True to her aim of analysing ‘laughter in the Shakespearean theatre in the context of a cultural history of early modern laughter’ (p. 1), Ghose focuses on the phenomenon of laughter rather than on what is funny, and also on Shakespeare to the near exclusion of other writers. She breaks up her investigation into five chapters, each looking at a certain area of laughter in early modern culture and relating it to key moments in a Shakespeare play. Her first chapter, ‘Courtliness and Laughter’, for example, takes up ideas about laughter and decorum that appeared in conduct books and courtesy manuals – Baldassare Castiglione's The Book of the Courtier and Richard Brathwait's The English Gentleman in particular – and shows how Love's Labour's Lost dramatizes those ideas and norms. A chapter on laughter and recreation discusses A Midsummer Night's Dream; the changing conceptions of stage comedians – from pratfalling clowns to punning wise fools – are exemplified in Twelfth Night; a chapter about the Puritan attacks on laughter makes use of Falstaff; Erasmus's idea of the ‘wise fool’ is related to King Lear. Each chapter offers a trenchant overview of laughter's place in a particular area of early modern thought. The textual analysis is detailed and rigorous, but the number of dramatic sources regrettably small. Only a handful of Shakespeare's other plays are noted in passing, and the lamentable tradition of studying Shakespeare in isolation from his contemporaries is continued. Marlowe, Fletcher, Heywood, Nashe, Lyly – they make appearance in this study, but receive only the briefest of glances. Given Ghose's exploration of a commendable array of cultural sources, her decision to relate them to only five canonical plays by the most canonical dramatist is disappointing.

Bowers takes up the idea of ‘radical comedy’ – his title is a clear nod to Jonathan Dollimore's Radical Tragedy – and shows how it motivates a variety of early modern texts. His study intends to focus ‘on comic representations that assert themselves in loud, sexist, messy, rude, tender, intimate, and disorienting conflicts of interaction, authority, and subversion’ (p. 1). Along the way, he considers the Second Shepherds’ Play, The Jew of Malta, Marston's Antonio plays, A Chaste Maid in Cheapside, and several of Jonson's comedies. The two most intriguing chapters feature Thomas Dekker's pamphlet about a plague outbreak, The Wonderfull Yeare, and Sir John Harington's satire on toilets, The Metamorphosis of Ajax; it is heartening to see someone working with these texts. This book, however, seems too broad and too brief: an introduction and seven chapters appear in a mere 109 pages. As a result, the discussions feel rushed, and the author's criteria of inclusion and exclusion remain mysterious. Bowers, unlike Ghose, barely mentions Shakespeare, claiming that ‘his influence will be felt and sometimes neutralized by the scope, power, and technique of his competitors in comedy’ (p. 8). While this choice is not inherently bad, one feels that some of the Bard's plays and characters (as well as those of a few other playwrights) would here have profitably added to the conversation.