Shakespeare's Clowns and Fools | Roberta Mullini (essay date 1985)
Roberta Mullini (essay date 1985)
SOURCE: "Playing the Fool: The Pragmatic Status of Shakespeare's Clowns," in New Theatre Quarterly, Vol. 1, No. 1, February, 1985, pp. 98-104.
[In the following essay, Mullini investigates Shakespeare's use of fools to disrupt hierarchical order and the conventions of language.]
The title of this paper suggests most of the dramatic and metadramatic features of the fool character. In the fictitious world the fool plays on various levels: the fool-actor reproduces on the stage his acting role, carrying into the dramatic world his heritage of social satire. At the same time he mirrors the historical figure of the court-fool from which he draws his line of behaviour: a player, a specialized one, heir to the ancient mimus and the medieval histrio, whose person is strictly linked to the world of dramatic illusion, plays himself in an illusory scene, creating a breach in the illusion itself. That...
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