Wit, Humor, and Shakspeare: Twelve Essays — Story, Setting & Ideas

Laughter's Anatomy and Animal Origins

Weiss begins by asserting that man alone laughs, then immediately questions this claim by examining animal precursors. He cites the anatomist's view that the respiratory nerves, diaphragm, and facial muscles are not fully developed in animals, yet notes that dogs show “a slight eversion of the lips” during play—a rudimentary smile. Monkeys, he writes, have “established a facial expression, accompanied with a laughing noise” that resembles human mirth, suggesting Nature was “preparing in them the nervous connections” for later human emotion. This evolutionary framing is unusual for 1876, and Weiss uses it to ground his analysis of Shakespearean humor in biological continuity rather than pure literary convention.

Falstaff, Hamlet, and the Comic Mask

The essays on Falstaff and Hamlet treat wit as a defense mechanism. Weiss does not simply praise Falstaff's cleverness; he examines how humor exposes social pretension. In the Hamlet essay, he likely connects the prince's antic disposition to a deeper melancholy—though the excerpts do not reveal his full argument. The table of contents also lists chapters on Dogberry, Malvolio, Bottom, and Touchstone, suggesting a taxonomy of comic types: the foolish officer, the pompous steward, the weaver-actor, the court jester. Weiss appears to categorize Shakespeare's humor by social function rather than by plot role.

Women, Dissimulation, and Moral Judgment

Weiss devotes several essays to Shakespeare's women, and the excerpts show him engaging with contemporary debates about female nature. He quotes Thackeray's claim that women are “admirable duplicity,” then counters with Queen Katherine's speech from Henry VIII: “Heaven witness, I have been to you a true and humble wife, / At all times to your will conformable.” Weiss argues that women's moral judgment is “natively far better than fear of detection” when not clouded by passion. He describes women enduring “protracted sacrifice” in silence, comparing their suffering to an auto-da-fé that “the world never discovers.” This section reveals Weiss's interest in the tension between social performance and inner integrity.

Readers approaching Weiss's essays should expect a blend of Victorian physiological theory, close reading of Shakespearean dialogue, and moral commentary on gender. The twelve essays are not a unified argument but a series of investigations into how wit and humor reveal character. Weiss is as interested in the psychology of laughter as in its literary expression, and his references to contemporary figures like Thackeray place Shakespeare in a living critical tradition. The book rewards those who read it as a period piece of American Shakespeare criticism.

That rainy afternoon, Weiss’s Falstaff kept dissolving into something quieter—his argument that jesting hides a craftier truth. I set the book down, tracing raindrops on the glass, and instead picked up a worn volume nearby, Selected Essays of Plutarch, Vol. I. — Context and Discussion. Strange how both men, centuries apart, trusted a sidelong glance more than a plain statement.