In his commonplace book, published posthumously as Timber: Or Discoveries; Made Upon Men and Matter, Ben Jonson remarks, ‘the moving of laughter is a fault in Comedie, a kind of turpitude, that depraves some part of mans nature without a disease’. Jonson's comments may seem incongruous to a modern reader. Although it is a modern cliché to say that Shakespeare's comedies are not funny, we still often associate laughter and comedy; if a comedy is not funny, it is seen to have failed. Modern productions of early modern plays are often judged in these terms: a favourable review of the National Theatre's 1983 revival of The Fawn remarks, ‘[w]e watch it, as it must have been written, with a constant smile that erupts into frequent chuckles and occasional belly-laughs’.

The early modern theatre did not make this assumption. Indeed, the place of laughter in comedy and in society in general was increasingly ambiguous. Jonson's comments, echoing Philip Sidney and explicitly following Aristotle, that encouraging laughter is a ‘fault in Comedie’, and ‘a kind of turpitude’, are an acknowledgement of an emergent debate. Sidney himself specifically condemns comic techniques of the 1580s: ‘our Comedients thinke there is no delight without laughter, which is verie wrong, for though laughter may come with delight, yet commeth it not of delight, as though delight should be the cause of laughter’.