SOURCE: "'Knock me here soundly': Comic Misprision and Class Consciousness in Shakespeare," in Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. 42, No. 3, Fall, 1991, pp. 276-90.

In the following essay, Moisan investigates three comic exchanges between members of differing classes in Shakespeare's plays, which he suggests hint at social inversion but ultimately leave the standards of social privilege unquestioned.

As sites in which to ponder the representation of "class" in Shakespeare's plays—and at the dual risks of making much of little and offering less a single thesis than a collage—I propose here to examine three moments from three plays that stand as three variations on a familiar form of Shakespearean comic business: the exchange between a social superior and his inferior wherein verbal misprision produces a comic impasse that momentarily renders the superior thwarted, his inquiries and commands deflected, the basis of his superiority questioned, and the inferior ultimately left beaten or...