Drawing on sources such as jestbooks, compilations of apophthegms, and treatises of wit, this chapter explores the interaction between memory and the affect of pleasure in the context of the early modern culture of jesting. The genre of the Renaissance jestbook, which owes its emergence to the humanist appetite for jokes, taps into the cultural memory of classical wit and medieval exempla as well as the collective memory of pre-Reformation festive culture. In England jestbooks proliferated as commodities on the print marketplace and were avidly consumed by social aspirants, keen to acquire wit and urbanity. Jestbooks were frequently marketed as vehicles of nostalgia for a "Merry England," a fabricated age of universal amity and concord. The jests themselves, however, often harness the legacy of agonistic wit to celebrate a form of civility in which conflict is transmuted into a contest of wit, evoking the shared pleasure of competitive play.

The term “wit” underwent a remarkable shift in meaning during the early-modern period. Originally used to denote intellectual ability, it also referred to the inward faculties of perception: imagination, cogitation or instinct, fantasy, memory, and common sense. Labelled “the five wits”, these were often collapsed into the notion of the imagination. In addition, “wit” increasingly signified linguistic adeptness and the aptitude to use words in a sparkling and amusing way. In this sense, “wit” reflects the Aristotelian social virtue of eutrapelia (“wittiness”). In Love's Labour's Lost Shakespeare explores various aspects of the relationship between wit and ethics, an issue closely bound up with the vexed early modern opposition between surface brilliance and intrinsic virtue. The protagonists of the play are consumed with the desire to display their cleverness and linguistic virtuosity in witty skirmishes with each other. The hunger for enhanced prestige that drives them is intertwined with an antagonistic impulse that finds its articulation in unrestrained baiting of others. The play, however, exposes the superficiality and self-regard at the heart of their demonstrations of wit. Instead, the play suggests, wit could be used to facilitate social intercourse and foster communal bonds through shared laughter.

Opposing conceptions of specific emotions are often in circulation at the same moment in time. This is particularly true of a period of monumental upheaval, as was the case in the early modern era. This essay looks at the contradictory notions of pride that traversed the early modern age and the way Shakespeare explores various facets of this emotion in his late tragedy, Coriolanus. On the one hand, the classical ideal of the ‘magnanimous man’ became an enduring pillar of early modern aristocratic ideology, based as it was on the cult of honour. In Christian belief, on the other hand, pride was regarded as the most heinous of the seven deadly sins. Both strands of thought identified a sense of innate superiority and self-sufficiency as the bedrock of pride. In Coriolanus Shakespeare creates a protagonist who is regarded by others as the epitome of pride, and who sees himself as independent of all human bonds. What the play reveals, however, is that even an emotion that is thought to be largely self-determined is inextricably social. The ideal of autonomy on which pride is premised is revealed as a myth.

The Victorian traveller Sir Richard Burton (1821–90) became famous for his sensational narrative of a journey to Mecca in disguise in 1853, published in 1855–56. Less well-known is Burton's account of his travels in Sindh, in present-day Pakistan, from 1844 to 1849. Before embarking on his career as one of the leading explorers and adventurers in the nineteenth century, Burton was stationed in Gujarat as an officer in the Indian Army. It was here that his voracious appetite for Oriental languages and Oriental knowledge was whetted. Burton was transferred from Gujarat to the Indian Survey in Sindh, where he came to the attention of Sir Charles Napier (1809–54), who had conquered the province of Sindh in 1843. Napier required surveillance reports about the morale among the population. It was during the five years he spent in Sindh that Burton first tried his hand at impersonating natives, working as an undercover agent in disguise.

Burton's book Scinde; or, The Unhappy Valley was published in two volumes by Richard Bentley in 1851. As was customary in nineteenthcentury travel writing, it appeared together with a more ethnographic account, Sindh and The Races that Inhabit the Valley of the Indus; with Notices of the Topography and History of the Province, published by William H Allen & Co.