M.A.

THESIS

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE : THE FOOLS AND FOLLY

IN "AS YOU LIKE IT", THE FIRST PART OF "HENRY
THE FOURTH", "TWELFTH NIGHT" AND "KING LEAR"
 Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina
Departamento de Língua e Literatura Estrangeiras

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE : THE FOOLS AND FOLLY IN

"AS YOU LIKE IT", THE FIRST PART OF "HENRY THE
FOURTH", "TWELFTH NIGHT" AND "KING LEAR"

Tese submetida à Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina

para a Obtenção do Grau de Mestre em Letras

Marianne Elisabeth Flos

Florianópolis
Santa Catarina, Brasil
Outubro de 1980
 Esta tese foi julgada adequada para â obtenção do grau de
— Mestre em Letras—
opção Inglês e Literatura Correspondente e aprovada em sua
forma final pelo programa de Põs-Graduação em Letras da
Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina.

ir
John B. Derrick, Ph.D
Orientador

Hilário Inácio Bohn, Ph.D

Coordenador de Põs-Graduação
em Inglês e Literatura Cor­
respondente

Apresentada à banca examinadora composta pelos professores

/$■
John B. Derrick

/^(jÎArJ — -
^ Paul jánícins
Ä memoria de Max Heinrich Ludwig
Ernst Flos, meu pai, de quem me
proveniente o gosto pelas Letras
e à Erica Maria Elisabeth, fruto
do meu ventre.
 -AGRADECIMENTOS

"-A Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, de modo

®wl-'«cial ao Professor Hilário Inácio Bohn, Coordenador
^ Pós-Graduação em Inglês e Literatura correspondente;
"-At) Professor e orientador John E. Dcrrick, por seu
e incentivo, e, sem o qual, esta tese jamais estaria
^«nliada. Igualmente, por sua inteira disponibilidade nas
raVl.sões desta, meu perene reconhecimento;
exma. sra, Elza Lemos, por seu carinho;
■"■An exmas. sras. Fridâ Hoeller e Irma Riggenbah, por
■^"Im vigor moral que me legaram;
exmo. Barão Hans von Wangenheim, por sua perserverança
""Aos exmos. drs. Alfredo Martins, Luizemir Wolney Car-
Vr'll)o Lago, Fransico da Costa Batista Neto e Denise Tubino,
P'*' acreditarem em mim;
- A - ’ 1
exmo. Sr. Mario Ralph Correa todo meu reconhecimento

AGRADECIMENTO ESPECIAL:

Aos exmos. Professores Heinrich, Clélia Nascimento,

Schultze

A exma. srta. Eva Ruth Silberger

ABSTRACT

This thesis deals with Shakespeare's treatment of the

Pool and Folly in 1 Henry IV, As You Like It, Twelfth
Night and King Lear.
It aims to identify the "natural" and the "intellectual"
components in the characters of the fools, and to analyse
the function of these components in the plays..
Sir John Falstaff in 1 Henry IV is an instance of a
"natural" fool, while the characters of the other plays under
discussion (Touchstone in As You Like It, Feste. in Twelfth
Night and Lear's Fool In King Lear 'are examples of the
"intellectual" (and Hence melancholy) types.
Drawing on the authority of Enid Welsford and C.L.Barber
especially, we argue that all these figures of entertainment
(whether they appear in a play of the historical, comic or
tragic genre) pose a serious criticism of society according
to the models of Erasmus1 In Praise of Folly. The mad fool,
inhabiting a still madder society, actually serves as a
touchstone whereby that society may discover the way
back to a natural harmony that it has abused. Despite
this potentially redemptive function as social "exorcist"
however, we may conclude that the fool himself is an outsider
in the world of the play whose end, if not actually tragic,
is most of the time, sad.
RESUMO

Esta tese versa sobre algüém empregado, durante a

Idade Média, como Palhaço que tinha por obrigação, enter-
ter as pessoas e Algo que nos pareça ridículo.
Esta dissertação visa identificar os componentes
"naturais" e "intelectuais" nos caráteres destes, bobos, e
analizar a função destes componentes nas obras.
"Sir" John Falstaff em 1 Henry IV é um examplo de
bobo "natural", enquanto as personagens das outras peças
discutidas (Touchstone em As You Like It, Feste em Twelfth
Night e Lear's Fool em. King Lear) constituem examplos dos
tipos "intelectuais" (e, por isso, melancólicos).
Baseados em Enid Welsford e C.L. Barber, especial­
mente, argumentamos que todas estas figuras de entertimento
(quer apareçam em obras do genero histórico, cómico ou
trágico) impoem severas críticas da sociedade de acordo com
os modelos da obra de Eramus In Praise of Folly.
0 maluco ou louco , convivendo numa sociedade ainda
mais insana,' serve realmente como norma pela qual aquela
sociedade poderá descobrir o caminho para uma harmonia
natural, que tem sido até então desrespeitada. Apesar desta
função altamente redentadora como "exorcista" social,
podemos concluir que o bobo ê em alheio as mundo das peças
e que cujo final, se não trágico realmente, ê na maioria
das vezes triste.
 Contents

Chapter One: Introduction:

1.1. Statement of Problem (the Fool and Folly) 01
1.2. Review of Previous Criticism 04
1.3. Statement of Purpose 07

Chapter Two: (Background) The Conventions of the Fool

and Folly : .
2.1. General idea of comedy linked to catharsis,
Aristotle and others 13
2.2. Folly, according to Welsford and C.L.Barber . 26
2.3. Carnival traditions, Lord of Misrule according
to the authors mentioned above 'and concerning
the "chain of being" idea by Tilyard 34

Chapter Three: The First Part of Henry the Fourth 50

Chapter Four: As You Like It 66

Chapter Five: Twelfth Night .78

Chapter Six: King Lear 103

Conclusion 115

Bibliography 120
 01

CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTORY

Statement of Problem:

As a point of departure, our dissertation takes

Theseus' statement in A Midsummer Night's Dream: "The

lunatic, the lover and the poet/ Are of imagination all

compact."'*' That is to say the poet (and presumably Shakes­

peare is including himself here) is often held to be mad

by his contemporaries - but conversely, thos6 who appear

to be mad, may also (like the poet) be inspired truth-

tellers. In this category, we find the fool, the object

of our study.

We will examine 1 Henry IV, As You Like It, Twelfth

Night and King Lear with special attention to the theme

which all of them have in common: the fool and his folly.

It is the fool’s function, socially and in the drama,

"to juggle with words until everything, often including the

truth, is upside down and inside out."

2 Yet those schol-ars

of the subject who derive from the Cambridge School of

Classical Anthropology might be called Laingian in the

sense that they do not see the fool's madness as a real .

disease, but a form of social criticism. According to

Enid Welsford, the fool is an

all licensed critic who points out to others the

dangerous possibility of a reversal of position
between the wise man and the fool. The fool sug­
gests that there is ambiguity in the words wisdom
f * :* i .. :• 3 y
 02

and folly...Here he is hinting at thoughts

which are vitally connected with the central
theme of the tragedy.

The subject of the fool's knowledge is the folly

of Mankind, and dramatically it is the fool's role to purge

spurious wise men of the pomposity and false wisdom.

It was Deriderius Erasmus van Rotterdam, the Dutch

humanist, who in his Praise of Folly (1509) laid the

foundation for this view of the fool. Erasmus suggests

that folly evokes folly in order to raise folly: it is

on the one hand, the exorcist and, on the other, the

object exorsized. As purgative, folly is synonomous with

the instinct to play, found in children and fools, while

as a thing exorcized, it is rather a fixation, an inflex­

ibility in character.

We will entertain sevral primary questions in this

thesis and will attempt to find answers for them in our

conclusions. How is it possible for the fool to dramatically

function outside of comedy, in plays of a historical and

tragic genre (Henry IV and King Lear)? What sort of con­

trasts and similarities de we find in the operation of folly

in the four plays to be examined? What is the fundamental

difference between the natural fool whom Enid Welsford des­

cribes, and the intellectual court-fool whom we find

elsewhere? How does the fool use logical inversion and

the device of the disguise to achieve his catharic aim?

Finally, however, we must ask why (even in comedy itself)

purgation is often shown to be incomplete. The fool is

 03

often demonstrated to be a cousin to the melancholy

man and presented as a protypical Hamlet. How does this

element of despair, alienation and sarcasm enter the

character of a figure who the naive reader supposes

is merely there to make us laugh?

 04

Review of Previous Criticism

Three main schools of criticism will be discussed

here, having in mind a history play with a comic sub­
plot, two comedies and one tragedy.
The first one is the so-called 'new .critic' school.
The critic of this school accepts the piece of work
as it is, putting aside judgements based on biography
and historical background. He is much more concerned
with the play's language and it's imagery. Norman
Holland in The Shakespearean Imagination; says that
"any real appreciation of the play involves understanding
all of it, both story and poetry, more properly, story
as poetry." 1
For the study of King Lear, we made use of the
^psychological school' in order to isolate the psycho­
logical or psychoanalitical viewpoints concerning the
play under discussion. It was A.C.Bradley who made
this school predominant, in giving emphasis to the
'character analysis' technique. He was followed by
Freud and his psychoanalysis.* Nowadays , however, the
Laingian 'existenial phenomenonological' critics, upon
whom our dissertation turns, are also called Laingain.
These 'anthropological' critics concentrate their
works on the elements of social ritual in the drama
and, especially, on the Fool. Mrs.Enid Welsford author
of The Fool: Social and Literary History, C .L .Barbeir's
Shakespeare's Festive Comedy and Glennys McMullen's
The Fool as Entertainer and Satirist are the main figures
of this school.

The Critics

The first critic to be analyzed is Mrs.Welsford

who in her book The Fool: His Social and Literary History,
 05

(1935), draws a clear picture of the fool as a figure of the

Elizabethan drama and as a social Lord' of Misrule. According

to her, fools range from the more natural to the more intellectual,

and as the fool becomes more artificial and courtly, he also

becomes more pessimistic and critical of the society.

