This chapter argues that Shelley’s laughter – as outburst and affect, and as comedy and satire – is both a way for him to put his aspirations for poetry to the test, and of giving humorous expression to them. For Shelley, laughter is attuned to the pains his poetry confronts and seeks to redress, and seems at once an obstacle to the radical energies of the imagination and a vehicle for his own ecstatic, prophetic strains. Shelley is a writer of restive, divided instincts, and his impulse for the laughable is as complex and contradictory as his feelings towards poetry. His laughter is by turns scornful and sympathetic, while at other times it bursts from anarchic desires and discloses the elusive and seemingly unknowable. The laughable, then, often appears like what he conceives poetry to be, while his native ambivalence towards laughter is borne of his doubts about where art comes from, and its influence.

The first half of the twentieth century saw a veritable industry spring up around Pepys. Three best-selling biographies by Arthur Bryant were influential in establishing Pepys as an English hero, while novels about Pepys’s wife Elizabeth mocked attitudes towards the diary advocated in mainstream historical works. Spurring much of this interest, however, was the experience of two world wars. To trace the roles the diary performed during wartime this chapter looks at three very different productions: the long-running diary parody by R. M. Freeman (1909–46); the war diaries of one of Pepys’s readers, Constance Miles (1939–43); and the post-war BBC drama The Diary of Samuel Pepys (1958). In wartime, Pepys’s portrayal as an ‘ordinary’ Englishman proved more effective than his representation as a heroic figure. The journal and its adaptations legitimated a range of emotional responses to disturbing times.

This chapter discusses the relationship between Shelley and one of his closest friends: Thomas Love Peacock. It sketches the origins and development of that friendship and suggests some reasons for its significance. Particular attention is paid to the very different casts of mind of the two men, something that is especially evident in Peacock’s criticism of what he regarded as Shelley’s culpable neglect of reality, in both his life and his art. Such criticism has its most enduring literary manifestation in Peacock’s caricature of Shelley as Scythrop Glowry in Nightmare Abbey – a novel by which Shelley, to his credit, was delighted. The chapter concludes with an account of Peacock’s peculiarly reticent Memoirs of Percy Bysshe Shelley, in which he sought to defend the biographical dignity of the poet against a malicious and frequently error-prone ‘tribunal of public opinion’.

This chapter explores the oscillations of political power and the “revolutions” – both violent and subtle – that appeared on the US stage throughout the nineteenth century. While many dramatists sought to avoid political debate, all too aware of the potential consequences (from boycotts to riots), timely issues of the day, including the abolition of slavery, the eradication of Indigenous populations, temperance, and women’s suffrage, inevitably made their way onto the stage. Some playwrights struck out boldly, naming issues of substance misuse and miscegenation in dramas such as The Drunkard or The Octoroon. Others infused politics into their depictions of everyday life, including Ossawattomie Brown (which retells John Brown’s history as a romantic family plot) and the labor melodrama Bertha, the Sewing Machine Girl. These homely narratives reminded viewers of how inescapable these issues had become. But whether starkly challenging or subtly questioning, nineteenth-century US theater never escaped the pressing political issues of the day.

This chapter describes the development of Russian drama over the first two centuries of its history. It begins with the court theatre of the seventeenth century, which formed under the influence of Polish and Ukrainian examples, and goes on to trace the slow development of public theatre. The chapter presents the political and social transformation of the audience as both a driving force behind the evolution of Russian drama and an important theme of numerous authors, including but not limited to Aleksandr Sumarokov, Denis Fonvizin, Aleksandr Griboedov, Nikolai Gogol, and Aleksandr Ostrovskii. The work of these authors reflected the shifting values and conditions of Russian society and state ideology, and influenced spectators and readers by offering up models of behaviour.

