A hundred merry tales and other English jestbooks of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries Book

This jolly volume, intended to show milestones in the development of English jestbooks from William Caxton's day to the day of William Shakespeare, brings together for the first time the texts of Caxton's Fables of Alfonce and Poge (1484), A Hundred Merry Tales (1526), Howleglas (?1528), Tales and Quick Answers (?1535), Merry Tales...Made by Master Skelton (1567), and selections from Thomas Deloney's translation of DesPerier's Mirrour of Mirth (1583). A witty and knowledgeable introduction, "The Natural History of Jestbooks," relates these collections of "merry" prose tales to Elizabethan prose fiction and comedy and to their classical and medieval forebears. Although their literary techniques reflect trends in more serious literature, the jestbooks have been little studied by practicing scholars and are generally unknown to the modern reader - in part because they are scattered all over the English-speaking world in the major research libraries. In the present volume spelling, punctuation, and typography have been modernized, and the editor have provided brief introductory botes and glosses of archaic terms.