[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 scene being taken from the court, the actor-fool need not look very far either for a character to imitate—the court-fool—or for clues from both narrative and dramatic sources and historical accounts as to how he should be performed. There is, moreover, a religious and philosophical background which traces its origin back to the biblical topoi and to Erasmus' Praise of Folly.

The Shakespearian fool stands at a crossroads where all these elements come together, a point where the dramatic traditions of the Tudor Vice and the folkdrama fool are renewed and where European culture shows at its best the mixture of medieval and humanist concepts of folly. 'This fellow is wise enough to play the fool', says Viola after Feste's exit in Twelfth Night (III, i). She is also saying that Robert Armin is a good enough actor to impersonate a court-fool, having all the faculties necessary to reproduce the nimble and saucy jester—and in making this metadramatic comment, she is also underlining Feste's qua-character ability to unmask the wise men's folly.¹

The Typology of Historical Fools

Juri Lotman's typology of culture draws a line between symbolic and syntagmatic models of society—the former, medieval society, being characterized by a strong sense of hierarchy according to which individuals are worthy only so far and so long as they occupy a position in the hierarchical scale; the latter, modern society, marked by greater consideration for the biological person whose social existence is no longer linked to hierarchical status.² Starting from this division, which of course has no pretension to being chronologically precise, we can try to define the position and the stature of the court-fool.

The fool arrives at the court when the king wants to be amused, or wants to divert the 'evil eye' from his sacred person—fools being chosen from the wretches of society already struck by some infirmity. The fool is thus called from the outer world into the inner world, from the land of darkness into the light, from a chaotic reality into the order. A person is asked to play a role: that of the king's jester. Those who come from the mobile world outside, from the popular culture of the anti-model, are asked to live in an immobile world, that of the model and of the static hierarchy.³

However, once inside the high space of the court, the fool's chaotic significance is subjected to the influence of the power of symbolic society: his freedom is a sign of the power which calls him to life; his liberty finds expression through and is limited by the licence given by authority. If this licence is withdrawn, the court-fool is no longer himself and has to go back to the world from which he came. He neither belongs to the symbolic model, nor has any place in the hierarchy: he is accepted by this same hierarchy because the king wants a sort of speaking and tumbling toy, and a comic double of his royal person. The bauble and the coxcomb are comic copies of the sceptre and the crown.

So the court-fool is at the same time at the top and the bottom of the social scale, yet cannot be considered part of it: when his licence is revoked, the fool is sent back to the world of prostitutes and petty crime, back to the roads and the market-place. It is not difficult to see Pompey in Measure for Measure and Autolycus in The Winter's Tale as such displaced fools.

It is almost impossible, then, to separate fools natural from fools artificial. Robert Armin himself writes that Will Sommers was 'the Kings naturall lester',⁴ but the episodes he narrates of Sommer's life reveal him as an artificial fool rather than a natural one. In practice many people put on the mask of folly in order to earn their living at court, thus creating a first level of simulation. And it is at this point that other cultural crosscurrents meet in the figure of the court-fool, the tradition of carnival buffoons and of marketplace players being grafted onto the insane children of nature (or onto those who feigned a degree of lunacy).

The clerical condemnation of histriones and the exclusion of the insane from the Christian community combined to give definition to a figure who lived outside society, far from any norm, blamed and feared both because of his behaviour and possible connection with supernatural (and infranatural) powers. All this is summed up in the typical costume of court-fools—the 'disorder' of the motley colours; the bauble as the sceptre of a nowhere bordering on an everywhere, and as a reminder of a disordered sexuality (the sin of lechery); the pig's bladder as the icon of a foolish mind, and simultaneously of the sin of gluttony; the coxcomb or the cap with ass's ears as the parodic crown of the king of the feast, and, together, as a link to two animals recorded in the Gospel as being near Christ at the time respectively of his death and birth.⁵