Desiderius Erasmus van Rotterdam who wrote In Praise of

Folly (1509), made the distinction between the foolish wiseman

(the butt or object of humor) and the wise foolish man(the fool).

An example of the former is Malvolio and of the latter,

Feste (both in the play Twelfth Night). As Mrs. Welsford says,

the fool is an 'all licensed' critic who points out to the others

the dangerous possibility of a reversal of position between

the wise man and the fool:

The fool suggests that there is ambiguity in the

words wisdom and folly...Here he is hinting at
thoughts which are vitally connected with the central
theme of tragedy. 4

It is he, the fool, who sees clearly into the nature of things

and people, reporting what he sees. Nevertheless, he is not

believed because he's a fool and people don't believe in the

words of a fool; furthermore they regard the fool's words as

jokes, not as true advice. This is the cause for him to be

'all-licensed': there is never the possibility of offence in an

innocent joke. Yet those who laugh at a fool's joke may themselves

be fools, without knowing it. There is an instance -in King Lear,

(I,IV)., when the fool has taught Lear the difference between

the bitter and the sweet fool, the King asks:

Lear: Dost thou call me a fool, boy?

Fool: All thy other titles- thou hast given away;
that thou wast born with.5

Mr. C.L.Barber, who edited his Shakespeare's Festive Comedy

 06

in 1963, brings up the terms rule.and misrule, which can be

synonomous to everyday and holiday. Rule or everyday might

suggest hard work, while misrule or holiday expresses rather

the oblivion of release from this hard work; the forgetting

of everyday restrains. The terms are used by Shakespeare

himself: Prince Hal affirms in 1 Henry IV: "If all the year

were playing holidays/ To sport would be as tedious as to work."6

Mr. C.L.Barber, as a good follower of the Cambridge

School of Classical Anthropology, draws another viewpoint

concerning Shakespeare's.festive commedies: in the chapter

entitled "Through release to clarification" he explains a

dialectical pattern he finds in the plays which traces the

cathartic restoration of the deluded character to a sense of

reality.

All these critics, and also George Santayana, Northop

Frye and Gilbert Murray, will be treated further in Chapter Two,

the background chapter.

 07

Statement of Purpose

Shakespeare's Fools, as Enid Welsford points out, can

be classified from the more 'natural' or 'carnal' to the more

'artificial' or 'intellectual'.

All manifest themselves as outsiders and observers. Yet,

in their folly and their outside criticism, they see truly into

the nature of things and serve, under the mask of foolishness,

as society's severest critics.

The characters and the plays which will be under discussion

are: Sir John Falstaff - 1 Henry IV'; Touchstone in As You Like It;
■ 'i '“ ;
Feste in Twelfth Night and Lear's Fool in The Tragedy of King Lear

This thesis aims to identify the 'natural' and 'intellectual'

components in the characters of these fools, and to analyze

the function of these components in the plays.' It will be

shown that Falstaff is an example of the 'natural' fool, while

Touchstone, Feste and Lear's Fool are examples of the 'intellectual

(and hence melancholic types).

Also we will explore the idea that at the plays' ends,

the fool's situations are unhappy. However, we note that the

fools lack the qualities of tragic complexity and full catharsis,

which belong to the tragic hero.

For Welsford, the comic fool ends tragically in the role

of the scapegoat; and H.B.Charlton, in his article "Shakespeare,

Politics and Politians"^agrees with her idea.

Touchstone, as well as Jaques, represents a certain shade

of melancholy. Although having been married to Audrey, he shows

his independence and freedom from the comic marriage-resolutions.

 08

Jaques: But for the seventh course: how did

you find the quarrel on the seventh
. course? ",
Touchstone: Upon a lie seven times removed: -
, bear your body njpre seeming, Audrey: ;
■: - as thus, sir.

Since the beginning of the play, Sir John Falstaff is

used by Prince Hal as a means to achieve his own popularity as

the future king is never a true Fool in the sense he does not

'purge' Hal of his own cold pride.

Falstaff: Well, God give thee the spirit of per- ,

suation and him the ears of profiting/ that what
thou speakest, may move, and what he hears, he
may be believed, and that the true prince may
(for revocarion1s sake), prove a false thief,
for the poor abuses of the timQ want countenance:’
farewell, you shall see me .in Eastcheap.

Prince: Farewell the late spring, farewell All-

hallown summer. 9

Furthermore, in 2 Henry IV Falstaff is sent to the fleet

as an actual scapegoat, as Mrs. Welsford observes. Indeed he

looks sacrificial when sent away. Though as the spirit of comedy

and freedom, he is 'resurrected' in the first part of the play,

in the second, he accepts passively his fate, meeting his melan­

cholic end.
Feste, in Twelfth Night, might be called ^ .parasite in

Welsfordian nomenclature, because he asks for money. He is

aware of his humiliated position as well as of his superiority,

and he has grown tired of the role of the fool.

Part of the function of the court fool is to be a parasite,

and it is this which causes Feste to grow bitter:

 09

A great while ago the world begun,

With hey, ho, the wind and the rain;
But that's all one, our play is done, 10
And we'll strive to please you every day.

The last sad verse of Feste's song in Twelfth Night might

be the voice of Shakespeare, for we see him several times

speaking as a playwright. So, the playwright himself identifies

with some of the characteristics of the fool. According to

Enid Welsford:

a) The fools are conspicuously classless, at very

least, difficult to place in the social hierarchies.
Although they may haunt the houses of the mighty
and the high, they are obviously neither pf the
upperclass nor distinctly of any other.

b) The fools are a law unto themselves; that is,

they do speak what they think, they are expected,
even incited to do so, and yet they can be punished
for it. 12

c) The fools' utterances are not simple. 13

14
d) They manifest a conspicuous withdrawl syndrome.

This withdrawl syndrome might be that of the author himself for:

a) The fool was an entertainer; so was Shakespeare .15

b) The fool, as a part of his professional function,

lived in and helped sustain a world of illusion;
so did Shakespeare.

c) The fool used the mask of folly to hide his lonely

aprehension of truth behind illusion; Shakespeare,
as a dramatist, is the greatest examplar of the way
in which the artist uses the illusion in the name
of reality. 17

The fourth fool considered in the dissertation under

discussion is Lear's Fool, who disappears in Act I, scene V:

Lear: Come, boy. •

Fool: She that's a maid now and laughs at my departure/

Shall not be a maid long, unless things be cut
shorter. 18
 10

The fool vanishes when King Lear becomes insane; when mad,

it seems that Lear is really sane and is able to see things

clearer. A possible explanation for the fool's disappearing

is that he may be considered his 'nuncle's double':

Lear: Who is it that can tell me who I am?

Fool: Lear's double. 19

In her master's thesis, Ana Maria Kessler Rocha makes some

pertinent comments on madness and .folly:

Both fool and madmen are the guardians of the truth;

the former is a kind of chorus, one who warns, criticizes
and confounds. The madman, on the other hand, can be
said to be the embodiment of the fool's words. He
reminds each man of his own truth, but not through
satirical commentaries or logic games. His mere presence
is enough, for he is a living example of man's mis­
fortunes. It is very signifigant in King Lear, that
the first manifestation of Lear's madness should come
as catches sight of Mad Tom. 20

Enid Welsford states that the fool ends tragically, as a

scapegoat. We personally, however, think that the comic 'hero'

is not tragic, since there is not a tragic recognition or true

catharsis. In a tragic catharsis, we identify with the protagonist,

feeling pity or horror; but in comedy, we do not identify with

the person purged. Instead of the feelings mentioned above, we

feel scorn, sorrow or amusement. There is no death, so there can

be no true pity or horror. The comic 'butt' is a flat character

who represents a quality to be exorcized. The tragic has been

called a 'scapegoat1, but the scapegoats of comedy are simpler

and not so sympathetic. Life, George Meredith observed, is

a tragedy to those who feel and a comedy to those who think. So,

like the 'intellectual' fool, the reader keeps at a certain

distance from the action of the comedy.

 11

Structurally, our dissertation is divided into six chapters

with a conclusion and a bibliography.

The first chapter deals with the Statement of Problem,

the Review of Previous Criticism and. , finally, with the

Statement of Purpose.

Chapter Two, a background chapter, is divided into three

major sections:

1) Comedy, as defined by Aristotle, Conford, Northorp Frye and

Gilbert Murray;

2) Folly, which is described by writeris such as Enid Welsford,

C.L.Barber. It's relationship to cosmology (described by Norman

Holland and E.M.Tilyard) will be pointed out in Chapter Six:

King Lear.

3) Carnival Traditions, especially those of the Lord of Misrule.

Here our main sources will be Enid Welsford, C.L.Barber and

George Santayana.

Chapter Three is concerned with 1 Henry IV, especially

the connection of the serious plot - the world of politics -

and the comic subplot.

The fourth chapter takes the reader to the sunny world,

where it seems there is no doomsday: As You Like It.

The fifth chapter examines a play written as Puritanism

began to cast it's shadow over the Elizabethan age.' Twelfth

Night is the last of Shakespeare's happy comedies.

The last play considered in chapter six is King Lear,

where the fool tries to perform his comic function in a tragic

universe.

In our conclusion, we will return to the questions asked in

Chapter One, and summarize the findings of the proceeding chapters.
 12

Notes to Chapter One

1) Quotation is taken from the Glasglow, Brook and Co edition

of A Midsummer Night's Dream. (V,1,84)

2) Harold Goddard The Meaning of Shakespeare, p.301

3) Cited by Edward Arnold in Shakespearean Comedy, p.77

4) Enid Welsford. The Fool: His Social and Literary History, p.256

5) Quotation is taken from the Bigelow, Smith and Co edition

of King Lear.(I,IV,163-165)

6) Quotation is taken from Penguin Shakespeare esition of The

First Part of Henry the Fourth.(1,11,32)

7) Cited by G.K.Hunter in Henry IV - Parts I and II, p.81

8) Quotation taken from the Bigelow, Smith and Co. edition of

As You Like It. (V, IV, " 3 0 - W )

9) Quotation taken from the Penguin Shakespeare esition of

The First Part of Henry the Fourth op.cit.I,II,31.

