Shakespeare's Clowns and Fools | Meredith Anne Skura (essay date 1993)
Meredith Anne Skura (essay date 1993)
SOURCE: "Shakespeare's Clowns and Fools," in Shakespeare Set Free: Teaching Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth and A Midsummer Night's Dream, edited by Peggy O'Brien, Washington Square Press, 1993, pp. 19-24.
[Below, Skura surveys Shakespeare's use of clowns in his plays, and their popularity with both Elizabethan and modern audiences.]
For a long while Shakespeare's clowns were an embarrassment to everybody, and they were censored from productions. Lear's fool, for example, was left out of every one of the many eighteenth-century performances of King Lear. Producers in the nineteenth century kept Macbeth's porter in the play, but they cut his lines to "Knock, knock, knock." Twentieth-century productions have at times imposed their own censorship on Shakespeare, invoking aesthetic if not moral justifications. The clowns in Romeo and Juliet and Othello are occasionally removed from modern...
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