The humanistic view of the fool—that of Erasmus' Praise of Folly rather than Brant's Narrenschiff— evaluates the figure as the mouthpiece of truth. Fools, says Erasmus,

can provide the very thing a Prince is looking for, jokes, laughter, merriment and fun. And, let me tell you, fools have a gift which is not to be despised. They 're the only ones who speak frankly and tell the truth, and what is more, passionately the truth. . . . The fact is kings do dislike the truth, but the outcome of this is extraordinary for any fools. They can speak truth and even open insults and be heard with positive pleasure: indeed, the words which would cost a wise man his life are surprisingly enjoyable when uttered by a clown.⁶

But it must be emphasized that hierarchical society permits the fool's truth precisely because it is told by someone who this same 'wise' society considers to be a fool. The truth of the fool's discourse cannot be utilized to change the situation: it belongs to the time-off period of games and the sender of the message is licensed only so long as his satirical comments do not intrude into the sphere of action.⁷ The fool's power of judgment is there like a toy to be enjoyed, but the fool's self-awareness cannot be transferred to the society which gives him the licence. Fools laugh and make men laugh, but their strength is limited by their being considered as playthings rather than as living individuals.

Games have their own rules which do not affect the level of reality. When the game is over, the players resume their daily activities: the fool, however, who constantly signifies play, is not allowed a proper time for serious activity. He is allowed no activity at all outside the game, unless he steps out of it. But in this event the fool turns into a man, and is therefore useless to the court games. While playing the game, the fool enjoys his particular licence to address anybody, anywhere. His word is tolerated as a warped comment on reality. And it is exactly within the boundaries of his own licence—nearly always on the border-line of being whipped—that the fool has to make a profit from his discourse.

Shakespeare's Fools

Writing about the development of stage characters in French soties and moralités, Michel Foucault says that

The denunciation of madness [la folie] becomes the general form of criticism. In farces and soties, the character of the Madman, the Fool, or the Simpleton assumes more and more importance. . . . He stands centre stage as the guardian of truth. . . . If folly leads each man into a blindness where he is lost, the madman, on the contrary, reminds each man of his truth; in a comedy where each man deceives the other and dupes himself, the madman is comedy to the second degree: the deception of deception; he utters, in his simpleton's language which makes no show of reason, the words of reason that release, in the comic, the comedy.⁸

Shakespeare's fools epitomize this tradition of European drama and prolong it. But the playwright is also (and mainly) drawing upon a dramatic convention already rich in Tudor and early Elizabethan theatre, that of the Vice. Nevertheless he invents his fools, because what is left in them of earlier medieval types is linked to the humanist and Renaissance views of folly, so that the convention is renewed by Shakespeare, who severs the two main aspects of the Vice (as sovereign of words and rhetoric on one side and as the archintriguer of the plot on the other), dismissing his villainy and retaining only his role as jester. Shakespeare's fools are denied the ability to further the action, and do not take part in the events that advance the plot.

In The Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Merchant of Venice, As You Like It, Twelfth Night, All's Well that Ends Well, and King Lear there are characters whose status is similar to that of the historical court-fool. Fools act as messengers—often failing in their tasks without, however, seriously damaging the proairetic chain of events.

Speed, in The Two Gentlemen of Verona, is sent away by Proteus because he has not been able to report Julia's answer to his master's letter:

Go, go, be gone, to save your ship from wrack,
Which cannot perish having thee aboard,
Being destin 'd to a drier death on shore.
I must go send some better messenger:
I fear my Julia would not deign my lines
Receiving them from such a worthless post.

In As You Like It, after their decision to flee from the court, Celia and Rosalind observe that Touchstone, the 'clownish fool', would 'be a comfort to our travel' (I, iii, 127). The fool's playful function in the dramatic world is stressed (he is not considered to be useful) through the importance of his presence in relieving the burden of the play ('our journey') with his comic and witty character.

Feste is declared unreliable when reading Malvolio's letter in Twelfth Night (V, i, 292-6), and Olivia orders Fabian to perform the task. The fool is thought of as disrupting the channels of communication, unable to transfer information from the written page to the lady.

