Daniel Derrin’s research while affiliated with Durham University and other places

Few studies have addressed comprehensively the place of jesting in early modern pulpit rhetoric. This article documents some of the humour-jests and witty speech-in the period's extant sermon literature. Specifically it identifies the analytical potential of revisiting an ancient, and early modern, idea: that the laughable is a kind of deformitas (deformity). A standard approach in studies of humour from the early modern period has been to identify 'scorn' as its centraI emotional category. However, with reference especially to the sermons of Hugh Latimer in the 1540s and Thomas Adams in the first decades of the seventeenth century, I shall argue that scorn for what is deemed 'other', and therefore 'low', does not exhaust the range of affective rhetoric achieved by jests against 'deformities' in sermons. Pulpit jesting also generates what are called here 'self-referring' laughable deformities, with much more complex affective purposes. Copyright:

How do we understand Shakespeare's invitation to laugh in the context of war? Previous critical accounts have offered too simple a view: that laughter undercuts military ideals. Instead, this article draws on the Aristotelian description of laughable 'deformity' and Plato's description of laughable ignorance in order to characterize Shakespeare's laughter in the context of war more carefully as an expression of 'relative painlessness'. It discusses how the fraught amusement of Coriolanus (Coriolanus), the reciprocality of Falstaff and Hotspur as laughable military failures (1 Henry IV) and the laughter of Bertram at Paroles (All's Well That Ends Well) each engage with an ancient philosophical conundrum articulated poignantly by St. Augustine: the requirement that a Christian civilization engage in war to defend itself against honour-obsessed aggressors without turning into a like aggressor itself. Shakespeare's laughter at war enacts the desire for that balance.

The article contributes to recent debates about the use of “profane learning” by humanist scholars in the sixteenth century in their sermons and religious polemic. It does this by surveying the use of references in such texts to the braggart soldier “Thraso” from the ancient Roman comedy Eunuchus, by Terence. The article situates the surprising number of references to this morally dubious figure—in sermons, polemic and wider religious writing—within a Renaissance pedagogy that stressed the character’s usefulness for the moral and political imagination. Identifying differences between the rhetorical contexts of sermons and polemic, it surveys and analyses a range of references to Thraso, and argues that even evocations of such a resolutely hateful figure as Thraso could vary in comic tone. In addition, such evocations were not only simple quotations or epithets; they could also be attempts to channel whole scenes from Terence’s play.

Critical engagements with the topic of humour and laughter and literary-historical enactments of their social power are all too easily polarized around the idea that the comic is somehow essentially conservative or progressive. Bakhtin's dream that the carnivalesque was a transforming social force has tended to give way to studies such as those by Mulkay, Billig and Ghose, among others, which emphasize instead how the comic can reproduce the status quo. Excepting Mulkay, such studies typically focus on laughter specifically. This article presents a more nuanced account of the comic in literary politics by developing an approach to humour's rhetoric and politics that draws afresh on the early modern Aristotelian tradition of thinking about the risible and offers an analytical approach to humour as an emotional response to what I will call the unseemly. Such a view of humour illuminates the similarities that might be observed in A Midsummer Night's Dream between Puck's amusement at the lovers in act three and Theseus's amusement at the artisans' play in act five. Such a view of humour emphasizes the evolving values, the seemliness, that can be common to humour and politics by exposing the conditions under which humour becomes available to many as a rhetorical resource. In doing so, the article points both through and beyond A Midsummer Night's Dream to a fresh conception of the constructive role that humour specifically might play in political transformation.

Francis Bacon’s parliamentary speeches have barely been studied in comparison with his other works. Their rhetorical brilliance, and what that reveals of their creator’s understanding of human psychology, offers an important angle on our wider conceptions of Bacon’s abilities as a communicator and propagator of ideas. I propose to look in particular at the rhetorical uses to which Bacon puts remembered bodily experience in his speeches. How does he evoke memories of bodily experiences to be mentally reconstructed by his audiences? How can we link the purposive context of a speech with the rhetorical skills Bacon deploys on that occasion? In attempting to answer these questions I pursue a rhetorical angle on conjunctions of mind and body in Bacon’s England.

This paper addresses the comic routine of Australian born U.S. comedian Gregg Turkington’s alter-ego, ‘Neil Hamburger’, from the perspective of Aristotle’s ancient conception of the risible as a species of the unacceptable, or the unseemly. In doing so, it explores two thresholds of acceptability, subjective and social, which are relevant to an understanding of Hamburger’s comic style. The paper argues that Hamburger’s style willfully violates those thresholds, risking the audience’s laughter, and yet working towards the visualization of a less normative kind of ‘unseemliness’ that underlies Hamburger’s politics: reverence for celebrity and the sacred.

The growing research on the history of emotions has yet to take full account of the extent to which the whole range of human passions and their functions, as understood within the highly influential Thomist model, were useful for a variety of rhetorical purposes in early modern literary cultures. This article explores John Donne's applications of the traditional rhetorical teachings on amplification and its related manoeuvres to some of his specific sermon contexts. This is done in order to show how Donne approaches his attempt to use various passions for his rhetorical purposes. The important dynamic existing between the precise rhetorical construction of an object's value and the precise kind of passionate feeling one should have towards it will be considered. I shall argue that Donne attempts to generate, transmute, and transfer the emotional responses of his audience towards his sermons’ particular subjects by employing the amplificatory techniques that are most useful for getting at the contents of memory directly as well as those that carefully shape the cognitive reconstruction of such contexts.