Antigone is the only character in Sophocles who explicitly purports to value philia above hatred. She does so in the course of a short dialogue, central to the play, which turns on the nature of philia and enmity.

This chapter focusses on discourse: how emperors were discussed and understood and how they were seen to interact with society. In particular, the chapter argues that part of the expectations placed on emperors was their ability to take a joke. Analysis focusses on emperors making and taking jokes, which outlines themes of accessibility and affability with wider society. An inability to be seen as jocular or amused translated as negative impressions of character that were fundamental to the historical and biographical receptions of emperors.

Drawing on sources such as jestbooks, compilations of apophthegms, and treatises of wit, this chapter explores the interaction between memory and the affect of pleasure in the context of the early modern culture of jesting. The genre of the Renaissance jestbook, which owes its emergence to the humanist appetite for jokes, taps into the cultural memory of classical wit and medieval exempla as well as the collective memory of pre-Reformation festive culture. In England jestbooks proliferated as commodities on the print marketplace and were avidly consumed by social aspirants, keen to acquire wit and urbanity. Jestbooks were frequently marketed as vehicles of nostalgia for a "Merry England," a fabricated age of universal amity and concord. The jests themselves, however, often harness the legacy of agonistic wit to celebrate a form of civility in which conflict is transmuted into a contest of wit, evoking the shared pleasure of competitive play.

Chapter 8 shows that Kant’s thoughts on humor can be viewed as part of his wider aesthetic theory. Kant’s view of laughter at humor can be interpreted in terms of his theory of a harmonious free play of the faculties. What are the sources of his account of humor, and how did his thoughts about humor develop? Kant combines elements of incongruity, superiority, and release theories of humor. While responding to authors such as Moses Mendelssohn, Thomas Hobbes, and the third Earl of Shaftesbury, Kant adds his own, more original, thoughts about humor by appealing to his theory of a free play between the imagination and understanding. Once Kant begins to understand aesthetic responses in terms of a harmonious free play, it puts him in a position to connect humor to his aesthetic theory.

The term “wit” underwent a remarkable shift in meaning during the early-modern period. Originally used to denote intellectual ability, it also referred to the inward faculties of perception: imagination, cogitation or instinct, fantasy, memory, and common sense. Labelled “the five wits”, these were often collapsed into the notion of the imagination. In addition, “wit” increasingly signified linguistic adeptness and the aptitude to use words in a sparkling and amusing way. In this sense, “wit” reflects the Aristotelian social virtue of eutrapelia (“wittiness”). In Love's Labour's Lost Shakespeare explores various aspects of the relationship between wit and ethics, an issue closely bound up with the vexed early modern opposition between surface brilliance and intrinsic virtue. The protagonists of the play are consumed with the desire to display their cleverness and linguistic virtuosity in witty skirmishes with each other. The hunger for enhanced prestige that drives them is intertwined with an antagonistic impulse that finds its articulation in unrestrained baiting of others. The play, however, exposes the superficiality and self-regard at the heart of their demonstrations of wit. Instead, the play suggests, wit could be used to facilitate social intercourse and foster communal bonds through shared laughter.

Johnson’s Lives of the Poets are a classic not only of literary criticism but of biography as well. Originally intended as brief prefaces in an anthology of fifty-eight poets from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, they increased in scope as Johnson worked on them, and as one commentator has said, they became “a book of wisdom and experience … a commentary on human destiny.” The lives of Milton, Swift, Dryden, and Pope are really books in their own right, and the earlier Life of Savage is a deeply felt account of someone Johnson knew well in his youth. He made good use of such documentary material as he was able to obtain, and for recent poets was able to draw upon his own memory of telling anecdotes. Above all, the Lives explore the range of human achievement, its failures and also its triumphs.

