

Now, obviously, the trajectory of this word and the entertainment it represented took it in a vastly different direction from the goat song or tragedy, but both words have roots in the festival entertainment of ancient Greece.

The word comedy followed alongside the word tragedy as it eventually made its way to England in the 1300s.

Now Greek drama not only featured song and dance, it also sometimes included mimes.

In fact, mime was an art form in itself.

Now Greek mime wasn't exactly what we think of as mime today.

The mime performers usually worked together as a group, and they did sometimes speak and sing to explain aspects of the story they were performing.

But the performance was mostly physical, and unlike regular actors who wore masks on stage, the mimes didn't wear masks because their facial expressions were an important part of their storytelling.

As I noted, mime was a physical form of drama.

The emphasis was on the movement of the body, not words.

Mime activity also included dancing and tumbling and juggling, so in that regard it was somewhat similar to the traditional type of English entertainment that Christopher Sly referred to, and in fact mimes may have been the first professional entertainers in Greece.

Of course, the word mime also produced the word mimic.

To mimic something is to copy or imitate it.

It reflects the characteristics of a mime.

In fact, that's how the word mimic first appeared in English.

It was used as an adjective to describe describe the actions of a mime, and it's first recorded in 1591, around the time that the plague closed the theaters of London.

The word mime itself appeared a short time later and was initially used in English to refer to a crude form of comedy using mimicry.

So mimes can be traced all the way back to the ancient Greeks.

And of course, many aspects of Greek culture were adopted by the Romans.

That included Greek drama.

Many elements of Greek drama were incorporated into Roman drama.

For example, the Roman actors wore masks just like the Greeks, and Roman drama also included mimes.

But Roman mimes created a new style of performance.

Rather than operating together as an ensemble, sometimes a single performer would tell an entire story by himself.

He would perform a dance or otherwise use his body to represent a variety of characters to tell the story.

Since he portrayed all of the characters, the Greek word panto, meaning all, was added to the word mime, thereby producing the word pantomime.

Pantomime was different from traditional mime not only in the fact that it was a solo performance, but also because the pantomime performer never spoke.

The performance was often accompanied by music and singing, but that was done by a chorus or someone other than the performer.

Pantomime was also more artistic than traditional mime.

The performer wore a mask like other actors, and their humor tended to be more sophisticated and less baudy than regular mime.

In many ways, Roman pantomime was really the forerunner of ballet, which emerged in the early modern period.

Now, I think that little digression into Greek and Roman theater will be very helpful as we move forward with this episode.

Those ancient forms of drama not only contributed some words that appeared during the Elizabethan period, but they also established a tradition that mixed word-based drama with entertainment that involved singing, dancing, and the use of gestures.

But these styles of entertainment remained distinct during the Elizabethan period.

Comedies didn't really include tragic elements, and tragedies didn't include comedic elements, and both types of dramas focused on dialogue and storytelling through words.

They only included dancing and singing when the storyline called for it.

But while the dramas themselves focused on storytelling through dialogue, audiences still loved those other forms of entertainment, so the performers looked for ways to combine the two styles of entertainment without destroying the integrity of the play itself.

The most common way of doing that was to simply take a break between the acts of a play to spontaneously entertain the audience with a comedic performance.

Audiences actually loved those little breaks because it provided a nice change of pace.

These types of comic interludes were especially common in French drama.

Since they were stuffed or crammed in between the regular acts of the play, they were described with the French word farcier meaning to stuff, and that produced the word farce.

Originally, a farce was one of those little brief performances stuffed in between the acts of a play.

They were usually humorous in nature, so within English, the word farce still retains that original sense of low comedy or ludicrous satire.

The word is first recorded in English in the 1530s, but it became more common during the Elizabethan period.

Now, I just refer to those little performances between the acts of a play as comic interludes.

Well, we've encountered that word interlude before in the podcast.

You might remember that an interlude was technically any type of performance in between other activities.

In earlier episodes, I noted that English plays were originally called interludes, because they were themselves originally performed as short skits in between other types of entertainment.

Lude, L-U-D-E, was a Latin verb that meant to play.

So an interlude was a type of playful performance in between other activities, and a prelude was a playful performance before other activities.

In fact, that entire introduction to the taming of the shrew with the prank on Christopher Sly was really a prelude to the main story.

Well, in addition to preludes and interludes, most Elizabethan plays also featured a postleude, which was a type of performance after the main play.

After the final act, performers would interact and improvise songs with the audience, and they would dance, and they might perform a funny sketch.

There might also be some tumbling or mock stage fighting.

It was a light-hearted and often bawdy way to end the evening, even after the performance of a serious tragedy.

And it was a great way to incorporate those traditional forms of entertainment into the new type of Elizabethan drama.

Now we don't get a sense of those postludes to day because the surviving scripts of those plays only include the main part of the play, but those improvised performances after the play were extremely popular.

