Shakespeare's Jest Book (original) (raw)

The title of Shakespeare's Jest Book has been given to two quite different early Tudor period collections of humorous anecdotes, published within a few years of each other. The first was The Hundred Merry Tales, the only surviving complete edition of which was published in 1526. The other, published about 1530, was titled Merry Tales and Quick Answers and originally contained 113 stories. An augmented edition of 1564 contained 140.