To Örebro University

This article discusses the clowning element of a German version of Hamlet believed to date back to the time of Shakespeare. Der bestrafte Brudermord is noted as an adaptation of Shakespeare's tragedy which incorporates a lot more low comedy than any extant version of Hamlet and provides opportunity for contemplating the reason why Hamlet has no explicit clown character. The article focuses especially on a character appearing very briefly in the German play, a rustic buffoon called Jens, and his affinity with the rustics and comic servants of other Shakespeare plays and other Elizabethan plays. It is particularly asserted that this role shows signs of the involvement of the clown Will Kemp at some stage of the writing of Hamlet, or of touring continental Europe with an adaptation of it that puts the clowning element at the forefront.

Denna temarecension diskuterar tre relativt nyutkomna böcker om humorns historia.

• A Cultural History of Comedy, vol. 1-6A
• The Palgrave Handbook of Humour, History, and Methodology

samt

• Gudomliga komedier. Humor, subjektivitet, transcendens. vol. 1–3

The age of Shakespeare, and its changing notions of what was funny, gave birth to modern comedy.

Around the middle of the nineteenth century, there arose a type of circus performer in England called ‘Shakespearean clowns’. These clowns constituted a transitory figure between the age of Georgian pantomime clowns and the establishment of the typical circus clown in the later part of the century. One of the more neglected representatives of the genre was James Clement Boswell, who enjoyed a brief period of success in England before becoming a sensation in Paris during the 1850s. Although he was universally praised, his clowning also evoked bafflement. This article studies reviews of and periodical articles on Boswell in order to get a picture of his performances and clown persona, and of how critics perceived him and turned him into an example of the melancholy clown trope. The resistance that Boswell’s act and persona offered to the writers, however, illustrates that he was part of a change in the figure of the clown from its early nineteenth century incarnation to the twentieth-century clown and comic. Boswell’s clowning prefigures the irony and deadpan comedy that would become more prevalent in modern comedy. He is also illustrative of the increasing detachment of the clown figure from representations of a social reality, and the creation of the modern circus clown as an essentially unreal character that epitomizes a separate outlook on life.