Around the time that the plague ravaged London in the early 1590s, those performances after the main play started to be called jigs.

Of course a jig is a type of dance, dance, but the term could also apply to the music that accompanied the dance.

And it's probably from that sense that the word jig was extended to these post-show performances.

The idea was to send the audience home laughing, even if they had just watched a depressing tragedy.

So the term jig was extended to these songs and dances and post-show skits.

But it could also refer more generally to jests and practical jokes jokes and other types of trickery and misdirection.

It was all part of the fun.

Well, from that sense of trickery or deception, we get the phrase the jig is up, meaning the trick or deception is over because it's been revealed.

Again, those extended senses of jig are recorded for the first time in the early 1590s.

Now, Shakespeare actually made reference to these jigs in one one of his plays.

In Hamlet, the story features another play within a play.

Of course, Hamlet is a later tragedy, but within the story, the characters put on their own play.

And when one of the characters named Polonius complains about the length of one of the passages, Hamlet dismisses the complaint by saying,

He's for a jig or a tale of baldry, or he sleeps.

In other words, Polonius doesn't appreciate a good play.

He only likes the jig or baudy tail.

Otherwise, he falls asleep.

That comment reflects the tension between traditional English comedy and the newer theatrical comedy at the time.

Some people loved the word play and puns and comedic situations featured in Elizabethan plays, but other people found it boring.

They just wanted the old-fashioned comedy of the jig, and this tension is also reflected in another passage from Hamlet.

In a separate passage, Hamlet instructs the actors to beware of comedians who might depart from the script and play to the crowd in the traditional way to get laughs.

He says, quote, let those that play your clowns speak no more than is set down for them, end quote.

He then adds that if they depart from the script, they will be focused on getting laughs, which will distract from the true meaning of the play.

That concern is probably why the jigs were reserved for the end of the evening, after the play itself was over.

English playwrights didn't want to incorporate those elements into the plays themselves.

They would only tolerate them before or after or in between the acts of the play.

Now, in addition to the jigs, some English plays also featured separate sections or interludes where some of the actors would dance or mime a short performance without speaking.

The performance was designed to summarize or supplement the main storyline of the play, and that type of performance was called a dumb show, from the old sense of the word dumb, as someone who doesn't speak.

The use of jigs and dumb shows is important to the development of English comedy because it illustrates how traditional English comedy continued to exist alongside the newer theatrical form of comedy.

In that passage from Hamlet that I read a moment ago, Shakespeare referred to the comedic actors in the play as clowns.

That was actually a relatively new word in the language at the time.

It's first recorded about three decades earlier.

It was apparently borrowed from Dutch or Low German, but it had a slightly different meaning at the time.

It originally referred to a peasant or rustic person from the countryside.

Of course, people in large cities like London often viewed those types of people as simpletons who were unsophisticated and uncultured, so they were often ridiculed.

Shakespeare's use of the word is actually consistent with that original definition because the characters he referred to in that passage were indeed rustic characters from the countryside.

But around this same time in the late 1590s, the more modern meaning of the word clown started to emerge.

It came to be a general term for a fool or a jester.

In fact, the word clown started to replace existing terms like fool and jester around this time.

Those were the traditional terms for entertainers that made people laugh.

Both words still exist today, but fool has acquired a slightly different sense as a stupid person, and jester seems like a relic of the past.

Another similar term that was emerging during this period was the word comedian.

Though the word comedy had been around in English for a couple of centuries by this point, the word comedian was new to the language.

It's recorded for the first time in the 1580s.

But in its earliest usage, it referred to someone who wrote comedies, not someone who performed them.

So Shakespeare would have been considered a comedian since he wrote the plays, but the comedic actors would not have been considered considered comedians.

The word was gradually extended to performers in the early 1600s.

Regardless of the term used, whether it be clown or fool or jester, it required a very talented performer, and the person who took on that role was often the most popular member of the cast.

And in the period before Shakespeare arrived in London, the most popular comedian on the English stage was Richard Tarleton.

People came in droves to see him perform, and he was Queen Elizabeth's favorite clown.

But Tarleton died in the late 1580s just as Shakespeare was arriving on the scene.

Fortunately for Shakespeare, the man who succeeded Tarleton as one of the most popular comedic actors was Will Kemp, and Kemp was a member of Shakespeare's acting company.

It's widely believed that Kemp played most of the humorous characters in Shakespeare's plays.

Now I've mentioned terms like clown, comedian, fool, and jester, but there was another relatively new term that was sometimes used to refer to those comedic performers.

And that was the word buffoon.

Again, much like the word fool, the word is often used today to refer to a stupid person, but in its original sense, it also meant a comedic actor or performer.

And buffoon is an important term because it represents a very important link in this story, and that's the link to Italy and Italian comedy.