10)Quotation taken from the New Swan Shakespeare edition of

Twelfth Night. (V,I,385-388)

11)Ibid. cited by ibid. Op.cit., p.147

12)Ibid.cited by ibid,Op.cit., p.148

13)Ibid. cited by ibid.Op.cit., ibid.

14)Ibid. cited by ibid.Op.cit., p.149

15)Ibid. cited by ibid.Op.cit., p.158

16)Ibid. cited by ibid.Op.cit., p.159

17)Ibid.Ibid. Op.cit., ibid.

18)Quotation taken from ibid. edition of Op.cit., (I,V,51)

19) Quotation taken from ibid.. edition of Op.cit. (I, IV, 42)

20)Glenys McMullen. "The Fool as Entertainer and Satirist".

Dalhousie Review, p.16
 13

CHAPTER TWO

THE BACKGROUND OF FOLLY

This chapter will be divided into three items, as follows:

First we will examine Comedy and diagnose the nature of the

sense of humor. Then, via Eric Bentley and Gilbert Murray, we

will examine the Aristotelian and Freudian ideas of catharsis

or purgation; finally, we will treat Aristotle and Conford's

viewpoint concerning comedy.

The second section of this chapter will be concerned with

FOLLY, considering the ideas of Enid Welsford, Eràsmus, C.L.

Barber, as well as Holland and Tilyard, with their notions about

the chain of being.

The third and last item of this section will be concerned

with CARNIVAL TRADITIONS and thé Lord of Misrule, a subject that

Mrs.Welsford investigates in depth.

To begin with, we may ask what would become of a person if

he didn't own this magnificent gift - the sense of humor, or .

the ability to try to laugh at melancholy moments of life or,

whenever one likes. We are invited to laugh at the absent-minded

teacher, not because of his learning, but because of his absent-

mindedness. This, of course, is not consistent with his erudition.

Kierkegaard affirms

...if a man wants to set up an innkeeper and does

not succeed, it is not comic. If, on the contrary,
a girl asks to be allowed to set uj as a prostitute,
and she fails, this fact is comic.

If we laugh at this instance,-we don't do it because of incongruity

...for incongruity does not necessarily evoke a

comic response. It is able to produce emotions as well
as great laughter. 2
 14

Eric Bentley analyzes Gilbert Murray, a member of

the Cambridge School of Classical Anthropology who has

suggested the idea of catharsis is easier to apply to

comedy than to tragedy - in the sense that we, the

readers, agree to it more easily. Bentley comments:

Murray has spoken of the close similarity

between Aristotle and Freud; and, actually,
Freud carried the idea of purgation further
than any aristotelian would have dreamt of! 3

For the former, the joke is'

...an upsurge from the unconscious, a

mechanism for releasing powerful archaic
impulses, always there below the level of*
reason...4

so, for Freud, the joke is fundamentally1 catharic: a

release, not a stimulant. Furthermore,

The comic is capable of being detached from

people, if we consider the conditions for
this person to be comic. The discovery that
one has it in one's power to make someone
else comic opens the way to an undreamt of
yield of comic pleasure and is the origin
of a highly devoloped tecnique. 5

The methods used to make other people laugh

- (comic) -, (for one can make- oneself comic,
too), are: putting them in a comic situation,
mimicry, unmasking, disguise, caricature,
parody, travesty, and so on. 6

For Eric Bentley,

A joke is a purling stream most of the way,

then suddenly from one of it's pools rises
up a veritable geyser. 7

The same critic goes on to say:

Men and women need a sense of humor for

they have inhibited many of their strong­
est wishes. 8
 15

The aim of a sense of humor is to gratify our forbidden

wishes, the repression of our id. We cannot get rid of

anxiety and guilt, but there are tricks for eluding

them, and the commonest is the sense of humor. The grat­

ification of the forbidden wish is then slipped in as a

surprise. Before our anxiety and guilt have time to go

into action, we have felt forbidden pleasure. Inhibitions

are momentarily lifted and we experience a release into

joy. Hence, the immense contribution of humor to the

survival of the species.

Hence, also a paradox, through the 'funny

we tap infantile sources of pleasure, we
become infants again finding the intensest
satisfaction in the smallestof things. Humor
has much to do with;.the distance between
the infancy returned and the point from
which the return journey is undertaken. 9

As Mr.Bentley points out as well,

Children develop a sense of humor as they

move away from primal innocence. They have
to hear a few songs of experience. Innocence
is whole and single, while with experience
c: comes ddivision and duality - without which
there is no humor, no wit, no farce, no
comedy. 10

Bentley spoke of pleasure; Aristotle defines this

feeling, in Chapter XXI of Book I of RHETORICS,

...as a movement by which the soul as a

whole is consciously brought into it's
normal state.of being. 11

Mr.Scott observes in his article "The Bias of Comedy":

Tragedy arouses emotions in order to be

purged: tragic pleasure, in other words,
is an affair of Katarsis of the tragic
emotions: it is something essentially
therapeutic. 12
 16

Scott also agrees that Aristotle

..♦also conceived the ultimate effect of

comedy to involve a special sort of pleasure,
a pleasure partaking of a comic catharsis. 13

And in Aristotle's words, comedy would be:

...an organically complete imitation of an

action which is ludicrous; in language embel­
lished with each kind of artistic ornament,
the several kinds being found in seperate
parts of the play; in the form of action,
not of narrative; with incidents arousing
pleasure and laughter, wherewith to accomp­
lish it's Khatarsis of such emotions. 14(pgs.38-39)

Aurelio Buarque de Hollanda Ferreira in his NOVO

DICION&RIO -DA LiNGUA PORTUGUESA -defines Khatarsis:

i
I
It is the moral and purifying effect of the
classic tragedy, whose dramatic situations
of extreme intensity and violence, bring
up the spectator's feelings of pity and
horror, giving them oblivion or purgation
of these feelings. 15

Aristotle considered comedy "a primal rite, a rite

transformed to art;"^on the other hand, Conford saw

17
xt as "a scene of sacrifice and a feast." In his Poetics,

the former states that both, tragedy and comedy, are

improvisations; the one rising from Dithyramb, the other

from the phallic songs. It?Vs clear that Aristotle traces

the origins of drama to a kind of fertility rite - Dionysiac

or phallic - c':-. the primitive sacrifice and feast, mentioned

by Conford. Comedy has strong elements from ritual present;

rituals which involve fertility, as mentioned above; so

it can be stated that the ritual origins of drama are

based upon the fertility cult; furthermore, they are

associated with spring and summer rites, which are rights

 17

of growth and nothing else than elements of rebirth.

Thus, in contrast to the tragic rites of win ter,

comedy constitutes a spring festival. As the great phil­

osopher affirmed, the typical form of the archaic fertil­

ity ceremony, (death or sacrifice of the hero-god, the

rebirth of a new one and the purging of evil by driving

out a scapegoat), requires a contest between the old

and the new heroes, a feast and a marriage to celebrate

the initiation or ressurection with the killed god or

hero, and a final triumphal procession with thé songs,

of joy. Behind the marriage ceremonial probably lies

the myth of the union between earth-mother and heaven-

father.

As Northrop Frye points out,"Dramatic comedy has

been remarkably tenacious of it'Cs structural principles

and character types." 18 The plot struture of Greek New

Comedy, transmitted by Plautus and Terence, has become,

the basis for most comedy, especially in its more highly

conventionalized forms up to our days. What normally

happens is that a young man (Demetrius, in A Midsummer

Night's Dream) wants a girl (Hermia) ; that his desire

is frustrated by some opposition, mostly paternal (Egeus)

yet, near the end of the play, the hero gets his aim

(Demetrius marries Hermia and Lysander, Helena). In this

simple pattern, the elements, that also seem simple,

are complex, indeed. Firstly the movement of comedy is

 18

that from one society to another. At the beginning, the

obstruction figure seems to be the "godfather" of the

society. Frye states when the point of resolution exists

in the action, there is the "Cognition".

Thus, the movement from a society

controlled by ritual bondage, arbitrary
law and the older characters to a society
controlled by youth and pragmatic freedom
is a movement from illusion to reality. 19

Illusion is whatever is fixed or definable, and reality

is best understood as it's negation: whatever reality

is, it's not fixed. Hence the importance of th6 theme

of creating and dispelling illusion in comedy: "illusions

which are caused by disguise, obsession, hypocricy or

unknown parentage.

The first stage of a play embodies a repressive

community; the second a purgatorial process, through

which the characters become better people; and the third

one represents the new society which is symbolized by

a festive ritual that usually happens at the end of the

play. Weddings are common rites which resolve comic com- •_

plications. In As You Like It there are four of them:

that of Oliver and Celia's, Orlando and Rosalind's,

Phebe and SilviusJ Touchstone and Audrey's . In Twelfth

Night there are Orsino and Viola's, Sebastian and Olivia's

marriages. In the tragedy of Lear the marriages come,

by contrast at the beginning of the play and progressively

disslolve. The last words here are divorce and death.

 19

Mr.Frye says,

There are two ways of developing the

form of comedy: one is to throw the
main emphasis on the blocking figures,
as the comedy of manners does it; the
other is ro throw it forwards on the
scenes of discovery and reconcilliation.
Comedy regularly illustrates a victory of ^
arbitrary plot over consistency of character.