In All's Well, Lavatch actually does serve as a messenger between the Countess and Helena; but his answers to Helena, who inquires about the lady's health, are so rhetorically complicated that pure information is muddled with riddles and mock-logic (II, iv). The behaviour of such fools shows that Shakespeare does not want to use his jesters simply as servants: they carry out orders if they like and how they like, disregarding the issues. And it is no wonder that Lear's Fool does not work as a messenger: he is never sent on errands, his primary task being that of helping the king out of his madness, or driving him towards self-awareness.

Touchstone gets married to Audrey, but his marriage is barely 'for two months victuall'd', as Jaques acknowledges at the end of the play (As You Like It, V, iv, 191). And Touchstone himself (III, iii, 81-5) declares in an aside that 'not being well married' would be better for him. His nuptials appear as a game, with rules which last only till the game itself is over, and his marriage acquires a clear metadramatic hint, in so far as it reflects the short life of the whole game—the play—and of all the fictitious marriages with which the comedy ends.

Feste plays the chief part in Malvolio's exorcism—or rather, two parts, his own and the exorcist's. But this episode does not affect the Viola-Orsino-Olivia plot, and, most important, the action operates as a play-within-the-play, a game whose victim is Malvolio. Feste says 'I was one, sir, in this interlude' (Twelfth Night, V, i, 371), thus confessing both his participation in and the nature of the plot against Malvolio: it was only an old game, a fiction, an interlude—its relationship to the Tudor drama all the more evident in that Feste, at the end of the exorcism, sings a song recalling his recent ancestor, 'the Old Vice' (IV, ii, 127).

There they are, the fools—ubiquitous, able to speak both as characters and as voices outside the plays through their metadramatic glosses, spokesmen of the commonsense of the audience and, at the same time, of the Utopian aspirations of the playwright. As the court-fool is a stranger in the court—an external element to which the court gives a limited licence but, paradoxically, a powerful voice—so the stage court-fool lives inside the main action ready to step out of its borders, as little involved as possible. The fool goes 'to bed at noon' when the fictional kingdom breaks down and the old hierarchy is destroyed.

But during the performance fools always work on the two dynamic levels of illusion and reality, between the stage and the audience. On the former level their word operates as a kind of litmus paper of the characters' folly, on the latter it shows and proclaims this folly in dialectical balance with the fool's wit. The fool's word, and not his action, interacts with the other characters, who judge him according to the cultural codes of Elizabethan society—or, as Duke Senior puts it, 'He uses his folly like a stalking-horse, and under the presentation of that he shoots his wit' (As You Like It, V, iv, 105-6).

The Corruption of Words

The fool's words can be qualified as a macro-speech act of challenge. By the various means of his pseudologic, the fool sets up a competition between his so-called foolish word and the 'wise' discourse of the others. The usual distinction between sweet and bitter becomes invalid, because the fool's discourse is always the eloquent weapon of the fool's challenge, through either 'sweet' behaviour or 'bitter' conversation.

Shakespeare endows his fools with extraordinary powers of speech. Following Elizabethan poetics, all his characters show specific rhetorical competence, but the fool's acute sense of the semantics and rhetoric of language enables him to play with the subtleties of the common code in order to subvert—for a magic moment—the hierarchical order of the speakers. It is in the pragmatics of the fool's discourse that Shakespeare moulds this character, whose life is the word and whose interaction effects the corruption of the others' words.

From this point of view, a character like Launcelot Gobbo in The Merchant of Venice shows a double nature, the rustic clown's and the fool's. Before serving Bassanio, he is the man of Shylock's household. His speech displays flaws such as comic malopropisms (for example in II, ii, 119-27) and he is conceived by Shylock as the prototype of most sins. He enters the stage in II, i, acting out the one-man moral show of the conflict between his conscience and the devil, like the old Vice. But once he has put on the 'livery / More guarded than his fellows" (II, ii, 147-8), he turns into a witty fool, skilful in undermining the solidity and the semantic denotation of the universe of discourse. Let's look, for an example, at the puns he constructs on Lorenzo's order, 'bid them prepare for dinner' (a):

LAUN. That is done, sir, they have all stomachs!