The word buffoon is ultimately a product of Italian comedy, and it's an example of onomatopoeia.

Onomatopoeia refers to a word that is created by imitating or mimicking a specific sound.

And in this case, the word buffoon began as an attempt to mimic a puffing or blowing sound.

Whereas we would describe that sound as a puff in English, in Italian it was described with the similar sounding word buff.

And that produced the Italian word buffare, which meant to puff out one's cheeks.

Well, at one time that was apparently a comic gesture.

And that produced the word buffa, which meant a joke or a jest.

And since clowns or other comedic performers would puff out their cheeks to entertain the audience, they became known as buffoons.

And that word made its way into English around the current point in our overall story in the 1580s.

So when Shakespeare was writing his early comedies, the fools or jesters could also be called buffoons with that relatively new word in the language.

I mentioned that the word buffoon provides an interesting link to Italian comedy because, as it turns out, a lot of terms associated with comedy actually come from Italian thanks to the comedic tradition that developed in Italy.

And that tradition influenced English writers like Shakespeare.

The most influential aspect of Italian comedy was the Comedia dell'Arte, which appeared in Italy in the mid-1500s.

I discussed that development back in episode 152.

The term Comedia dell'Arte refers to a specific type of Italian comedic performance, and it's important to our story because it started to influence English drama in the late 1500s.

As we've seen, English drama didn't really include dancing and singing and tumbling and mime performance within the plays themselves.

Of course, those elements were included if the storyline called for it, but otherwise those elements were not incorporated into the play.

But they could be placed before or after the play, or maybe even in between the acts of the play.

But the play itself remained as written, so traditional comedy and theatrical comedy existed side by side.

But in Italy, street performers started to mix all of those elements together to create a new type of performance.

This new dramatic style, called Commedia dell'arte, had much of the structure of a traditional play with a specific storyline, but there was no actual script.

The performers improvised most of their lines, and they interacted with the audience.

The performers also included physical comedy, like dancing, juggling, and tumbling, among other activities.

So we have the structured storyline of a traditional Greco-Roman comedy, but the loose, physical, improvised performances associated with traditional festival comedy.

The Comedia del Arte also featured a small group of stock characters, So, regardless of the specific storyline, the characters were almost always the same.

And each character had a specific name and costume.

The performers usually wore masks as well.

And in Italy, each character represented a different part of the peninsula.

So each character usually spoke in the unique dialect of the region they represented.

For example, the character of Pantellone was a merchant from Venice, so he usually spoke Italian with a Venetian accent.

Pantalone was typically an older man, and he wore bright red trousers or leggings.

As I've noted before, the character was so closely associated with that item of clothing that his name produced the word pantaloons in English.

The term was later shortened to pants in American English.

So whenever you refer to your trousers as pants, you're actually harkening back to the Italian comedy of the late late 1500s.

Well, the performers of the Italian Comedia dell'arte traveled throughout Western Europe and even made their way to England.

So English playwrights and actors became familiar with that style of comedy, and Shakespeare's early plays also reflect that influence.

In fact, he actually gives us one of the first recorded uses of the word pantaloon in English.

It appears in the Taming of the Shrew, which we looked at earlier.

Remember that the storyline of the main part of the play involves the pursuit of a younger sister by several men.

Well, one of those suitors is an old man named Grammio, and in one of the scenes, a younger suitor refers to him as quote, the old pantaloon, end quote.

Now that's clearly a reference to the stock character from Italian comedy, which was apparently the inspiration for Shakespeare's character in this early play.

Now back in episode episode 152, where I discussed the origins of the Commedia dell'Arte, I gave several examples of common words that entered English from that style of comedy, like slapstick, which was originally a prop stick that one character would use to beat another character.

It also contributed the word zani to the English language.

Zani originally referred to a class of stock characters who were servants.

They were called Zani in Italian, and they included the well-known character of harlequin.

As I noted in that earlier episode, harlequin contributed to the development of the modern clown that we know today with makeup and a funny costume.

And interestingly, the Italian word zani shows the same developments as the word clown.

Just like the word clown, which I discussed earlier, the word Zani originally referred to someone who was from the countryside, so it had the sense of someone rural or rustic.

Zani actually comes from a Venetian dialect version of the name Gianni from Giovanni.

And like with English comedy, the Italian Zani characters evolved from rural servants to clowns and jesters.

And when the word Zani or Zani entered English, it had that same sense as a clown.

In fact, one of the first uses of the word zani in English occurred in Shakespeare's play Love's Labor's Lost, which we looked at last time.

In fact, if we assume that the wording of the first folio version we have today is the same as Shakespeare's original draft in the early 1590s, then it's probably the oldest known use of the word in English.

You might remember from my discussion of that episode last time that the story involved the pursuit of the ladies attending the French princess by several men who were the companions of the King of Navarre.