The structure of a comedy requires a ocmic resol­

ution and a consistent comic mood. Concerning characters,

he lists three types of them: a) the alazons or imposters

(Egeus in A Midsummer Night's Dream); b) the eirons or

self-deprecaters (Bottom, who falls in love with the ’

Fairy Queen, Titania) ; c) the buffons professional fools,

clowns, pages, singers and incidental characters with

forgein accents. Instances of this last type are: Sir

John Falstaff in 1 King Henry the Fourth, and Feste in

Twelfth Night, who are also parasites; moreover, there

are Lear's Fool in King Lear and Touchstone in As You

Like It.

Aristotle points out a fourth type of comic

character: the agroikos or churlish, rustic. "The

contest of eiron and alazon," says he, "forms the basis

of comic action, while the buffoon and the churl

22
polarize the comic mood." The humorous blocking

figures belong to the alazon group. Such is the senex

iratus who seems closely related to some of the demoniac

characters of romance.
 20

A type of eiron figure, according to Frye's

classification is the spiritual being such as Ariel

in The Tempest. These beings are the spirits of comedy

as well as vices. In Roman comedies they were called

23
"tricky slaves" . In Shakespeare, the vice is rarely

the actual architect of the action. For example, Ariel

acts under the orders of Oberon, the king of the fairies.

In the third phase of comedy Frye explains "the

24
senex iratus gives into the young man's desires." Pericles

contains an example of a Shakespearian father-daughter

relationship "where it forms the demoniac antithesis of

25
the hero's union with his wife and daughter at the end"

In the fourth phase of comedy, the world

of experience is replaced by that of innocene. This

occurs when the old and closed society is transformed

through a purgatorial process, a return to nature and

a new, open and more tolerant form of human society.

The "green world" (an island, a forest) where the great

changes in the characters occur, is associated with

instinct and dream, the unconscious as illustrated by

the Forest of Arden in As You Like It.

In the fifth phase of the comedy,

the world is still more romantic, less

festive, less utopian and more Arcadian,
and the comic ending'is less a matter of
the way the plot turns out than of perspec­
tive of the audience. 26

These five phases of comedy, Frye explains,

might be considered as a sequence of stages in the

life of a redeemed society. The reader finds an up-side-

 21

down society; the best way for the characters, either

old or young, is to re-establish peace through a purg­

atorial process, which in the plays is represented by

the~ green world, or by the sea, which has the same sym­

bolic effect. As was already pointed out, the forest and

the sea are emblematic of man's instincts, in fact. In

short, in these five phases, the comedy society has run

from infancy to death; psychologically, this transition

could mean the return to the mother's womb, or more

accurately put, the being in the mother's womb put into

the world.

In Northrop Frye's words, c.omedy is 'an

escape not from truth, but from despair: a narrow

27
escape into faith." it is a belief in a universal

delight. In tragedy, every moment is eternit-y; in

comedy, eternity is a moment. In tragedy we feel pain;

in comedy, pain is a fool, suffered gladly. If the comic

action is a "sacrifice and a feast"

28 , as Conford

suggests, then it also suggests the unruliness of the

flesh and its vitality. The comic ritual is presided

over by a Lord of Misrule. In Henry the Fourth, Part I,

this is Falstaff; in As You Like It, Touchstone; in

Twelfth Night, Feste, and in King Lear, Lear's Fool.

As Miss Rocha states in her thesis, citing

Foucault,"by the time Shakespeare started his work,

29
Folly was an organize institution throughout Europe."
 22

England, mainly Elizabethan England seems to have entered

the cult of Folly more than any other European country.

In the various holidays and festivals then celebrated

there were dances, plays, mock-ceremonies and other

pastimes where the L6rd of Misrule led his court

through the streets of town. Of course, the Fool occupied

an important role in these festivals. This function had

been born in the early theatrical clowning of the Middle

Ages where the clown stood as one among the vices.

In the Renaissance, however, he comes to fore: "Folly

now leads the joyous throng of all human weaknesses."^

All this "saturnalian pattern"*, as C.L.Barber

calls ot, formed the source of Shakespeare's Festive

comedies. Not only the clown of the comedies, but also

the court-fool of the romances and tragedies use

their folly for witty commentaries, expressed by a

powerful weapon - their tounge..

Leszek Kolakowsky remarks:

The clown is he who, although moving

on high society,- is not part of it,
and tells unpleasant things to every­
body in it; he who desputes everything
regarded as evident. He'd not be able
to do this, if he were part of that
society himself. At the same time he
must move in good society in order
to know its sacred cows and occasionally
tell unpleasant things, already pointed
out. 31 I
In such an enviorment, the Fool is not a mere participant

in the town's festivities, nevertheless, "hired under

a master in whose household he is kept to amuse and

32
entertain." Generally, behind the pretence of innocence,
 23

he speaks the truth, and in some cases, gives real advice

to the foolish.

Desiderius Erasmus van Rotterdam, the Dutch

humanist was the first one to express the idea that

folly expressed truth, criticism of society or moral

advice. He wrote The Praise of Folly in 1509, against

theologians and Church dignitaries. There he plays on

various meaning and relations of the words "fool",

"knave" and "wisdom",(emphasizing their ambiguity;

furthermore, it is Erasmus who invents the expressions

"wise fool" and "foolish wiseman". Jan Kott says:

A fool who is recognized for a foo'l,

who has accepted the fact that he's
only a jester in somebody's household,
ceases to be a clown. But his philos­
ophy is based on the assumption that
every man is a fool; and the greatest
fool is he who does not know he's a
fool. That's why the fool has to make
fun of others; otherwise he ceases to
be a clown. 32

Mr.Goddard in 1 The Meaning of Shakespeare,

suggests that the fool's function is to "juggle with

words until everything often including the truth is

33
upside down and inside out."

The fool, who belongs to a lower social

class has the license to criticize the ills of society,

but without offense, because he is only a fool and nobody

can take him seriously. Yet his satire is expressed with

so much wit that he is able to turn others into fools

 24

without noticing it. This is where an inversion of

meanings takes place and the roles change between the

wise fool and the foolish wiseman. Thus he is a re­

minder of the Folly present in every man, even as, in

King Lear, the king himself. McCullen. affirms:

Here we may notice the close similarity

between the fool and the madman. Speak­
ing about the crazy logic of the fool the
author states:"This logic associated as
it is with obsessive images, brings the
-fool close to the madmen. Both express
tangenital thoughts on staccato phraseO*
flashing truth through the certain juxa-
position of ideas. It's exciting for an .
audience, and produces a restless feeling,
even an easy sense the table of sanity is
turning. 34 1

I must agree with Miss Rocha's statement that,

During the Renaissance, the alliance between

madness and folly was very strong. Either
because of their neighboring position in
the chain of being, or because they planned
similar functions /being,.in society
(or maybe both); the madman and the fool
has always been seen as kingsmen, as cousins,
so to speak, of the medieval vices. 35

C.L.Barber writes about Folly: and as we have

seen terms Shakespeare's comedies are "festive" ones,

36
which contain a "saturnalian pattern". Shakespeare's

style "is more Aristophonic than of any other great comic

37
dramatist," although he also followed Plautus and

Terence. "The Old Comedy tone of Shakespeare's world

results, Barber says, from the dramatists participation

in his native saturnalian traditions of the popular

theaters and holidays. He used the resources of a

*all quotes on this and the following page are from C.L.Barber's
Shakespeare's Festive Comedy, pgs.3-4 See notes on Chapter 2
 25

sophisticated theater to express in his clown's

ironic misrule, the experience of moving to humorous

release.

Examples of Shakespearian Festive comedies are:

A Midsummer Night's Dream, Henry IV and Twelfth Night.

The saturnalian pattern maybe divided into three steps:

inversion, statement and counterstatement and, finally,

39
the formula "through release to clarification". Barber

says, "the saturnalian pattern came to Shakespeare from

many sources,, both in social and artistic. It appeared

in the theatrical institution of clowning, the clown

oe Vice a recognized anarchist who made abberation

devious by carrying release to absurd extremes. The

same happened with the cult of fools ans folly, which

40
was half social, half literary." C.L.Barber concludes:
"One could formulate the saturnalian pattern by first

refering to these traditions: Shakespeare's first

completely masterful comic scenes were written for the

41
clowns." But, he affirms: "it is the festival occasion
42
that provides the clearest paradigm." It includes not

only comedies with holiday motifs like A Love's Labor 's

Lost, A Midsummer Night's Dream, but also those with

little direct use of holidays as in As You Like It ‘

and Henry IV.

2.2 Folly according to C.L.Barber and Enid Welsford

C.L.Barber points out the connection between

holiday folly and the Bacchic tradition. When the author

Nashe presents his character Bacchus, Barber draws

the parallel with Shakespeare's Falstaff: both are

festival lords. Bacchus' speech might be the twin

brother to Falstaff's: "Abstinence endenders maladies;" 43

d4
It makes us fall into a sort of greensickness."

Bacchus, as god of wine, expresses the Erasmian paradox:

"there is no exellent knowledge without mixture of

madness. And what makes a man more mad in his head than
45
wine." Falstaff, Barber notes, makes the same "burlesque
46
parade of logic and authority" when he discusses

wine's contribution to valour and wit.

In The Fool, Mrs.Welsford specifically defines

the court fool as a type. After, the War of Roses, she

claims, the fool flourished in the courts of the Tudor

monarchs. Elizabeth of York, for example,.had as court

fool one William Worthy or "Phip", while Henry VIII

kept a fool called Lobe:

The losse of thee, Lobe, maketh manye sorrye,

Throughe ye be not able for thyn own sake,
But the King and the queen thou mayest so merrye,
With the many good pastimes that thou dydest make

Yet foolys be ignoble, thoughe thou be gone.

Now Lobe, Lobe, God have mercy on thy merrye node
And Lobe, God have thy mercye on thy foolish face
For follyes be alyve, Lobe, thoughe thou be gone.
 27

Lobe, eviderttaly, is considered a "natural" and not

an "intellectual" fool.

