Fooling Around: The Court Jesters of Shakespeare
Fooling Around:The Court Jesters of Shakespeare CHRIS WILEY
This paper was written for Dr. Nina Dulin-Mallory’s Senior Thesis & Presentation class.
Shakespeare is considered to be many things—including many people— but one thing that Shakespeare is not considered is a fool.Yet this would not be as great an insult as it sounds. Shakespeare wrote many “fools” into his plays, most of whom were treated respectfully. A few even had major roles in his works. Distinctions must be made within the category of fools, however: clowns, who turn farce into a precise science (think “pie in the face); dunces, who turn their lack of intelligence into a medium for humor; and finally the princes of fooling, the court jesters, who turn fooling into a respectable profession.The jester is the restrained clown, the educated dunce. He has earned a place near the king or queen and has earned an equally prestigious place in the literature of Shakespeare:Touchstone in AsYou Like It, Feste in Twelfth Night, and the Fool in King Lear. Many contribute to the appearance of Shakespeare’s court jesters. Touchstone, Feste, and Lear’s Fool are products of history, results of personal influences on Shakespeare, integral parts of their plays, and characters that deserve a closer look. Shakespeare was always apparently sensitive to history, whether in his own interpretations in his history plays or his tendency to take old, established stories and make them his own. Shakespeare then must have been aware of the jester in earlier incarnations.There was the comic chorus of ancient Greek plays, which commented on the foibles of human nature. Beatrice Otto, an authority on court jesters, found evidence of fourteenth-century Chinese plays that have conversations between jesters and their emperors (188). Closer to Shakespeare’s time, the medieval ages produced a great many morality plays, whose Vice characters—characters that represent the “vices” in human nature—speak and act as jesters. But the
This paper was written for Dr. Nina Dulin-Mallory’s Senior Thesis & Presentation class.
Shakespeare is considered to be many things—including many people— but one thing that Shakespeare is not considered is a fool.Yet this would not be as great an insult as it sounds. Shakespeare wrote many “fools” into his plays, most of whom were treated respectfully. A few even had major roles in his works. Distinctions must be made within the category of fools, however: clowns, who turn farce into a precise science (think “pie in the face); dunces, who turn their lack of intelligence into a medium for humor; and finally the princes of fooling, the court jesters, who turn fooling into a respectable profession.The jester is the restrained clown, the educated dunce. He has earned a place near the king or queen and has earned an equally prestigious place in the literature of Shakespeare:Touchstone in AsYou Like It, Feste in Twelfth Night, and the Fool in King Lear. Many contribute to the appearance of Shakespeare’s court jesters. Touchstone, Feste, and Lear’s Fool are products of history, results of personal influences on Shakespeare, integral parts of their plays, and characters that deserve a closer look. Shakespeare was always apparently sensitive to history, whether in his own interpretations in his history plays or his tendency to take old, established stories and make them his own. Shakespeare then must have been aware of the jester in earlier incarnations.There was the comic chorus of ancient Greek plays, which commented on the foibles of human nature. Beatrice Otto, an authority on court jesters, found evidence of fourteenth-century Chinese plays that have conversations between jesters and their emperors (188). Closer to Shakespeare’s time, the medieval ages produced a great many morality plays, whose Vice characters—characters that represent the “vices” in human nature—speak and act as jesters. But the
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