Near the end of the play, the ladies switched switched their clothing in order to confuse the men.

In response, one of the men, Barone, tells the princess that she is, quote, some slight zany, end quote.

In other words, the ladies are acting like Italian clowns by switching their clothing to play a joke on the men.

So we can see in these examples that Shakespeare was incorporating the language of Italian Commedia dell'arte into his early comedies.

Like most Elizabethans, he was fascinated with Italian culture, including Italian poetry and drama.

Many of his plays can be traced back to earlier Italian sources, and given that some of those sources had not been translated into English yet, some scholars think that Shakespeare even had a basic working knowledge of the Italian language.

Of course, the play we looked at earlier, The Taming of the Shrew, was set in Italy, and part of the plot of that play is derived from an earlier Italian comedy called E Suppositi, which meant the substitutes or changelings.

In that case, Shakespeare may have encountered the story from an English translation composed in the mid-1500s.

The Taming of the Shrew was one of many plays that he chose to set in Italy.

Over and over again he turned to Italy to provide the backdrop for his stories.

In fact, you might be surprised by the number of his plays that are set there, including those set in ancient Rome.

The first folio of his works contains 36 plays, and that's really the standard Shakespeare canon.

Fourteen of those thirty-six plays are set in England, or the British Isles more generally.

That includes his ten history plays about various English kings, as well as Macbeth, which is set in Scotland.

In addition to the fourteen plays set in Britain, another twelve are set in Italy.

So there are almost as many plays set in Italy as in Britain.

The remaining ten plays are set in various locations.

So those numbers illustrate Shakespeare's fascination with all things Italian.

No matter what kinds of stories he wrote or where he chose to set them, his mind always returned to Italy.

Shakespeare's obsession with Italy is reflected in another one of his early comedies.

That play is called The Two Gentlemen of Verona, and once again it's another comedy set in Italy.

It's actually difficult to put a date on this particular play because it's only mentioned once in any document from Shakespeare's lifetime, and that document is the list of his plays prepared by Francis Mears in 1598.

I've mentioned that list before because it appears to be a list of all of Shakespeare's plays up to that point.

So, based on that list, we know that the Two Gentlemen of Verona was composed prior to 1598.

Beyond that limited piece of evidence, most scholars consider the play to be a very early play.

Some have even suggested that it might have been the first play he wrote.

The general opinion of most critics is that it isn't as good as his later, more successful plays, so they think it's the work of a younger and less mature playwright.

The structure of the play is also more consistent with his earlier works.

The story involves two friends from Verona in northern Italy.

The friends are Valentine and Proteus.

Valentine leaves to go to Milan, another city in northern Italy.

He travels there to study at the court of the Duke of Milan.

Meanwhile, Proteus stays behind in Verona because he's in love with a local girl named Julia.

But his father soon requires him to go to Milan as well.

He leaves Julia behind and joins his friend Valentine.

When Proteus arrives in Milan, he learns that Valentine has fallen in love with the Duke's daughter named Sylvia, and they're soon to be married.

But Proteus also falls in love with Sylvia when he sees her, so he sabotages the marriage plans between Sylvia and his friend Valentine.

Proteus wants Sylvia for himself, but his girlfriend from Verona soon arrives in Milan to check on him, but she's disguised herself as a male page to hide her identity.

Eventually, all is revealed, and when Proteus realizes the page is actually his girlfriend, Julia, he recalls his love for her.

In the end, Proteus marries his girlfriend Julia, and Valentine rekindles his relationship with the Duke's daughter, Sylvia, and they also get married.

Now, within this play, we have a comedy set in Italy, and we also have a female character who cross-dresses as a page boy.

This would prove to be a common device in Shakespeare's plays.

Time and again, male characters pretend to be females, and females pretend to be males.

That may also represent another influence from the Italian Comedia dell'arte.

It was somewhat unusual in the English tradition for a female character to pretend to be a man, but it was quite common within the Commedia dell'arte of Italy.

Regardless of the source, Shakespeare employed that device in The Two Gentlemen of Verona, and he would employ it again and again in his subsequent plays.

We also have to keep in mind the gender-bending nature of these types of storylines.

Since females were not allowed to act in plays in England, all female characters had to be portrayed by men or teenage boys.

But in the context of a play play like The Two Gentlemen of Verona, a female character has to pretend to be a male.

So we have a male actor playing a female role who's then pretending to be a male.

It required a talented actor to pull it off, and again, it may reflect a tradition that had developed in Italy over the prior few decades.

The Two Gentlemen of Verona also provides another apparent link to the Italian Commedia dell'Arte.

The play features two clownish servants, one serving Valentine and one serving Proteus.

They're basically the equivalent of Zani characters in the Italian comedies.