Mrs.Welsford proceeds, stating that the most

lively picture of the sixteenth and seventeenth century

fools in England was provided by Robert Armin's book

Foole upon Foole (1605), published four years later

under the equally entertaining title The Nest of Ninnies.

Armin himself was a clown who acted in Shakespeare's

company. He discusses several famous fools of the time,

including Jack Oates and Jack Miller; but Willaim Sommers

(who was the fool of three monarches: Edward VI, Queen

Mary and Queen Eliabeth I) is the most important.

Will was the most lovable of court fools, and his rhymes

show his wit.

A road in the school

Arid a whip for the fool
Are already in season.
A halter and a rope
For him that would be Pope
Against all right and reason.

Again, Sommers is responsible for the epitaph:

But whether he was fool or knave

He now lies sleeping in his grave.
The Priesthood sometimes was actively hostile

to the fool, as under Richelieu, for instance. Welsford

discusses the case of Archibald Amstrong, who was

banished form the English court for his disrespect

towards the daughters of a bishop and the fool commented

on his own dillema in verses:

 28

You which the dreame of Archy have now read,

Will surely talke of him when he is dead.
He knowes his foes in prison whilst that hee
___ By no man interrupted but goes free. .
His fooles coate now is in far better case,
Than he which yesterday had no much Grace:
Changes of time surely cannot be small
50
When jesters rise and Archbishops fall.

Thus we see that despite his "license" to mock estab-

lihed insitutions, the fool often got into trouble

because his criticism became a little too direct or

! ■

telling.

Mrs.Welsford suggests that As You Like It and

Twelfth Night are 'poems of escape'. In the former,

we evade reality in the name of dream, while the latter

was written for Christmas celebrations. In the first

play mentioned, there is holiday from everyday restrains,

while in the second on a Feast of Revels took place.

Yet even in comedy there is melancholy: in Twelfth

Night there is the April sport Malvolio, who reminds

us of Jaques in As You Like It. And when Malvolio's

exorcist, Feste, sings his last song, he sings the sad

 29

song of Humanity.

A great while ago the world began;

With hey-ho, the wind and the rain;
But that's all one, our play is done,
And we'll strive to please you every day."^

According to Welsford, Lear's Fool had a more

intellectual than emotional sighifigance. Because King

Lear is a tragedy, the Fool is not only a commentator

about what he sees, but "also a prominent figure caught

up into the drama, whose role and nature form a vital

part of the tragic central theme." He is not only a

comic fool who "juggles with words, until everything,

often including the truth, is upside down and inside

out"; but he also emphasizes the reverseal of psition

between the wise man and the fool. It is he who advises

the Earl of Kent, Regan's husband, that the knave who

runs away turns fool; however, not the fool himself:

the fool is a wise man, then. Moreover, it is the fool

who proclaims reality: the wise man is the fool, not

the knave. We have already pointed out, Lear's good

 30

boy is not the same as Touchstone and Jaques.

In Illyria and in Arden, it is regarded as

sufficiently good joke that the madman should
be the spokesman of sanity. But Lear's
Fool goes farther than this. Like others of
his profession, he is ready to profess his
coxcomb, nevertheless, in doing so, he
does not merely raise a laugh or score a
point; he raises the question: "What am I?
What is madness?"^

Examining King Lear, Welsford finds that it deals

with the conflicts between "good and evil, of wisdom

and folly, the hopeless cry of the Heavens for justice."

In this play, the word knave refers to the fool, and

Shakespeare seems to emphasize more the bad characters

than the good ones.

Goneril: (to Albany, her husband) O vain fool I

Albany : Thou changed and self-cover'd thing,-
53
for shame, Be-monster not thy feature.

Mrs.Enid Welsford observes that Lear is respons­

ible for his madness. Being an absolute king, choleric

by temperment, and superficial in his actions, he is

accustomed to flattery, pride and vnaity. He is a good

 31

character in the play, but has to undergo a purgitorial

process to recuperate, at least, his self-respect,

since he has given away his kingdom and even his clothes.

In his madness, he proclaims:

I am a very foolish old man.

. . . and, to deal plainly,
I fear I am not in my mind.^

The fool in King Lear might be considered not

only as a helper or a good Samarithan, but also as

Lear's double: as soon as the monarch starts being mad,

the fool disappears and it is in his madness that he,

Lear, seems more sane.

0 let me not go mad, not mad sweet heaven I

Keep me in temper, I would not be mad!
0 fool, I shall go mad!^

says the king in the beginning of his catharsis from

pride and selfishness.

Once mad, Lear realizes the sufferings of other

people, even of the Earl of Gloucester:

 32

* . .heavens, dear so still!

Let the superfluous and dieted man
That slaves of your ordinance, that will not see
Because he doth not feel, feel your power quickly
So distribution should under excess,
56
And each man have enough.

At the beginning of the play, Welsford points out that

both, Lear and Gloucester, are actual fools. There is

the reversal of wisdom and folly, as a matter of fact:

0 Lear, Lear, Lear'. ‘

Beat at the gate that let folly in
57
And thy dear judgement out.

At the start of King Lear, the fool makes a state­

ment concerning Lear's folly: "Thou wouldst make a good

£ i ii58
fool."

When mad, the king realizes that from his cradle

to his tombstone there is not poetic justice in the world.

When we are born, we cry that we are come

To this great stage of fools. 59

Welsford links king and fool when she states:

Shakespeare was indebted to his contemporaries

as well as to his ancestors. In his day, they
were still a part of the practical structure
 33

of a living religion. The king was the

representative of the Divine Goverment,
while the Fool was laughed at as a popular
entertainer and moralized over as an
embodiment of a Christian paradox.^
 34
r

2.3 The Conventions of the Fool and Folly

Now I come to the third section of this Back­

ground Chapter, which is concerned with Carnival Trad­

itions and the Lord of Misrule.

In considering the clown, we should first mention

Harlequin, the original clown. He was a character in

commedia dell*arte and still today remains as one of

the characteristic types of carnival. There's something

mixed in the character of Harlequin, who is an animal,

a fawn and a devil; that's why he uses his black mask.

The laws of space and time seem not to apply to him.

He's a servant who really serves nobody. He makes fun

of love and ambition. He's wiser than his masters,

though he seems only more clever. He's independent,

because he has realized the world to be simple folly.

Feste, the wise fool of Twelfth Night , has the qual­

ities just pointed out. There is one qualification,

 35

however: although Feste has never ceased to be Harlequin

he does not perforin anymore; he does not even take part

in the action, but just comments on it. That is the

cause of his bitterness.

The clown is the primitive comedian. Sometimes

in the exuberance of animal life, a spirit of merriment

comes over a man. For a moment, he may be wreathed in

smiles and extremely pleased about nothing. All this

he does without any reason, by sort of a mad inspiration

In Twelfth Night, the one who embodies the spirit

of merriment is Sir Andrew Aquecheek, who sings and

drinks with Sir Toby Belch and the jester, Feste. There

is a scene in which those three are together till late

at night and Malvolio, the steward to Countess Olivia,

comes in to advise them to be silent. Sir Toby asks

him then: "Art thou any more than a steward? Dost thou

think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no .

more cakes and ale?"^, to which Feste wisely answers:

"Yes, by Saint Anne; and ginger shall be hot i*the

 36

C 'y
mouth too." The clown may thus turn his fooling into

mimicry of anything or anybody. In fact, Feste's fool­

ing is a pretense

Because the actor is able to revert from

those assumed attitudes to his natural self;
whilst his models have no natural self
save that imitable attitude, and can never
disown it, so that the fool feels himself
superior in his rôle of universal satirist,
to all actual men, and he belabours at them
unmercifully."^

After mentioning Carnival Traditions, we must

discuss the Lord of Misrule, according to Enid Welsford.

and C.L.Barber. According to Mrs.Welsford, during the

Middle Ages and Renaissance, the festival fool, i.e.,

the Lord of Misrule, really had as serious function as

any poet or philosopher. Welsford discusses the similar­

ities between the fools of the traditional festivals

and the court-fool: the former, using his motley and

cap, keeps on talking nonsense while the latter is the

butt of a household. "They are both professedly fools

 37

and their folly is regarded not merely as a defect as

64
the quality which endears them to the community."

As Mrs; Welsford suggests, both fools have a common relative

the sacred, possessed man who is out of his

normal wits only because he is inspired with
a higher wisdom.^

However, by the fifteenth century, there was no longer

much connection between them, and they have evolved into

the fool and the jester. Throughout the passing of time,

the fool became a figure of pure nonsense, while the

court jester devoloped as a serious critic of social

abuses, especially during the Dark Ages and the first

part of the medieval period.

With the growth of towns, the roles of the festival

fool was confused with the office of the court jester,

so by Shakespeare's time, the Lord of Misrule showed

signs of thus double descent front both clown and jester.

Welsford locates the earlier origins of the Lord

 38

of Misrule among pre-Christian customs, particularly

in the Kalend and in the pagan Roman saturnalia.

Furthermore, theses festival customs were "survivals

from an intercalary period inserted into the calander

66
to fill the gap between the solar and lunar year."

Moreover, the old rites (which were amusements in

the very deep sense of the word) involved clerical

saturnalia, where, sacred things were prophaned

by a ritual leader: the Bishop of Fools.

Where Christendom is concerned, the octave

of the Epiphany is the Feast of Fools. Mrs.Welsford

points out that the festival, concerning the Lord

of Misrule, flourished in France, mainly although

there are traces of it in other countries too.

The pagan character of the Feast of Fools

is obvious. Since the old custom of festival was

in the hands of the uneducated, and "since the vicars

67
were of humble origins" , the church sanctioned the

festival. "The composition of burlesque sermons

 39

gave the fool the chance to insist on the idea of

/T O
folly as a sign of increased intellegence."

