What do Shakespeare’s tragedies and the book of Proverbs have in common? Timothy Hampton says they can teach us about joy.
If you’ve ever taken an English class before, you might have noticed that a lot of classic literature creates drama and interest by being really depressing. However, just because a lot of literature focuses on sadness doesn’t mean that happiness is boring, and we can learn a lot about our emotional experience by examining how happiness is depicted in literature. In his colloquium address on January 16, 2025, titled “Make a Cheerful Noise: Joy and the Literature of Modest Passions,” Timothy Hampton (professor of French and comparative literature at University of California, Berkeley) shared his recent literary investigation into depictions of cheer and joy in Early Modern literature, examining what the two separate but interlinked feelings can tell us about our interactions with emotion.
Hampton started by explaining the difference between the two: Cheer is an externally oriented emotion, while joy is internally oriented. “Joy has a transcendent, conclusive, and even metaphysical dimension, while cheerfulness is much more limited,” Hampton said.
To illustrate, Hampton pulled examples from Shakespeare plays and the King James Version of the Bible. In plays like Hamlet, Macbeth, and Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare uses the words cheer and joy in close proximity to each other (and almost always right before a devastating tragedy). In the King James Bible, Proverbs states that “a merry heart maketh a cheerful countenance,” but merry, according to Hampton, can be better translated as joy. Hampton said, “To be without cheer is to be isolated, alone.” He explained that cheer is a carrier emotion that allows us to express our joy to others without overwhelming them. “Joy passes through the interior self, through cheerful thoughts, and expands out into the larger world. . . . We can see that they are linked.”
As for the larger implications of Hampton’s investigation, he hopes that looking for cheer and joy in literature will bring some of the fun back into the study of the humanities. “I think the humanities have boxed themselves into a corner through an obsessive focus on critique and ideological deconstruction of every text,” he said. “Why would you read these novels if they’re just tools of ideology? We really need to think about rediscovering the ways in which art can be redemptive. . . . The humanities [are meant to] teach us joy.”
Find the Humanities Center Colloquium schedule here.