Now at some point after the composition of The Two Gentlemen of Verona and The Taming of the Shrew, Shakespeare once again turned to Italy for another comedy.

This time the play was called The Merchant of Venice.

And I said it's a comedy, but as we'll see, that classification is complicated.

It may be considered a comedy, but it also has a lot of tragic elements, or at least elements that aren't usually associated with comedy.

And for that reason, it shows how the genres were starting to blend together as the English theater became more mature and as it started to find its own unique voice.

The Merchant of Venice is another play that's difficult to date with any precision.

Like the other plays we've encountered so far, far, it's included in the list of Shakespeare's plays by Francis Mears, compiled in 1598, so we know it was composed prior to that date.

For various reasons, most scholars think it was composed sometime between 1595 and 1597, in the period after the theaters reopened after the plague.

The Merchant of Venice has proven to be a very popular play over the centuries, and for that reason it's had a greater impact on the language than the other other plays we've considered so far.

Despite the popularity of the play, it's also proven to be controversial.

One of the most prominent characters is the Jewish moneylender named Shylock, and many people are uncomfortable with the Jewish stereotype that he represents.

But as with most things Shakespeare, nothing is ever that simple.

Shylock is a complicated character, and in many ways he's also a sympathetic character.

The The story can be read and interpreted in many different ways.

With respect to the Jewish stereotype that Shakespeare presents, we have to keep in mind that there was no Jewish culture to speak of in England during the period in which Shakespeare lived.

Way back in episode 111, I noted that the English king in the late 1200s was Edward I, the king who is sometimes known to history as Longshanks,

and he ordered all Jews to be expelled from England during his reign.

So Jewish culture had been largely unknown in England since then.

The popular perception of Jewish people was based on stereotypes which had been around for centuries, and Shakespeare's play also reflects those common stereotypes.

Of course, anti-Semitism wasn't limited to England.

It was common throughout Europe, but one of the few places where Jews enjoyed a bit of a safe haven was Venice in northern Italy.

In the late 1400s, the Venetian Senate allowed Jews from other parts of Europe and the Mediterranean to live in the city, but they were restricted to a specific part of the city.

That part of the city was called ghetto in Italian.

The ultimate source of the word ghetto is disputed, but the most popular idea is that the area had once been home to a foundry where metal was cast.

The local Venetian word for a foundry was ghetto, G-E-T-T-O.

So this part of the city acquired that name, and as I noted, it was the Jewish enclave in Venice.

And from this original source, the word spread far and wide and ultimately produced the modern word ghetto used in English today.

The modern word usually refers to an impoverished part of a city, but it also usually refers to an area inhabited mostly by people who are an an ethnic or racial minority.

And that ethnic or racial sense of the word helps to establish a connection back to the original ghetto found in Venice.

By the way, Shakespeare didn't actually use the word ghetto in The Merchant of Venice or any of his other plays.

In fact, the word isn't found in English until the early 1600s, near the end of Shakespeare's life.

As I noted in that earlier episode about the expulsion of Jews Jews from England, European Christians had a complicated relationship with the Jewish minority in their countries.

The Church prohibited Christians from charging interest on loans.

Of course there were many ways to get around that restriction, but Judaism permitted the charging of interest if the person paying the interest was not Jewish.

So Jewish businessmen became prominent lenders of money throughout Europe.

Christian borrowers were more than happy to take money from the Jewish lenders when they were in debt, but they hated to repay the loans with interest.

So the lender who was a godsend in one moment was often treated with disdain when the debt came due.

This conflict informs the story that Shakespeare tells in The Merchant of Venice, and again it inevitably played on certain stereotypes that existed at the time and, to a certain extent, still exist today.

As I noted, Shakespeare's moneylender is named Shylock, and many sources suggest that the character's name is the ultimate source of the word Scheister, meaning a crooked lawyer or more generally a crook or swindler.

But that appears to be a false etymology.

Most modern scholars trace the word Scheister back to the German slang term Scheiser, literally one who defecates, but used to refer to a contemptible person.

Now, despite the prominent role of Shylock in the merchant of Venice, he's not the actual merchant in the play.

The title character is a merchant named Antonio.

Like many Venetian merchants, Antonio is involved in shipping and international trade.

The play begins with Antonio and a friend having a conversation where Antonio says he is feeling sad and doesn't know why.

The friend asks if he's worried about his business failing or if he has unrequited love.

Antonio answers no to both questions.

The friend suggests that Antonio isn't really sad then, maybe he just isn't happy.

The friend says that some people laugh at everything, while others never crack a smile even at the funniest joke.

Or as Shakespeare put it, quote, they'll not show their teeth in way of smile, though nestors swear the jest be laughable, end quote.

And I mention that passage because it's the first known use of the word laughable in an English document.

The word laugh is an old word going all the way back to Old English, but this is the first time we can document it being used as an adjective in that way.