The unruly clergy did not celebrate the kalends

in earnest but in fun. Nevertheless, sometimes,

they used folly.as a stalking horse, under which

their wit is hidden.

Enid Welsford agrees that the‘"Feast of

Fools was an annual interruption of ordinary routine,

marked by a temporary reversal of moral judgements." 69

That is to say, during the festival, people held

holiday from everydayfs restrains.

The time came when the eclesiastic Feast of

Fools was replaced by the Societee Joyeuse, which

thrived in France for the most part from the end

of the 15th century to the middle of the 17th, these

were associations of young men who adapted

the traditional fool's dress of motley, eared
hoods, bells and bauble and organized them­
selves into kingdoms under the rule of an
annually elected monarch known as Prince des
Sots, Mëre-Folle, Abbé de Malgouverne, etc.
with the object of celebrating certain trad­
itional customs...^
 40

which gave them scope for satire and social criticism.

, Mère-Folle, a man dressed as a woman, was

always nicely received wherever "she" went; those

who followed before "her" wore garments of red,

green and yellow. Her reception in the Infanterie

was formal.^Furthermore, it was "she" who provided

for public morality and her best weapon was the

satire. In 1603 Louis XIII supressed the society

I

for the disorders it provoked in town; but because

Mère-Folle was a conventional and respected author­

ity "she" survived the edict. By the end of the

17th century "she" had died.

Like any other fool societies, such as the

Societée Joyeuse, the Basochiens and the Enfants-

sans-souci were linked to scandel and satire; never-

the less, many times in trouble, they operated at

ease under the good-natured regime of Louis XIII

 41

who allowed them to criticize his court. No more

activities are heard of after 1552.

The English Lord of Misrule was either a

temporary court official appointed to provide enter­

tainment for Christmas holidays, or a leader elected

by young students at the Universities or Inns of

Court to preside over their rejoicing at Christmas.

Mrs.Welsford points out thai the English

fools l'ike the lower class Parisians, celebrated

the twelve days of Christmas, and choose a Lord

of Misrule. A clear example of what I mean is

Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, which witnesses the

virtual end of festivity-as a stage tradition. After

the death of Edward VI, the Lord of Misrule disappeared

from the English court.

The use of motley by the fools, like the

Basochians and Enfants-sans-souci is understandable

 42

for they were assuming the role of the licensed

court-fool; furthermore, if they wore the garments

of a fool, nobody could critcize them.'

Finally we might state that not only the

French Lord of Misrule, but also that of other

nationalities (the English, the German), refined

himself to a philosopher, an satirist and a comic poet.

Now let us examine C.L.Barber's viewpoint

of the Lord of Misrule. Barber sees him as the

ritual spirit of comedy. This spirit was present in

summer, "when a holiday group asserts its liberty" 71

or in winter, "when he resided over the eating and

72
drinking indoors," mostly at night.’The author

goes on saying that on the twelfth night ( January 6 ),

the Lord of Misrule became the king of the Bean.

Furthermore, this custom was held not only at Christ­

mastime, but also at Shrovetide and at the harvest.

 43

These traditional celebrations seem to be

a version of the Feast of Fools, as Barber points out.

In creating Falstaff, Shakespeare fused the

clown with the Lord of Misrule, working out
the saturnalian implications of both traditions.
In I Henry IV, holiday is balanced everyday .
73
and the doomsday of a battle.

Holiday would be the release from everyday's restrains

and everyday, the clarification, the whole week in

which one is expected to work. "Here, comedy and political

life are contrapuntal," 74 by contrast in the history

2 Henry IV there is no holiday, just everyday.

During the Renaissance, the Lord of Misrule

still existed, but during the reigns of Mary and

Elizabeth, of Edward VI and Henry VIII, the spirit

of comedy was forced to withdraw.

Although officially forbidden, the Lord

of Misrule continued alive In people's minds, as

for example, mock-majesty improvised in taverns,.

 44

as was already pointed out in the discussion, Hal

and his 'bacchic' companion, Falstaff.

C.L.Barber proceeds:

The morris-dance was thoroughly traditional:

the dance typically included . . .,the hobby­
horse Maid Marian, who dressed himself up as
a woman and the fool, usually the leading
dancer.^

By this account, he who didn't want to be a Lord

of Misrule (in other words, a 'kill joy') was

mocked and flouted not a little. Here we see, then,

the birth of satire and festive abuse.

There are great links between the holiday rites

and Shakespeare's comedies, according to the critic

who defines "release in idylic comedies as that which

transmute the experience of the play into that of

a revel. As an instance of release we may cite the

point in As You Like It where Rosalind says to

Orlando: "Come woo me, woo me, for now I am in hoi-

 45

76
iday humour, and like enough to consent."

Cornford, in his Origins of Attic Comedy,

.suggested invecation and abuse based on a vestig­

ial nature-worship, "still practiced in the folly

77
of Elizabethan May-Game or Winter Revel."

'Invocation' means comedy to be a spring festival;

while 'abuse' the license to do things that day

which are forbidden to others.

■l

In order to provoke release, the same invoc-

ation-abuse appears in Shakespeare's festive comedies,

"where the poetry about the pleasures of nature and

the naturalness of pleasure serves to evoke bene-

ficent natural impulses." 78 Through the pattern of

release and clarification, the festive comedy makes

us aware of the relationship between man and nature,

79
"the nature celebrated on holidays." C.L.Barber

affirms: "It is the present myth and laughter of the

festive plays that reconcile feeling, without

recourse to sentimentality or cynicism, to the

clarification conveyed about nature's limitations.

 .47

Notes to Chapter Two; Background

Chapter

1) Robert W.Corrigan. Comedy: Meaning and Form, p.61

2) Ibid. Op. cit; p.69
3) Eric Bentley cited by Corrigan. Op. cit., p. 285
4) Sigmund Freud cited by Corrigan. Op. cit., p. 253
5) Ibid. O p . cit., p.255
6 )'Aristotle cited by Corrigan. Op. cit., p.

7) Eric Bentley cited by ibid. Op. cit., p. 286

8) Ibid. Op. cit., p.286
9) Ibid . O p . cit., ibid . *
10) Ibid. cited by ibid, Op.- cit., p.287
•I
11) Aristotle cited by ibid. Pp.. cit., p . 88
12) Nathan A.Scott Jr, cited by ibid. Op. cit., ibid.
13) Ibid. mentioning Freud cited by Corrigan. Op. cit., p 89 .
14) Ibid. Op. cit., ibid.
15) Aurélio Buarque de Hollanda Ferreira.. Novo Dicionário
da Lingua Portuguesa, p.29 6
16) Aristotle cited by Corrigan. Op. cit.,p.33
17) Conford cited by Ibid. Op. cit.,ibid.
18) Northorp Fr^escited by Corrigan. Op. cit., p. 141
19) Ibid. cited by ibid. Op.cit., p.147
20) Ibid. cited by ibid.Op. cit., ibid.
21) Ibid. cited by ibid. Op. cit., pp.144-145
22) Ibid. cited by ibid. Op. cit., p.150
23) Ibid. Op. cit-/P-151
24) Ibid. Op. cit.,p.157
25) Ibid. in his article "The Mythes of Spring: Comedy"/
cited by ibid. Op. cit.,p.158
26) Ibid. Op. cit.,p.160
27}
28) Conford, mentioned by Wylie Sypher in his article
"The Meanings of Comedy", cited by Corrigan,p.33
29) Michel Foucault. Madness and Civilization,p.24
30) Leszek Kolakowsky cited by Edward Arnold. Shakes-
 43

pearian Comedy, p.150

31) Enid Welsford. The Fool: His Social4and Literary
History, p.241
32 Jart Kott. Shakespeare Our Contemporary, p. 35
33 Harold Goddard. 1 The Meaning of Shakespeare, p.301
34 Glenys McMullen. The Fool as Entertainer and
Satirist, p.16
35 Ibid. Op. cit., ibid.
36 C.L.Barber. Shakespeare's Happy Comedy, p.4
37 Northrop Frye cited by Corrigan, p,141
38 C.L.Barber. Op. cit., pp.3-4
39) Ibid. Op. cit., p.6
4§) Ibid. Op. cit., p .5
41) Ibid. Op. cit., p.5
42) Ibid. Op. cit., p.5
43) C.L.Barber. Op. cit., p.69
44)
45) Ibid. Op. cit., ibid.
46) Ibid. Ibid., Ibid.
47) Enid Welsford. Op. cit.,,p.159
48) Ibid. Op. cit., p .167
49) Ibid. Op. cit., p.171
50) Ibid. Op. cit., p.181
51) William Shakespeare. Twelfth
52) Ibid. King Lear, (II, i'v, 120)
53) Ibid. Op. cit.(V,111,153-158)
54) Ibid. Op. cit.(IV,VII,60-63)
55) Ibid. Op. cit.(111,11,53)
56) Ibid. Op. cit.(IV,IV,150-156)
57) Ihid. Op. cit.(I,295,IV)
58) Ibid. Op. cit. (I,IV,152)
59) Ibid. Op. cit. (Ill,IV,181-2)
60) ■Enid Welsford. Op. cit.,p.174
61) William Shakespeare. Op. cit.
62) Ibid. Op. cit., ibid.
63 George Santayana in the article "The Comic Mask
and Carnival" cited by Corrigan, p.73
64) Enid Weisford. Op. ci
65) Ibid . Op. cit .,ibid.
66) Ibid. Op. cit ., P . 199
67) Ibid. Op. cit. p .2 0 1
.6 8 ) Ibid. Op. cit .,p .20 2
69) Ibid . Op. cit ., p.203
70) Ibid . Op. cit. , ibid.
71) C.L.Barber. Op . cit .,
72) Ibid. Op. cit.,ibid.
73) Ibid. Op. cit., p . 8
74) Ibid. Op . cit., p. 6
75) Ibid. Op. cit., p .28
76) Ibid. Op. cit., p . 8
77) Ibid. Op. cit.,p.9
78) Ibid. Op. cit . ,p.9
79) Ibid. Op- cit., ibid.
80) Ibid . Op. cit ./P •8
81) Ibid . Op . cit . rP.10
 CHAPTER THREE
THE FOOLS AND FOLLY IN HENRY IV, PART ONE

1 Henry IV is the story in which the

plans of Henry IV for a crusade are broken off

by news of rebellions in Wales and Scotland.

