Authors:
- Employs comic theory, rhetorical analysis, cognitive psychology and historical contextualization to recover the ways that Morecambe & Wise’s humor communicated with its original audiences
- Situates Morecambe & Wise fully within their historical moments, demonstrating that their comedy engages the world in far more than a frivolous manner
- Provides a review of Shakespop criticism, outlining the ways scholars continue to evolve their analysis of the many and growing appropriations of Shakespeare
- Analyses Morecambe & Wise’s career-long and widespread use of queer humor, situating their famed, but challenging, comic bed sketches within the larger body of their work
Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Comedy (PSCOM)
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Table of contents (12 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Morecambe & Wise Past and Present
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Front Matter
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Morecambe & Wise and Shakespeare
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Front Matter
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Morecambe & Wise and Sexuality
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
About this book
Contextualizing the duo’s work within British comedy, Shakespeare criticism, the history of sexuality, and their own historical moment, this book offers the first sustained analysis of the 20th Century’s most successful double-act. Over the course of a forty-four-year career (1940-1984), Eric Morecambe & Ernie Wise appropriated snippets of verse, scenes, and other elements from seventeen of Shakespeare’s plays more than one-hundred-and-fifty times. Fashioning a kinder, more inclusive world, they deployed a vast array of elements connected to Shakespeare, his life, and institutions. Rejecting claims that they offer only nostalgic escapism, Hamrick analyses their work within contemporary contexts, including their engagement with many forms and genres, including Variety, the heritage industry, journalism, and more. ‘The Boys’ deploy Shakespeare to work through issues of class, sexuality, and violence. Lesbianism, drag, gay marriage, and a queer aesthetics emerge, helping to normalize homosexuality and complicate masculinity in the ‘permissive’ 1960s.
Reviews
“This book is extremely well-researched and represents a welcome addition to the generally under-represented field of Variety and so called ‘low comedy’ within comedy writing generally. The book presents a novel and entertaining point of view that certainly deserves a wider audience.” (Dr David James, Senior Lecturer of Film & Media Studies, Manchester Metropolitan University)
Authors and Affiliations
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Moorhead, USA
Stephen Hamrick
About the author
Professor Stephen Hamrick, Minnesota State University Moorhead, USA, teaches British literature, religion and literature, speculative literatures, history, and writing. In addition to work on the English Reformations and Tottel’s Miscellany, Hamrick has published on George Gascoigne and Queen Elizabeth, Mary Tudor, and Lodowick Lloyd. He has edited two collections, George Gascoigne (2008) and Tottel’s Songes and Sonettes in Context (2013). He is the author of The Catholic Imaginary and the Cults of Elizabeth, 1558-1582 (2009).
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Shakespeare and Sexuality in the Comedy of Morecambe & Wise
Authors: Stephen Hamrick
Series Title: Palgrave Studies in Comedy
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33958-6
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media Studies, Literature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-030-33957-9Published: 19 February 2020
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-030-33960-9Published: 19 February 2021
eBook ISBN: 978-3-030-33958-6Published: 18 February 2020
Series ISSN: 2731-4332
Series E-ISSN: 2731-4340
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XIII, 346
Number of Illustrations: 6 b/w illustrations
Topics: Comedy Studies, Gender and Sexuality, Shakespeare