Now Antonio has a close friend named Bassanio, who's deeply in debt.

Bassanio is in love with a rich heiress named Portia who lives in another town, but he needs money to travel there and present himself as a successful suitor.

So he reaches out to his friend Antonio, the titular merchant.

He tells Antonio that if he can borrow the money from him, he'll be able to pay off all of his debts when he's married Portia, since she's very wealthy.

But Antonio's money is tied up in his merchant vessels, so he can't actually lend the money to Bassanio.

Since Bassanio's credit is too bad to obtain his own loan, Antonio agrees to act as a guarantor if the loan can be obtained from someone else.

In other words, Antonio will agree to pay back the loan if Bassanio defaults.

With the plan in place, the two men approach Shylock to obtain the loan.

But Shylock hesitates.

While discussing the charging of interest with Antonio, Shylock refers to a story from the Bible.

Antonio then turns to his friend Bassanio and says, quote, the devil can cite scripture for his purpose, end quote.

Now, this is the source of that commonly recited phrase, meaning that good things are sometimes twisted and put to use for bad purposes.

We then learn why Shylock is reluctant to make the loan.

He and Antonio have a history.

In the past, Antonio has bullied Shylock.

Antonio has mocked him, spit on him, and ridiculed his religion.

Shylock now mocks Antonio in return.

He says, says,

Shall I bend low and in a bondsman key, with baited breath and whispering humbleness, say this?

Fair sir, you spit on me on Wednesday last, you spurned me such a day, another time you called me a dog, and for these courtesies I'll lend you thus much monies?

Now I mention that passage because Shylock used the term baited breath, and that passage contains the first known use of that term.

It appears to be a term that Shakespeare coined for the play.

Baited is really just a shortened form of the word abated, meaning reduced or lessened.

So if someone responds with baited breath, it means that their breathing has been subdued, usually due to fear or nervousness or anticipation.

The word bait, B-A-T-E, and its common variation baited, are rarely used today outside of this this particular term found in the merchant of Venice.

Now, after a back and forth between Shylock and Antonio, Shylock finally makes a proposal.

He will agree to make the loan, and he'll make it at no interest.

But if the loan is not repaid in full on the due date, then

let the forfeit be nominated for an equal pound of your fair flesh to be cut off and taken in what part of your body pleaseth me.

⁇

So if Bassanio and Antonio default, Shylock will literally take a knife to Antonio's body and remove a pound of his flesh, almost certainly resulting in Antonio's death.

Now obviously, this is the origin of the modern phrase a pound of flesh, referring to something that's legally or morally owed, but which is paid under very harsh circumstances.

So if you exact a pound of flesh from someone, you're getting what's technically due to you, but it's not a pleasant experience for the person who has to pay.

Surprisingly, Antonio agrees to the deal.

He's confident that his merchant ships will arrive in time to repay Shylock in full.

With the terms of the loan agreed to, we're then introduced to Shylock's servant, a clownish character named Lancelot.

And once again, we see the connection to the Italian Zani, the clownish servants of Italian comedy.

Just like in the two gentlemen of Verona, the comedic servant provides some laughs and entertainment for the audience.

It's also a reminder that this is indeed a comedy despite the heavy subject matter.

In terms of the English language, there's a very interesting passage at this point involving the servant Lancelot and his blind father.

Lancelot encounters his father on the street, but due to his father's blindness, his father doesn't recognize him.

The father asks the apparent stranger if he knows where Lancelot dwells.

Of course, being a clown, Lancelot initially plays a joke on his father and pretends to be someone else.

But eventually he reveals his identity to his father by saying, quote, at the length truth will out, end quote.

In other words, the truth will always come out in the end.

This passage between Lancelot and his father is the first known use of that phrase, and it may be another example of a phrase coined by Shakespeare.

Another fascinating aspect of the exchange between Lancelot and his father concerns the pronoun forms used during the conversation.

The father begins by using the formal pronoun you when he's referring to the man who he considers to be a stranger.

But when Lancelot reveals his identity, the father stops using the formal pronoun you and switches to to the informal pronouns the and thou.

It's a subtle change that most readers or viewers of the play never even notice, but it shows how Shakespeare distinguished those pronoun forms, as people still did in England in the late 1500s.

You would have addressed a stranger, certainly one of equal or higher standing, with the formal pronoun you, and you would have addressed a close family member or someone of lower standing with the informal pronouns the and thou, and that's what Lancelot's father does in this particular passage, switching forms as the identity of the person is revealed.

We're then introduced to Shylock's daughter named Jessica.

Now, this may come as a surprise to you, but this is actually the first recorded use of the name Jessica.

It appears to be a name that Shakespeare invented for this play.

Most scholars agree that it's derived from an obscure female character in the book of Genesis named Iska, ISCAH.