This chapter examines Varro’s depictions of teasing and banter in his dialogue De Re Rustica, with particular reference to issues of im/politeness. In many cases, this banter involves some kind of provocation of the addressee, and so risks being construed as impolite. In most instances, however, the witty phrasing conveys a playful intent, which ensures that the remark does not cause offence. The end result is usually heightened rapport among the participants. In several cases Varro’s teasing involves ‘collaborative’ banter, in which both participants contribute to the construction of a playful conceit. In other instances, however, the teasing quips are one-sided, with no response reported. In such cases the emphasis seems to be on the display of quick-witted inventiveness for its own sake. This energetic interaction differs from the highly conventionalized language of social negotiation typically used by the Roman elite. Indeed, it is significant that Cicero’s real-life epistolary relationship with Varro was marked by a degree of formality that eschewed the use of banter. In this respect, the right to tease was one extended only to a privileged sub-set of personal acquaintances

Meredith’s novels abound in sentences, understood not just as the verbal form that contains a subject and a predicate, ending in a period, but as sententiae or maxims, which express a general truth or opinion in striking and memorable terms. A long-time feature of argument and rhetoric, sententiae are intimately associated with the development of oral and written prose, though their presence in Meredith’s work has led to the accusation that his novels are excessively poetic. This essay adopts a genealogical approach to Meredith’s style by tracing the development of his earliest sententiae to their recognizably mature form. With roots in the “wisdom” tradition in ancient prophecy and philosophy, Meredith’s sententiae reflect an ideal of cultivated speech historically associated with intelligent conversation and drama, which he then assimilated to narrative fiction. The singularity of the Meredithian sentence – a metaphorically dense and syntactically complex assertion that blends idiosyncratic expression with judgments of common sense – thus arises from synthetic hybridity, overlaying didacticism with description and intellection with image.

This chapter discusses the work of the humanist, poet, and statesman Giovanni Pontano, focusing on his ideas on language, grammar, history, and philosophy. It shows that Pontano shared Valla’s conviction that a proper discussion of philosophical questions requires a deep familiarity with Latin (and Greek). Like his humanist predecessors, Pontano held medieval scholars and translators of Aristotle responsible for the demise of classical learning and knowledge. But as this chapter shows, Pontano was much more than a critic of medieval scholasticism. Inspired by the literary and philosophical heritage of classical antiquity, Pontano began to explore the social, emotive, and active functions of language. Focusing on language as a tool for communication, persuasion, and practical deliberation, he underscored the intimate connection between language and sociability. This becomes clear from an examination of his treatise on speech, De sermone, which shows the high level of semantic precision Pontano achieved in adapting Aristotle’s virtue ethics to his own contemporary society. The chapter suggests that the underlying assumption of Pontano’s semantic and philosophical discussions is the idea that in marking the boundaries of things, words enable us to distinguish aspects of reality, including the past, as a discussion of his views of history shows.

Chapter 6: This chapter discusses how, as scientific medicine gained ascendancy in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, theatre became an important site for the examination of scientific medicine’s aspirations, achievements, limitations, and dangers. Early twentieth-century plays celebrated the pioneers of modern disease research and their accomplishments, while later twentieth- and early twenty-first century plays display a growing critique of scientific medicine and its conception of the body as an object of medical knowledge. David Feldshuh’s Miss Evers’ Boys considers the human and ethical stakes of the infamous Tuskegee syphilis study, and Suzan-Lori Parks’s Venus addresses the historical objectification of anomalous bodies. Margaret Edson’s Wit, given extensive discussion here, explores the conflict between scientism and subjectivity in the context of the modern research hospital. The medium of theatre is central to these dramatic critiques; medical science may formulate the human body as an object of knowledge, but theatre’s bodies look back in the midst of their display.

Access to indigenous commodities and artefacts produced new fashions and codes of conduct in London. Unlike global trade more broadly, colonization imbued Atlantic objects with specific meanings that involved a politics of appropriation that relied on both the presence and erasure of indigenous peoples. The social spaces of the metropolis fostered environments that encouraged gentlemen to behave like colonizers, from the private gatherings where they read verses that glorified conquest often fuelled by the actual intoxication of tobacco on the senses to court performances where gentlemen adorned themselves with feathers and danced in masques that advanced imperial agendas. Examining clusters of consumption involving globes, pearls, and tobacco pipes alongside verses, portraits, performances, and commonplace books offers evidence of how gentlemen presented their masculinity in ways that reflected their growing ambitions in the Americas. The Inns of Court, where gentlemen were encouraged to debate the political realm in creative and often daring ways, were particularly influential in bringing colonial interests and commodities within provocative redefinitions of civility. The strong sense of virtue and moral responsibility that developed alongside wit and conviviality created a distinct vision of how gentlemen fashioned themselves in an imperial polity.