Humor in British Literature, From the Middle Ages to the Restoration: A Reference Guide by Don L. F. Nilsen (review)

94 discovery is just that we know it already.’’ We can see that going over well in the classroom. He also knows how to use the exclamation mark precisely and properly in scholarly prose. He has a flair for the wittily turned phrase and never hesitates to declare some typical example of longwinded sixteenth-century prose not just turgid but ‘‘unreadable.’’ When Clarendon ‘‘fell in 1667, the year of Sprat’s History of the Royal Society and the year before Dryden’s Essay of Dramatic Poesy, his prose and his world fell with him.’’By 1750, Mr. Robinson thinks, ‘‘Clarendon must surely have been one of the great unreadables.’’ No question. Sterne ‘‘the deadly serious joker’’used theem rule‘‘injusttheoldwaytoindicate the succession of phrases that are anything but clauses in a complex sentence.’’ And even if the introduction of Thomas Burnet startles (but it should not, for Mr. Robinson declares his personalinterestas Burnet’s editor), listen to this: Burnet ‘‘can evidently write the beautifully clear proseof philosophicalargumentationthat one finds in Berkeley or David Hume, but he has a shade less decorum and more idiosyncratic insolence than either.’’ DON L. F. NILSEN. Humor in British Literature , From the Middle Ages to the Restoration : A Reference Guide. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1997. Pp. xxvi ⫹ 226. $79.50. Finding the right audience for this how-to book on humor research will prove more of a challenge than its compilation . Humor in British Literature offers four segments on humor in the fourteenth, fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries, each including miniature critical biographies and thumbnail bibliographies. A general Introduction, a supplement on humor before the fourteenth century, and an alphabetical Index of authors are intended to complement the chronological layout of the volume. It is not altogether clear whether the book is aimed at supplementing the work of professional scholars or at jump-starting undergraduates stymiedbytermpaperassignments . Mr. Nilsen’s bibliographies are too predictable for the former and too complex for the latter. The chief merit of this undertaking is that it gives beginners fairly complete lists of authors’names and a broad-based accounting of relevant standard critical works. This virtue is also the chief deficiency . Attempting to be comprehensive in limited space, Mr. Nilsen leans too heavily on outdated synoptical histories of humor such as those of Louis Cazamian and Alfred Gu L’Estrange, whose edicts appear on almost every page. Mr. Nilsen is consequently limited to lessthan -dazzling statements like ‘‘Samuel Butler’s Hudibras . . . is considered to be the best example of the genre’’ of the satirical character, statements in which a general literary historian passes a general value judgment that is generally less than informative. The section covering the Restoration seldom goes beyond ambiguously informative general commentary. We get the predictable remarks about the licentiousness of the Earl of Rochester; the unremarkable announcement that Dryden was probably the ‘‘greatest of the Restoration writers.’’Sometimes Mr.Nilsen ’s synoptical comparisons border on the bogus, as when he declaresthat‘‘Marvell ’s writings are close to the writings of Jonathan Swift in their cleverness, intellect [,] and irony,’’ thereby creating in the gullible undergraduate mind a false basis for synonymizing disparate writers. Mr. Nilsen’s compendium is not without merit. He is willing to look at all genres as potential vehicles for humor. His entry on Restoration comedy is more 95 extensive than anything done by lesser encyclopedists intimidated by the complexity of Restoration theater culture. He is willing to count Locke as a humorist insofar as he contributed to the psychological analysis of wit. He even finds humor in sallow Milton and in ideological Behn. FamiliarpoemssuchasMacFlecknoe take on a new life when set out as benchmarks in the history of modern hilarity . Likewise, undervalued jottings such as Waller’s Instructions to a Painter take on a previously unnoticed importance as triggers for parody, travesty, burlesque , and thence laughter. The gems must be mined out of a deep but choked vein of older, sometimes superannuated scholarship. Mr. Nilsenlikes to give plenty of play to big-nameauthors and genre critics, not many of whom are early-modern specialists and most of whom were flourishing back in the 1970s and 1980s. His bibliographies on writers like Rochester, for example...