LOR. Goodly Lord, what a wit-snapper are you! then bid them prepare dinner!

LAUN. That is done too sir, only 'cover' is the word. (b)

LOR. Will you cover then sir?

LAUN. Not so sir neither. I know my duty.

LOR. Yet more quarrelling with occasion! Wilt thou show the whole wealth of thy wit in an instant? I pray thee understand a plain man in his plain meaning: go to thy fellows, bid them cover the table, serve in the meat, and we will come in to dinner.

LAUN. For the table sir, it shall be serv'd in,—for the meat sir, it shall be cover 'd,—for your coming in to dinner sir, why let it be as humours and conceits shall govern. (III, v, 44-58)

In his response to Lorenzo's directive (a), Launcelot shifts the meaning from what would be usual in a servant/master context to an inter pares interpretation: the relationship between the two men has already become 'democratic', so to say, instead of the one-up/one-down balance existing on the ontological level.¹⁰ The fool's answer to the other's reformulated order (b) is quite correct, but it adds also a metalinguistic comment on Lorenzo's semantic inappropriateness.

At this point the discoursive hierarchy is subverted: the fool can teach the wise man how to use language, and, furthermore, the former compels the latter to reword the directive, now split into the three original constituents which are at the basis of the present idiomatic usage. Besides this, Lorenzo cannot but pray Launcelot to 'understand a plain man in his plain meaning': the one-up character descends to the one-down position, so that he begs comprehension and puts questions. The order, then, is carried out only after this metalinguistic performance.

The discoursive hierarchy is turned upside down in a more striking example from Twelfth Night when Feste, using the medieval device of catechism (instruction and education through what we now call adjacency pairs or question-and-answer exchange) brings the lady Olivia to acknowledge herself as the fool of the house (I, v). After playing with his own discourse and highlighting his rhetorical and semantic competence (he uses syllogistic structures, antanaclasis, and activates more than one isotopy in 40-7), Feste repeats his challenging riddle which confuses 'the lady' and 'the fool' into a single character. Then he proclaims that he is not a fool, but only wears the fool's cap: in so doing he implicitly suggests that those who do not wear the coxcomb are the actual fools.

Eventually Olivia succumbs to the catechistic process, which is nothing but a mock syllogism whose praemissae are distributed between the speakers and whose conclusio 'Take away the fool' (69) coincides with the propositio 'Take away the lady' (37). Olivia is not only degraded from her one-up position to the one-down, but is also repeatedly given the title of fool, the one we are 'born with', as Lear's Fool maintains (I, iv, 147). With his rhetorical performance, Feste changes the referent of his lady's words: he succeeds in proving his lady the real fool, even if his victory is limited—as is Launcelot's—to this realm of words, so that Olivia says, a few lines later, 'There is no slander in an allowed fool' (84).

Lear's Fool is often threatened with the whip because he dares to remind the king of his folly. The Fool here, however, need not use any particular device to call Lear by the name of 'fool'. All the jester's interaction in Act I aims at pointing out Lear's foolish behaviour, while a recovery of judgement still seems possible. The king does not contest his Fool's word—although the jester is threatened—because he now understands the 'logic' and truth of his word.

The Fool is a fool, Lear is 'nothing': the king is the first to lose his place in society and therefore his ontological value, whereas he was at the hierarchical top of symbolic society. The Fool will follow him, as a true fool, but, not belonging to this order, he is free to leave this world to its decay. He loses his job in the court because medieval society is crumbling: when the king reaches the stage of definitive madness and no longer needs the Fool's mirror, the Fool can retire. And Shakespeare, in his later plays, does not use stage court-fools.

Lear's Fool can be considered as the epitome of all Shakespearian fools: he is no messenger, uses monologues and asides addressing the audience directly, speaks almost exclusively to his master, is given no possibility of intervention in the plot, but has powers of satirical and Utopian prophecy. The active power of his speech, however, here more than in other plays, proves extremely limited: words cannot govern tragic issues and the Erasmian fool is not sufficient to stop the events from destroying the hero.

