Shakespeare and the Ethics of Humour

In today’s world, humour has become the target of the culture wars. Humour is increasingly under attack for causing offence to certain groups in society. Curiously, what seems to be a feature of our times actually replays disputes about comedy in Shakespeare’s age, in particular an insistence on a one-to-one correlation between fictions and reality. How does Shakespeare respond to attacks on comedy in his time? A brief survey of comic episodes in the plays reveals a consistent engagement with the nature of fictive artefacts. Humour, Shakespeare seems to suggest, is a form of fiction too, an arena governed by the laws of make-believe: as in a foreign country, they do things differently there. In a post-truth world in which the distinction between fiction and reality is increasingly under pressure, Shakespeare’s humorous moments shed a light on our own paradoxical relation to fictions and the truths we insist are reality. They unsettle our pieties, and remind us that our minds are not unified—and that we are able to slip into fictive worlds in the full awareness that these might be incompatible with other worldviews we might hold.