Laughter with the audience can be and has been approached from at least two quite different angles: on the one hand from that of the theatre and social custom and ritual, on the other from that of aesthetics and the theory of comedy. Dover Wilson was perhaps the first to remark, many years ago, that Shakespeare ‘gets his audience to laugh, quite as often with his characters as at them’. In more recent years, the social and dramatic background of the actor–audience relationship has been brilliantly explored by Anne Righter and C. L. Barber, and this has— in connexion with the reassessment of the Elizabethan platform stage by G. F. Reynolds, Richard Hosley, W. C. Hodges, Glynne Wickham, Bernard Beckerman and others—considerably modified our conceptions not only of the Elizabethan theatre but of the theatrical modes and possibilities of Shakespearian comedy and, of course, of laughter in this comedy.

Now such laughter on the comic stage has both a history and a theory, and from a comparative point of view it may perhaps be desirable to try and link up the historical (or theatrical), and the theoretical (or typological) aspects. Quite to integrate them must in the last resort involve both a historical view of theory and a theoretical view of history, and it would of course call for a vast amount of documentation.2 It seems therefore more fruitful just to raise the problem (without necessarily suggesting all the answers) and to do so within the limited context of one Shakespearian play.