Critical discussions of the novel of ideas have often asked us to take seriously the ideas articulated by fictional characters, and assumed that these ideas are sincerely held by those characters. This is in fact a good description of the serious novel of ideas, whose formal dynamics can be mapped onto theories of tragedy by Hegel, Lukács, and David Scott. But often, comedy and hypocrisy disrupt the presumed continuity between public utterances and private convictions or behaviours. This also often involves disrupting essentialist conceptions of identity and group belonging. Through readings of novels by Rose Macaulay, Doris Lessing, Jonathan Coe and Jeanette Winterson, this chapter argues that comic novels of ideas thrive on such discontinuities, diffusing and deflating identity categories as well as tragic collisions, and offering a distinctive orientation towards discursive liberalism as the primary medium of politics.

Martial Poirson foregrounds France’s greatest writer of comedy and the most widely read, performed and translated French-language playwright in the world, Molière. Highlighting the myths that have thrived around this national treasure, Poirson notes that almost nothing is known about the biography and history of this national treasure. Inseparable from the nation’s narration of itself and of its status at the centre of colonial empire, Molière has been celebrated for his supposedly republican values, and his language – ‘la langue de Molière’ – has become foundational in France and exported, sometimes aggressively, across la francophonie, or the French-speaking world. Notably, Poirson provides insights into how Molière’s language and oeuvre fared in colonized Indochina. With astonishing constancy and unparalleled resilience, Molière has persisted in the French and international cultural subconscious for over four centuries.

This chapter considers some aspects of the intertextual and intervisual dynamics of Euripides’ Cyclops with particular reference to the cave represented by the skēnē. The particular links of the Cyclops to Sophocles’ Philoctetes are used to explore a network of allusive possibilities in both plays going back to Homer’s ‘Cave of the Nymphs’ in Odyssey 13 and embracing the lost Philoctetes plays of Aeschylus and Euripides. The powerful mediating role of Homer’s cave is seen to be transferred to the caves of drama as the boundary between the seen and the unseen, between the past, present, and future, and as a strongly suggestive marker of the difference between epic narrative and dramatic representation. As the Homeric cave had separate entrances for mortals and gods, so did the Athenian stage. In exploring some of the richness of ‘intertextual allusion’ in fifth-century drama, the chapter also contributes to the appreciation of the differences in allusive practice between tragedy, comedy, and satyr play and of how poets acknowledged and exploited those differences.

This chapter explores contexts for Goldsmith’s career as a playwright, such as competition between Covent Garden and Drury Lane theatres that were factors in the moderate success of The Good Natur’d Man in 1768 and the surprise runaway hit that was She Stoops to Conquer five years later. These plays are considered in the light of how the Seven Years’ War, which greatly expanded the British empire, challenged conceptions of Britishness at home and abroad. Goldsmith’s comedies respond to the perceived effeminization of culture in the 1770s, associated with the possibility corrupting influence of luxury and commerce as a result of imperial expansion. This influence was manifested in new kinds of fashionable sociability such as the masquerade with its uppity women, and the phenomenon of the male ‘macaroni’. Goldsmith also tests the conventions of the comedy of manners in how he deploys minor characters in The Good Natur’d Man and the cross-class appeal of Tony Lumpkin in She Stoops to Conquer.

Chapter Five charts Rogers’ move into silent pictures, a dynamic new entertainment form taking the country by storm in the late 1910s. He headed to Hollywood in 1919 to work for producer Samuel Goldwyn, for whom he would star in a dozen films over the next two years. His films combined humor with depictions of ordinary people struggling to surmount some kind of travail or imposition. In 1923, Rogers moved on and signed a contract with another pioneering producer, Hal Roach. Over a two-year period the Oklahoman would complete thirteen more films, while subsequently appearing in a few independent productions and starring in a series of European travelogue films. Involvement with silent films placed Rogers squarely within the new world of leisure entertainment, and further enhanced his status as a celebrity.

