'A jest with a sad brow': Shakespeare’s ambivalent insults

Shakespeare’s insults are ambivalent creatures that oscillate between humour and pathos. That is what this article aims to show. It focuses on the part insults play in the articulation of humour and pathos in Shakespeare’s plays, Falstaff and his reference to “a jest with a sad brow” appearing as a case in point. Through examples taken from Much Ado About Nothing, Love’s Labour’s Lost, King Henry IV, Hamlet, Othello, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the article explores how insults and moments of insult convey the complex and fragile balance between humour and pathos. It shows that Shakespeare’s theatre of insult is based on the tension between laughter and tears, between the ludic and the serious modes or humours of insult, at a time when the word ‘humour’ was mainly conceived in the plural and still referred to fluid(s) rather than wit. This article first analyses how Shakespeare’s plays reveal a breach between humour and pathos by dramatizing, on the one hand, what is called “skirmish[es] of wit” in Much Ado About Nothing, and, on the other hand, what is called “heart-struck injuries” in King Lear. After dissociating comic and tragic insults, the article then shows how Shakespeare cultivates moments of insult when the spectators do not know whether they should laugh or cry, moments when insults waver between humour and pathos, between mirth-making and grief-making, moments in which insults hurt even when they are supposed to be humorous. This ambivalence is related to the ambivalence that is at the heart of the way the tongue is represented in Shakespeare’s world which points to its essential volatility, unpredictability and instability.