and
the end is partly the same; for they both delight and teach: the
comics are called _didaskaloi_[1] of the Greeks, no less than the
tragics. Nor is the moving of laughter always the end of comedy;
that is rather a fowling for the people's delight, or their fooling.
For, as Aristotle says rightly, the moving of laughter is a fault in
comedy, a kind of turpitude that depraves some part of a man's
nature without a disease. As a wry face moves laughter, or a
deformed vizard, or a rude clown dressed in a lady's habit and using
her actions; we dislike and scorn such representations, which made
the ancient philosophers ever think laughter unfitting in a wise
man. So that what either in the words or sense of an author, or in
the language and actions of men, is awry or depraved, does strongly
stir mean affections, and provoke for the most part to laughter. And
therefore it was clear that all insolent and obscene speeches, jests
upon the best men, injuries to particular persons, perverse and
sinister sayings (and the rather, unexpected) in the old comedy did
move laughter, especially where it did imitate any dishonesty, and
scurrility came forth in the place of wit; which, who understands
the nature and genius of laughter cannot but perfectly know.

[Footnote 1: Teachers.]

He then goes on to say of Aristophanes that

he expressed all the moods and figures of what was ridiculous,
oddly. In short, as vinegar is not accounted good till the wine be
corrupted, so jests that are true and natural seldom raise laughter
with that beast the multitude. They love nothing that is right and
proper. The farther it runs from reason or possibility, with them
the better it is.

In the latter part of this it is evident that Ben is speaking with a
little bitterness. His own comedies are too rigidly constructed
according to Aristotle's dictum, that the moving of laughter was a fault
in comedy. I like the passage as an illustration of a fact undeniably
true, that Shakespeare's humor was altogether a new thing upon the
stage, and also as showing that satirists (for such were also the
writers of comedy) were looked upon rather as censors and moralists than
as movers of laughter. Dante, accordingly, himself in this sense the
greatest of satirists, in putting Horace among the five great poets in
limbo, qualifies him with the title of _satiro_.

B