Isca was a relative of Abraham, and it appears that Shakespeare anglicized that name slightly to produce the name Jessica for Shylock's daughter.

Of course, the name would go on to become one of the most popular names in the English language, especially in the United States.

It was one of the top ten names used for girls in the U.S.

throughout the last quarter of the 1900s, and it was the number one name for girls from 1985 to 1990.

Its popularity has faded slightly in recent years, but now you know that it was a name coined by William Shakespeare in the Merchant of Venice.

We soon learned that Jessica is about to elope with a Christian man named Lorenzo.

She disguises herself as a man, takes a large amount of her father's money, and leaves to be with Lorenzo.

So, once again, we have a cross-dressing female character.

As I've noted, this was a popular feature of Shakespeare's comedies, and an idea that may have been influenced by the Italian Comedia dell'arte.

And as we'll see, this isn't the only example of that type of cross-dressing in the play.

Well, when Shylock learns that his daughter has left him and taken his money, and has done so to marry a Christian man, he's stricken with grief.

Jessica's new husband Lorenzo is a friend of the merchant Antonio, so once again Shylock puts the blame on Antonio.

Now remember that the merchant Antonio is on the hook for the debt, but he wasn't the one who received the money.

The money actually went to his friend Bassanio, who needed it to pursue the rich heiress Portia.

Well, we now learn that Bassanio has successfully pursued her, and they have gotten married.

But shortly after the marriage, Bassanio receives a letter from Antonio.

In the letter Antonio reveals that his ships have been wrecked at sea, and that he's not going to be able to repay Shylock.

Antonio asks Bassanio to return to Venice for what will be his inevitable death at the hands of Shylock.

Antonio writes that all debts between the two of them will be forgiven if Bassanio is able to return to Venice.

The actual passage in the letter is quote All debts are cleared between you and I if I might see you at my death, end quote.

Now I actually referred to that passage in an earlier episode about English pronouns, episode 54 to be precise, and that's because English teachers tell us that the correct pronoun form after the word between

is you and me, not you and I.

So you should say between you and me, not Shakespeare's between you and I.

That's because me is the pronoun form that we use as the object of a sentence, like when we say, you see me.

We also use it as the object of a prepositional phrase, like give it to me.

Well, between is a preposition, so the pronouns that follow it are the objects of the prepositional phrase.

Therefore, grammarians say that you should say between you and me, since those are the forms normally used in in that position.

But this technical rule is often ignored in normal speech, and many people cite Shakespeare's use of between you and I in this passage to point out that even the greatest writer in English didn't always follow the standard rules.

Of course, the modern rules of grammar were not fully in place during Shakespeare's lifetime, so that also explains why he sometimes used words in ways that would not be acceptable in English class today.

Well, after reading Antonio's letter, Bassanio heads back to Venice to save him from Shylock's wrath.

Bassanio now has his new wife's wealth at his disposal, so he can pay Shylock far more than the original loan amount to settle the debt.

But back in Venice, Shylock refuses.

He wants revenge, not money.

But before he can exact his pound of flesh, the dispute has to go to trial to determine if the terms are legal and binding.

Bassanio's new wife, Portia, has a cousin who is a law professor, and apparently after consulting with him, a plan is devised.

Portia and her friend Narissa will travel to Venice.

They will dress as men and pretend to be a lawyer and a clerk sent by the professor to observe the trial.

So once again we have women cross-dressing as men.

And given that Shylock's daughter Jessica also cross-dressed as a man earlier in the play, that means that all three female characters in the play engage in cross-dressing.

Again, this plot device may reflect Italian influence.

Well, Portia and Narissa arrive in Venice, and Portia pretends to be a lawyer sent at the recommendation of her prominent cousin.

The local Duke is impressed by her apparent credentials, and he agrees to turn the case over to her to determine the outcome.

Of course, he thinks she's a man, but I'll just refer to her as Portia going forward.

Portia tries to convince Shylock to show mercy, but Shylock demands strict adherence to the terms of the agreement.

But then Portia, as the presiding judge, notes that the agreement requires the payment of a pound of flesh, but there's no mention of blood.

So while Shylock can have his flesh, he cannot have a single drop of Antonio's blood.

Of course, Shylock cannot have flesh without blood, so the agreement is determined to be unenforceable.

Furthermore, Shylock faces the prospect of losing all of his property as a foreigner under Venetian law, since he tried to take the life of a citizen.

In the end he's given mercy and he's allowed to retain part of his property, but he has to agree to convert to Christianity.

So Antonio is spared, and in the minds of Shakespeare's Elizabethan audience, the greedy moneylender got his comeuppance.

This is the happy ending that Shakespeare provided for his comedy, even though modern audiences are sometimes disturbed by the outcome.

Is the bullied Shylock who lost his daughter and much of his wealth really the bad guy?

