Shakespeare's Jest Books (Barnes & Noble Digital Library)

by William Carew Hazlitt (Editor), Karin S. Coddon (Introduction)

Overview

This edition includes a modern introduction and a list of suggested further reading. Shakespeare’s Jest Books is an anthology of humorous, often bawdy anecdotes and jokes from late medieval England. Collected in 1864 by the British bibliographer William Carew Hazlitt, the jest books are haphazard in their authorial ascriptions: they have origins in the oral tradition and anthologized the professional foolery of noted clowns Richard Tarlton and Will Kemp.
 
Shakespeare’s most notable direct reference to the jest books appears in Much Ado About Nothing, during one of the play’s memorable witty exchanges between Beatrice and Benedick; Beatrice complains to her gentlewoman Ursula of Benedick: “that I had my good wit out of the Hundred Merry Tales—well, this was Signior Benedick that said so.”

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781411466791
Publisher:	Barnes & Noble
Publication date:	03/13/2012
Series:	Barnes & Noble Digital Library
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	640
File size:	993 KB
Age Range:	3 Months to 18 Years

About the Author

No one would have seemed better qualified to confer dignified status upon such unlikely matter as jest books as William Carew Hazlitt (1834–1913), descended from a man commonly regarded as second only to Samuel Johnson as England’s greatest literary critic, especially for his writings on Shakespeare.  Hazlitt’s works as author and editor include not only Shakespeare’s Jest Books but also A Handbook to the Popular, Poetical, and Dramatic Literature of Great Britain (1867), Four Generations of a Literary Family: The Hazlitts (1897), The Letters of Charles Lamb (1886), The Lambs (1897), and Shakespeare, the Man and His Works (1902).