Wit & Attitude Quote by William Shakespeare

Leave it to Shakespeare to smuggle a social critique inside what sounds like a throwaway preference for cheap laughs. The line pits two kinds of authority against each other: the licensed fool, whose job is to puncture pretension, and “experience,” that solemn credential people brag about as if it were automatically ennobling. The speaker doesn’t just choose merriment over melancholy; he mocks the cultural assumption that wisdom must arrive wearing a bruised face.

The phrase “and to travel for it too” is the sly kicker. Experience isn’t merely painful - it’s expensive, time-consuming, and performative. You can hear the Renaissance travel-industrial complex humming in the background: the grand tour, the cultivated cosmopolitan, the man who returns with stories and a slightly superior tone. Shakespeare’s jab suggests that a lot of “worldliness” is just sadness dressed up as sophistication, purchased at great effort, then displayed like a souvenir.

Subtextually, the line defends comedy as something more than escapism. A fool “makes me merry” not because he’s frivolous, but because his foolishness is engineered: permission to say what others can’t, to expose the vanity of those who fetishize hard-won lessons. Shakespeare repeatedly uses clowns and jesters as truth-delivery systems precisely because courts and polite society punish direct speech. So the intent here isn’t anti-knowledge; it’s anti-pose. If experience only teaches you to brood - and you had to cross oceans to learn it - maybe the joke is on you.