William Carew Hazlitt 
Shakespeare’s Jest Books (Barnes & Noble Digital Library) 

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.”

Circa l’autore

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).