Henry Percy, Hotspur, the soneof the Earl of

Northumberland, is victorious over the Scots

under Douglas at Homildon. The king demands the

prisoners from the general, but Hotspur refuses

to give them up unless Henry IV will ransom his

kinsman, Edmund Mortimer, Earl of March, who is

held prisoner by the Welsh. This the king will

not do, for he fears Mortimer may claim the crown.

Then, Hotspur sends his prisoners home without a

ransom, and joins the plot of the Welsh and Scots

to overthrow Henry IV.

The Prince of Wales is a wild youth; his

favorite companion is Sir John Falstaff, whose

 51

main occupations are talking and drinking wine

at the tavern in Eastcheap. Poins, one of Fal-

staf-f.'s group, informs Hal that there are pilgrims

going to Canterbury "with rich offerings and traders

riding"“ the next morning. In short, he invites

the Prince to be a thief, a purse taker. Harry

agrees and, disguised, attacks Falstaff who, after

having fled, does not tell the truth, but rather

lies, telling Hal that he was attacked by eight

or nine robbers. When the Prince and his group

return to.London, their merriment is cut short

because of Hotspur's departure for the battlefield

in Shrewbury.

Furthermore, the King wishes his son to

behave better as King-to-come. When Hal promises

to be worthier of his position, he is entrusted

with the royal forces. Before the battle, the King

offers to pardon the rebels if they will lay down

their arms, but his message is distorted before

 52

it reaches Hotspur and the latter gives battle. The

rebels are defeated, Hotspur being slain by Hal. Fath­

er and son (Henry IV and Hal) then go to Wales to

quell the insurrection there.

"When thou art king, let us be called thieves

of Diana's foresters, gentlemen of the shade,
and let men say we be men of good government,
being governed as the sea is, by our noble
and chaste mistress, the moon, under whose
contenance we steal." 25 •

If we consider the way in which Falstaff loves,

but is unloved by Hal, we might dare to affirm the

parallel between Sir John and the Prince on one hand,

-and between Shakespeare and his patron, the third Earl

of Southampton.

Francis G.Stokes observes: "Henry Wriothesley became

a patron of literature and the intimacy of his relations

with Shakespeare, who was some years his senior, is

26
beyond dispute." We find evidence in the fact that

Venus and Adonis (1593) and Lucrece (1594) are both

inscribed "To the Right Honourable Henry Wriothesley,

L^i
 53

27
Earl of Southampton and Baron of Tichfield." In ded­

ication to the letter Shakespeare writes "What I have

done is yours; what I have to do is yours; being part

23
in all I have devoted yours." The first work related

here is a study of female lust and boyish coldness,

while the second is the picture of male lust and woman­

ly chastity.

The most important evidence of thp parallel between

Falstaff and Shakespear however are the Shakepearian

sonnets dedicated to Henry Wriothesley. The same tender­

ness with which the author wrote for his patron is found

in Sir John Falstaff's attitude towards Prince Hal; in

both cases, the poet and the clown were.not heard and

recognized.

Let's examine Sonnet XXVI:

"Lord of my love in whom in vassalage

Thy merit hath my duty stongly knit,
To Thee I send this written ambassage,
To witness duty, not to show my wit:
Duty so great, which wit so poor as mine
May make seem bare, in wanting words to show it,
But that I hope some good conceit of thine
 54

In thy soul's thoughts, all naked, will bestow it.

Till whatsoever star that guides my moving,
Points on me graciously with fair aspect,
And puts apparel on my tatter'd loving,
To show me worthy of thy sweet respect.
Then may I boast I do love thee;
29
Till then not to show my head where thou mayst prove me."

Although he is the Earl.ls puppet-on-a-string, Shakespeare

doesn't mind it because of love. The same attitude is

found in Sir John's attitude toward^.Hal.

Love is my sin, and thy dear virtue hate,

Hate of my son, grounded on sinful loving:
Oh, but with mine compare thou thine own state,
And thou shalt find its merits not reproving,
Or, if it do, not from those lips of thine,
That have profaned their scarlet ornaments
And sealed false bonds of love as oft as mine,
Robb'd others' beds revenue of their rents.
Be it lawful I love thee as thou lovest those
Whom their eyes woo as mine importune thee
Root pity in thy heart, that when it grows
If thou dost seek to have what thou dost hide,
30 ’•
By self-example mayest be denied. (Sonnet CXLII)

William Shakespeare had a great passion for his patron;

nevertheless, he is not loved in return, and neither is

Falstaff. Furthermore, the difference in class between

the poet-commoner and his noble patron is implied by

the social gap between Falstaff and the prince.

 55

Sonnet LXXI tells us:

No longer mourn for me when I am dead

Than you shall he the surly sullen bell
— Give warning to the world that I am fled
From this vile world, with villest worms .to dwell:
Nay, if you read this line, remember not
The hand that writ it: for I love you so,
I that your sweet thoughts would be forgot
If thinking on me then I should make you woe.
Oh if, I say, you look upon this verse
When I perhaps compounded am with clay,
Do not so much as my poor name rehearse
But let your love even my life decay;
Lest the wise world should' look into your morn,
1 31
And mock you with me after I am gone.

Shakespeare, as well as Sir John, advised his patron

and the Prince of Wales not to mourn for their death,

because, as a matter of fact, neither the former nor

the latter will cry the death of a fool. More sonnets

demonstrating Shakespeare's "love" towards the Earl of

Southampton (and very applicable from author to Henry

Wriothesley) are those numbered: LXI, LVII, LXII, LXXVII,

XCII,CV,CXV, and CXVI.

Shakespeare's melancholy over his rejection by

Southampton may be reflected by F&lstaff's sad end,

when Hal (as Henry V) sends the old man to the fleet.

This occurs in 2 Henry IV. Falstaff goes, not like a

scapegoat but, simply in obedience to the orders of the

man he so dearly loves and who has made him a puppet-

on-a-string. An instance of Falstaff's loyalty to the

new-crowned King occurs, when in'part2, the procession

of the coronation streams out and there is a shout

within the Abbey. Here Falstaff affirms:

"God save thy grace, King Hal, my royal Hall;God

save thee my sweet boyi
King: My Lord Chief Justice, speak to that vain
man.
C.Justice: Have you your wits? Know you what, rtis
you speak?
Falstaff: My King, my jovel I speak to thee my heart
How ill white hairs become a fool and a jester1
.
I have long dream'd of such a kind of man,
So surfeit - swell'd, so old and so profane;
But being awake, I do despise my dream." 3 2

The procession passes out of sight, but Falstaff and

his friends remain. It is not the King who sends Fal­

staff to fleet, but the Lord Chief Justice: "Go, carry

Sir John Falstaff to the fleet; Take all of his company

 57

with him." The "Prince's dog" exclaims: "My Lord,

34
my lord," however he is cut short and taken away.

Falstaff, then, is the supremest symbol of loyalty,

a loyalty not recognized by the one he so loved - King

Henry V.

Prince Hal is being educated according the the

tradition of the "books of courtesy" in order to be

the future King of Britian. We don't think at all that

the prince is really secondary to the comic protagonist,

Falstaff. Not even in the least: we agree that Falstaff

assumes in the low plot the same importance Hal assumes

in the high plot.

We will mention two authors, each favoring a pro­

tagonist: Mr.G. Dover Wilson emphasizes the traditional,

historical theme of princely education, while Mr.William

Empson favors the humanity and centrality of Falstaff.

Of course, as prince, Hal shall act princelike; but

this gives him no right to treat Falstaff coldly and

without feeling, making of him simply a means for his

 58

popularity.

Prince; Well, come what it will, I'll tarry at home.

Falstaff: By the Lord, I'll be a traitor then when
— thou art king. _ .
Prince: I care not.^

Disagreeing at times with Mr. Wilson, we affirm

that it is Falstaff, and not Hal, who links the low life

to the high life, the scenes at Eastcheap with those

6f Westminster, the tavern with the battlefield.

I
Another point under discussion by the critics is

the prodigality fo the prince: it is machiavelism towards

his father that drives him rather than actual tender­

ness. (The prince is waiting for the king's death to

imerge to usurp his crown and throne, since the father,

Henry IV, did this to the lawful king, Richard II.)

"So please your Majesty, I would I could quit all

offences with as clear excuse, as well I an doubt­
less I can purge myself of many I am charged with-
alj yet such extenuation let me beg, as in reproof
of many tales devis'd which of the ear of greatness
needs hear by smiling pickthanks, and base news­
mongers, "I may for some things true, wherein my
youth, hath faulty wander'd, and irregular, find
pardon on my true submission. I shall hereafter,
2
lay trice gracious Ia©rd, be more myself."

•-I kAou u
 "I know you all, and will a while hold the unyok'd
humour of idleness, yet herein I'll imitate the sun.

(This the prince states after Falstaff and his companion

Poins have left in Act One, scene two, 32.

It was already said that Hal was biding his time,

waithing for the right time to emerge:

"I'll so offend to make offense a skill,

4
Redeeming time when men think least I will."

This means that he's waiting for something which does

not belong to him. Falstaff calls the Machiavelian spirit

Hal, a true prince while he is in fact a false thief:

"Why Hal,'tis my vocation Hal,'tis no sin for a man

to labour in his vocation."

