Tudor Theatre

Primarily meant to host studies about the drama of the English -- and European -- Renaissance, as well as the culture in which it is rooted, the THETA series aims to be a forum of exchange and debate. As in the previous issues the topic of the present volume, which derives from the Eighth Round Table on Tudor Drama held at Tours in June 2000, the problematics of puzzling laughter, is addressed in various dramatic works of the Tudor period. Explicit or merely assumed, such occurrences of an intrinsically diverse and ambivalent phenomenon are hardly amenable to the stereotypes of comedy. In their different ways the nineteen essays in the volume focus on interpretations which relate laughter to the dramatic and aesthetic economy of the works considered, probe its links with medical theory, with genre or intellectual views influential at the time or again, beyond the pregnancy of zeitgeist and functional uses, suggest the relevance of recent assumptions by cognitive science.