And is this really a comedy?

Well, it's a type of comedy, though it blends elements of tragedy.

Earlier, I noted that comedies and tragedies had opposite trajectories.

Comedies started with a conflict conflict and trouble and ended with a happy resolution.

Tragedies started with a period of common stability and ended in conflict and loss.

Well, for Bassanio and Antonio, who were clearly the good guys in the play, everything ends well.

So this is a comedy in that regard.

But for Shylock, who was intended to be the bad guy, the play ends with loss, loss of a daughter, loss of his money, loss of his court case, and loss of his religion.

So for him, this is a tragedy.

The merchant of Venice isn't the simple, straightforward comedy that most audiences were accustomed to at the time, and that may have been part of the reason why it was so popular.

The English theater was maturing and coming into its own, and writers like Shakespeare were willing to break from the rigid structure of theatrical comedy.

The traditional dividing lines were starting to blur, and over the next couple of centuries, theater that focused on the spoken word would face competition from other types of theater, those that focused on singing, dancing, and the use of gestures to tell a story.

By this point in history, a form of storytelling through dance had already developed in Italy.

It was a type of theater that harkened back to the earlier Roman pantomimes, where performers told stories through dance and mime.

Like pantomime, this new type of storytelling didn't use words.

It was called balletto in Italy, but it quickly spread to France where the word was shortened to ballet.

The word comes from the same root that gives us the word ball as in a type of social gathering where people dance.

Italian performers not only told stories through dance, they also told stories through song.

And during the late 1500s, around the current point in our overall story, Italian performers started to revisit the way Greeks had used music in the theater, like the use of the chorus to help develop the plot.

Inspired by those classical influences, the Italian performers developed new theatrical works set to music.

I call them works, but in Italian the word for work is opus.

We sometimes use that word in English, like when we refer to someone's magnum opus, meaning their greatest work or achievement.

And the plural form of opus was opera.

So in Italian, works that were set to music were called opera in musica.

But that term was later shortened to just the first word, opera.

By the way, the connection between the word opera and work is much more obvious if you think about another word that shares the same Latin root, the word operate, as when you operate a car or a piece of equipment, meaning that you work with it.

Well, the first known opera was called Daphne.

It was composed in the mid-1590s, around the same time that Shakespeare was composing the comedies that I discussed in this episode.

That opera was first performed in 1597, and it re-established the idea of storytelling through song and music.

So, ballet and opera both have roots in Italy in the early modern period.

And of course, those types of storytelling through dance and music eventually found an audience in England.

But it was the Italian Comedia dell'arte that had the greatest impact on the English theater going forward.

While Elizabethan drama incorporated some of those elements, like clownish servants and females who dressed as men, the overall influence was limited.

The focus remained on a story told through dialogue and words, with little outside distraction.

But in the 1700s, many aspects of the Comedia dell'Arte were embraced as part of a new type of English performance.

In some ways, this new type of performance returned to the roots of English comedy, with music and dancing and less of a focus on scripted dialogues.

But it also adopted many aspects of Italian comedy comedy with improvisation, audience interaction, cross-dressing, fancy costumes, and topical jokes.

Initially, the focus was more on dancing with relatively little dialogue, so they came to be known as pantomimes, referring back to the old Roman type of storytelling through dance and gestures.

But over time, the verbal element expanded, and much like those old Christmas gambles that Christopher Sly referenced in The Taming of the Shrew, these types of performances became common around Christmastime and the holidays.

Of course, those of you listening in the UK will know exactly what I'm talking about, since pantomimes are still a common part of English culture to this day.

But in the U.S., they never really had the same kind of impact.

Of course, the U.S.

has a separate tradition of musical theater, but it lacks the improvisational and interactive nature of the English pantomime.

The bottom line is that there have always been many different ways to tell a story, and many different ways to make people laugh.

Performers have always used song and dance and gestures to entertain people, but the idea that performers would entertain audiences primarily with words, through the delivery of scripted dialogue, with the use of puns, malapropisms, repetition, alliteration, rhyming, and other types of wordplay, well, that was a fundamental feature of the Elizabethan theater.

It was a feature that distinguished that type of drama from those other forms of entertainment.

And it's something that was zealously guarded by playwrights like Shakespeare.

And it's part of the reason why those plays have had such a long-lasting impact on the English language.

Next time, we'll move the story forward, but we'll stay in Italy, at least for the setting of one of Shakespeare's most famous plays.

We'll look at Romeo and Juliet, and we'll see what the play has to tell us about the state of English at the time.

Of course, we'll look at some common words and phrases that have survived from the play, but we'll also examine what the passages have to tell us about the pronunciation and grammar of the language as well.

And if all goes well, I may actually take the narrative to the very end of the 1500s.

So, until next time, thanks for listening to the History of English podcast.