Thus Shakespeare seems to acknowledge that this figure from the Middle Ages who uses a fanciful wisdom cannot act against the epistemological crisis of his age: late and post-Elizabethan times require new energies to resist the disruption of the old order. And tragic madness seems to be the only cognitive answer.

The Fool's word is endowed with special prophetic values which link the play's society to the Elizabethan audience, to our own world, and backwards to myth: 'This prophecy Merlin shall make, for I live before his time' (III, ii, 95-6). The Fool speaks in the here and now of the scenic present and so talks to Jacobean society, but he shifts this present back to a legendary past, prior even to Merlin. All the long tradition of the fool appears to be epitomized in this prophecy: the character comes from far off in the past and projects forward into an indefinite future, ready to turn up whenever the fool society needs witty chastisement.

Conclusion

All Shakespearian fools, then, are largely artificial, and as such they 'with their wits lay waite / To make themselues fools, likeing their disguyes, / To feed their owne mindes, and the gazers eyes', according to Robert Armin's definition.¹¹ They are actors on the stage of life, and doubly players in the fictional world: the awareness they possess of their condition, of their playing the fool, contrasts with the other characters' blindness, which does not allow them to accept the truth of the fool's discourse.

The fool's licence, often obscene, always pungent in throwing attention onto the dynamics between seeming and being, appears then as a conscious invention of Shakespeare's in order to stress the Utopian values of his fictional societies. The satirical power of the ancient folk-fool and of the more recent market-place player is transferred by Shakespeare into the figure of the fool in his fictitious courts, where a lucid word substitutes for the tumbling and jesting of the historical personages.

Shakespearian fools, dramatic signs of the power which allows the licence of the court-fool, operate to dismantle the conventional signs of language: they anatomize the others' langue—dividing words, splitting proverbs, commenting metalinguistically on the structure of language, often disguising their parole as a riddle. And their word is rhetorically rich, semantically ambiguous, ontologically disruptive of the order of the fictional world. Shakespeare's fools are, as Feste himself says, actually not his 'fools', but his 'corrupters of words'.

Notes

¹ I have dealt more extensively with these aspects of the fool in Corruttore di parole: il fool nel teatro di Shakespeare (Bologna: CLUEB, 1983).

² Cf. J. Lotman, 'Problema znaka i znakovoj sistemy i tipologija russkoj kul'tury XI-XIX vekov', in Stat'i po tipologii kul'tury, I (Tartu, 1970).

³ Cf. M. Corti, 'Modelli e antimodelli nella cultura medievale', Strumenti critici, 35 (1978).

⁴ Cf. R. Armin, Foole upon Foole, in The Collected Works, with introductions by J. P. Feather (New York; London: Johnson Reprint Corporation, 1972), E2-1.

⁵ For a more detailed study of both court-and stagefools, cf. E. Welsford, The Fool: His Social and Literary History (London: Faber, 1935); and W. Willeford, The Fool and His Sceptre: a Study in Clowns and Jesters and their Audience (London: Arnold, 1977). Among the many articles on the subject, see particularly G. L. Evans, 'Shakespeare's Fools: the Nature and the Substance of Drama', in D. Palmer and M. Bradbury, eds., Shakespearian Comedy (London: Arnold, 1972), for its specific stress on the actor/character and stage/audience relationships.

⁶ Erasmus, Praise of Folly, trans. Betty Radice, Chapter XXXVI (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971).

⁷ Here I make use of the concepts of 'time-on' and 'time-off activities as introduced by E. Goffman, in Interaction Ritual (Chicago: Aldine Press, 1967).

⁸Madness and Civilization: a History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (London: Tavistock Publications, 1977), abridged translation, pp. 30-31.

⁹ This quotation and the following are taken from the Arden Editions of Shakespeare's plays.

¹⁰ P. Watzlawick, J. H. Beavin, and D. D. Jackson, in Pragmatics of Human Communication (New York: Norton, 1967), underline the relationship between the speaker's social and/or contextual status and his actual discourse.

¹¹ Armin, op. cit., B2-2.