Twelfth Night and the Broken Jest

Abstract

Abstract This chapter revolves around the cluelessness of Aguecheek and Malvolio, likening their difficulties parsing the jests and jokes that saturate the world around them to the puzzlement of editors who have attempted for centuries to make sense of the Folio text’s inscrutable terms and foreign-sounding nonsense. It argues for an attitude toward the play, and toward the early modern textual archive more generally, that makes space for the ‘ungettable joke,’ suggesting that we should be explicit about the limits of learned explication, even though doing so entails the occasional acceptance of baffled stupefaction in the midst of our scholarly pursuits. This chapter also includes a discussion of early modern jestbooks and the long critical tradition pertaining to Aguecheek’s putative cognitive disability, offering a new reading of the play’s most baffled character.