Members of Rabelais's and Shakespeare's courtly audience share a faith in the capacity of humor to comprehend experience most fully and, therefore, to serve as the best teacher. I claim that we have a good chance at recapturing the laughter that engages the courteous audiences of Rabelaisian and Shakespearean comedy, and that this laughter is especially worth recovering since it marks a lesson, however fleeting, in skeptical truths. My method is twofold: I treat the responses of the characters on stage as a guide or inducement for offstage viewers, and characters of the Rabelaisian book as an index for its readers; and I examine various thematic and formal elements which relate the text to other texts in an ongoing historical exchange of ideas.

As instruments for their humor, Rabelais and Shakespeare favor three comic topoi that express the ambiguous moral attitudes characteristic of life at court—parody, folly, and inversion. In their comedy these devices set in motion corresponding dialectical tensions between a parodying and a parodied text, the fool and the curial establishment, and normative and inverted systems. Such conventions are well suited to privileged audiences who take great pleasure in widening the gap between two seemingly opposed ideas, thereby proving their ability to hold these ideas in constant tension. If truth, for a courtly spectator, is always relative, multivocal, and ambivalent, then the didactic method to truth must take the form of a struggle between contrasting values.

The first chapter analyzes how an appreciation of parody hones the courtier's sociability. At the feast, in the giant's mouth, and in the pastoral setting, gentlefolk test their courtesy through conversations with equals. Chapter two shows the courtier studying the fool to attain worldly success. The spectacle of blind Fortune and blind Justice favoring the fool startles courtly observers into revising their perspective on folly. My third chapter charts the courtier's pursuit of wisdom as s/he deliberately inverts and makes play with values. This inversion, which affirms rule and misrule simultaneously, expresses the dissonances at the heart of the individual's experience within the temporal community.