Chapter Thirteen examines Rogers’ emergence in the 1930s as one of Hollywood’s most popular movie stars. The development of "talkie" films provided an opportunity for showcasing perhaps the most popular person in America in every facet of his talent: folksy appearance, verbal dexterity, homespun wit, unpretentious but shrewd sensibility. Fox Films signed him to a contract, and from 1929 to 1935 he starred in a series of popular films that combined his trademark humor with common-man characters struggling with, and overcoming, pressing trials and challenges. These populist films often touted the virtues of rural and small-town life, hard work, plain-spoken morality, and community loyalty. Rogers made a trio of such films with famed director John Ford. The humorist became such a popular movie star and celebrity that he was judged to be Hollywood’s top box office attraction in 1934. Rogers’ success as a "talkie" movie star provided the capstone of his career and cemented his status as an American folk hero.

This chapter examines the irony, complexity, and pleasure in rhetorical ingenuity evident in the satirical essay in English, taking as its central exemplars some of the key historical figures in that tradition in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, from the Irish authors Jonathan Swift and Maria and Richard Lovell Edgeworth through to the Romantic essayists Charles Lamb, Thomas De Quincey, and Thomas Love Peacock. It demonstrates how the prose essay became a powerful satirical form in the Georgian period, and discusses the tonal richness and ambiguity which render the satirical essay a key subgenre in the tradition of the prose essay in English. It pays particular attention to the links between satire, colonialism, the Gothic, and the sublime in the form of the essay.

The Euripides described by ancient biographers is the Euripides Aristophanes portrays in the comedies he wrote for Athenian audiences after the devasting plague of 430–429 BC: immoral, sophistic, and irreligious. Biographers created new anecdotes about him, using the comic poets’ techniques, taking lines from his dramas out of their original contexts and placing them in anecdotes in which they could be repurposed to express his personal thoughts. The process of transforming literature into biography can be seen most clearly in the Life of Euripides by the Hellenistic biographer Satyrus, which is based almost entirely on anecdotes created to provide new contexts for some of Euripides’ most memorable lines; for example, an account of Euripides’ death mirrors the account of Pentheus’ death in Euripides’ drama Bacchae. The idea that Euripides was critical of ancient religion, like some famous philosophers, explains why Diogenes Laertius refers to Euripides more frequently than any other poet. These ancient characterizations continue to have a profound and misleading influence on modern interpretation of his dramas, demonstrating how transformative an effect a skillful comic poet can have on the course of literary history.

Ancient historians regularly argue that the classical Athenians held sailors in much lower esteem than hoplites. They cite in support of this the extant funeral speech of Pericles. Certainly, this famous speech said a lot about courageous hoplites but next to nothing about sailors. Yet, it is also clear that this was not a typical example of the genre. Funeral speeches usually gave a fulsome account of Athenian military history. In rehearsing military history, funeral speeches always mentioned naval battles and recognised sailors as courageous. Old comedy and the other genres of public oratory depicted sailors in the same positive terms. All these non-elite genres assumed that a citizen fulfilled his martial duty by serving as either a sailor or a hoplite. They used a new definition of courage that both groups of combatants could easily meet. In tragedy, by contrast, characters and choruses used the hoplite extensively as a norm. In spite of this, tragedy still recognised Athens as a major seapower and could depict sailors as courageous. In Athenian democracy, speakers and playwrights had to articulate the viewpoint of non-elite citizens. Their works put beyond doubt that the Athenian people esteemed sailors as highly as hoplites.

Joyce subjected race to comic treatment without lessening its seriousness. He does this by broadening his perspective and deferring judgment about differences (“prejudice” literally means prejudgment). Human racial competition takes the form of a car race (in “After the Race”) and a horse race (in Ulysses). This play on different meanings of “race” allows Joyce to make fun of racism while simultaneously belittling it. People “pre-judge” the results of racial competition by betting. Racial hatred is no longer comic in Finnegans Wake, where Shem the Penman is excoriated as black, Jewish, and oriental. Joyce exposes the superficiality of race prejudice by suggesting that darkness is internal to everyone, and it can be transformed into a form of communication that is communal instead of being driven by self-interest and greed.