In a sense, Henry V, the Machiavel, is like most

of those of the court, pretending to be different from-,

what they are. But Hal's pretense is quite the reverse

of theirs. Henry pretends to be better than his son is,,

nevertheless convinces nobody. On the other hand, Hal

pretends to be far worse and convinces everybody. "In

a bad time, one must protect oneself and one's purpose

 60

g
conceals one1s true identity," says he. Thus, the king-

to-come is the ablest actor of the whole court and de­

ceives all. Really, he is a royal counterfeit on behalf

of truth, honor and order.

William Hazlitt opens his criticism of 1 Henry IV

stating: "Falstaff's wit is an emanation of a fine con­

stitution, an exuberance of good humor and good nature;

an overflowing of his love and laught'er and good fellow­

ship; a giving vent to his heart's ease and overcontent-

7
ment with himself and others." This gentleman, based

on Sir John Oldcastle of the British aristcracy, embodies

zest for life and an entire moral irresponsibility. He

represents the spirit of freedom, the spirit of comedy.

Sir John Falstaff's heart and vitality' contrast

with Prince Hal's head, Falstaff's corpulence, his eat­

ing and drinking, and later on, in his resurrection

from death, marks him as the Adam, the natural man who

never tried to be an "artificial" or "intellectual"

 61

fool. On the contrary, he shows more fidelity to the

prince than anybody can imagine. He may even be called

"the Prince's dog", as the critic W.H.Auden points out.

Besides his loyalty, as Lord of Misrule, he shows the

exuberance of his love for laughter and good fellowship.

His tounge drops fatness, and "in the chambers of his

8
brain it snores of meat and drink." Sir John's old

age and obesity gives him a melancholy retrospective

quality. And the disparity between his inclinations and

his capacity for enjoyment, makes him still more ludicrous.

Comparing Falstaff among the other fools in this

study, (Touchstone, Feste and Lear's Fool) we come to

the conclusion that he is the most natural of all.

A fool is not an aristocrat, while Sir John is it,

at least, a nominally one; yet his energy and speech

are the very opposite of formal manners. In function,

he is after all a fool whose exclusion from high society

is a sign of his vitality. Falstaff is "noble in name",

but "vital in function", we see this in a non-royal

 62

speech between him and Hal:

Prince: "Out ye roge shall I be your Ostler?

Falstaff: Hang thyself in thy own heir apparent
__ garters; if I be ta'en, I'll peach for this: I have
not ballads made on you all, and sung to filthy
tunes, let a cup of sack be my poison, when a jest
9
is so forward, and afoot too I hate it."

Arisotle defines comedy "an artistic imitation of

men of moral bent"^, while to Conford it is a "sacri­

fice and a f e a s t " A c c o r d i n g to these twe concepts,

comedy suggests saturnalia, the unrul'iness of the flesh

and its- vitality; furthermore, it is pEesided over a

Lord of Misrule, who, in the play in discussion, is

Sir John Falstaff. An example of him as Lord of Misrule,

who presides over the inversion of order is the scene

in which the fool plays the king and the future king

remains the prince.

'Falstaff: "that thou art my son I have partly thy

mother's words, partly my own opinion, but chiefly
a villanous trick of thine eye and a foolish hang­
ing of thine nether lip, that dost warrent me. If
then thou be son to me, shall the son of England
prove a thief and take purses? Harry, yet there is
a virtuous man, whom I have often noted in thy
company, but I ko9 w not his name.
 63

Prince: What manner of man and did it like your

Majesty? A goodly, and partly i'faith, and a corp­
ulent, of a cheerful look, a pleasing eye and a
most noble carriage; and as I think of his age,
fifty, or a birlady inclining to three score, and
now I remember me, if that man should be lewdly
12
given, he deceiveth me."

This speech between Hal and Falstaff foreshadows, in

fact, the actual speech between King Henry and his son

Hal, which is speech number 2:

"I. know not whether God will have it so for some

displeasing service I have done, that in his secret
doom out of my blood, he'll breed revengement and
a scourge for me: But thou dost in thy passages of
life, make me believe that thou art only mark'd for
the hot vengeance, and the rod of heaven, to punish
my mistreadings. As thou art match'd withal, and
grafted to, accompany the greatness of thy blood
and hold their level with thy princely heart." 13
 64

Notes to Chapter Three

1) Willaim Shakepeare. 1 Henry IV (1,11,30) .

2) Ibid. Op. cit. (111,11,80)

3) Ibid. Op. cit. (1,11,32)

4) Ibid. Op. cit.(1,11,33).

5) Ibid. Op. cit. (1,11,29).

6) William Hazlitt. Characters of Shakespeare's Plays

p.148.

7) Ibid. Op. cit. p.149.

8) William Shakespeare. Op. cit., (II,IV,57).

9) Aristotle cited by Corrigänt Comedy: Meaning and Form,

p.4

10) Conford cited by ibid. Op. c i t ., p.33.

11) William Shakespeare. Op. cit., (IV,iv,118)

12) Ibid. Op. cit. (1,11,20)

13) Ibid . O p . cit . , (I, 11,25)

14) Ibid. Op. cit . , (I, 11,27)

i—i
CTi

15) Ibid . Op . cit . (III

H
H
H i—t
i—)
00
H
>

16) Ibiä . Op. cit. , (V,

17) Ibid . O p . cit. (III ,11,85)

 65

18) Harold Goddard. I The Meaning of Shakespeare, p.1-61.

19) William Shakespeare. Op. cit. (IV,III,99).

20) Ibid. Op. cit., (11,111,52).

.- _ -•-- --

21)
' Ibid. Op. cit., (IV,II,96).

22) Ibid. Op. cit. (V,IV,117).

23) Ibid. Op, Cit. (V,II,108).

24) Ibid. O p . cit., (1,11,27) .

25) Ibid. Op. cit., (ibid.).

26) Francis Griffin Stokes. A Dictionary of the Charac

ters and Proper Names in the Works of Shakespeare.,p.3

27) Ibid. Op. cit., ibid.

28) Ibid. Op. cit., p.348. '

29) Willaim Shakespeare. The Complete Works of William

Shakespeare, p.lo4 6 .

30) Ibid. Op. cit.,p .1060.

31) Ibid. op. cit.,p.1051.

32) William Shakespeare. 2 Henry IV, pp.159-160).

33) Ibid. Op . c i t . p.162

34) Ibid. op. cit., p.162

 66

CHAPTER FOUR
AS YOU LIKE IT

-- Scholars assign As You Like It to the year

1599: the plot is probobly derived from a work by

one of Shakespeare's contemporaries, Thomas Lodge,

calles Rosalynde, Euphues' Golden Legacy^- which was

first printed in 1590.

In the comments to follow we will attempt to combine

a summary of the play with analysis. In the first act

we see that the rightful Duke of France, Duke Senior,

has been forced by his usurping younger brother, Fred­

erick, to leave for the Forest of Arden. Rosalind,

daughter of the banished Duke, stays at court with Celia

her cousin (Fredrick’s daughter) whom she appreciates

dearly. Symbolic of the violence of the new regime,

a wrestler named Charles has just maimed three challengers

and is about to take on a fourth. This is Orlando, the

son of Roland de Bois who is an ally of Duke Senior

and who shares his exile. To his embarassment, Duke

Frederick is forced to pronounce Orlando victor in the

sport, but determines to kill the young man by other

means. Orlando determines to flee to the Forest of Arden

to join the exiles. Rosalind meanwhile confesses her

love for Orlando to Celia. The girls decide to leave

for the forest too, wearing disguises. Rosalind passes

as a man ("Ganymede") while Celia masks as "Aliena",

the lost girl. Touchstone, the court fool of the old

Duke, decides to accompany them in their exile.

In the terms used by Northrop- Frye, the play now

passes into its middle or purgatorial phase: the comic

confusion of the Green world where the divisions between

lovers and friends, forests and children, brother and

brother will be heightend, but ultimately resolved. The

forest , as the realm of nature, stands in contrast to

the.court with its artificiality and political .corruption.

It forms a "natural perspective" from which the court is

criticized: "Here the present is compared to its dis­

 2
advantages with a golden past." Yet it is not presented

by Shakespeare as an earthly paradise: he continually

reminds us that it is a place where life is hard and

where the winter winds blow fiercely. Yet for all of

this, it seems to be better than the court, where other

kinds of "winds" destroy the soul more subtly.

In the forest Touchstone, the critic of urban

corruption, encounters Jaques, the melancholy philos­

opher who is attached to the court-in-exile of Duke

Senior. The two of them form an interesting parallel

and contrast for our purposes.

"On the whole if in TSuchstone there be much of

the philosopher in the fool, in Jaques there is
3
not less of the fool in the philosopher."

In the association of the two, Shakespeare links the

fool with his seeming opposite, the thinker. When

Jaqiie overhears Touchsone engaged in his follu 'he is

filled with admiration and envy at the freedom with

which the fool can criticize the evils of the world.

Jaques wishes that he too were a fool, and had the

fools license to criticize the 'sacred cows' of a cor­

rupt society. Thus we see that the natural setting is

now a base for satirical thought. Touchstone is a court

fool who is not really at.home in nature and Jaques is

even less of a 'natural'. But both are critical of the

unnatural vices of court which have put them where they

I

are, and both would prefer a revised and reconstituted

society where nature and custom are in harmony instead

of at odds.

The play provides in fact all shades of opinion

concerning the pastoral ideal (an ideal very "courtly"

in its inception). Amiens, an attendent of the banished

Duke, expresses an orthodox pastoralism when he sings:

Under the Greenwood tree

Who loves to lie with me,
And tune his very note
Unto the sweet bird1s throat
 70

Come hither, come hither, come hither;

Here shall he see
No enemy
4
But winter and rough weather.

Jaques, on the other hand, is a bitter man of thought,

a puritan in fact who will remain outside the marriages

at the play's end. He asks Amiens for more song in

order to parody pastoral sentiment:

If it do come to pass
That any man turns ass
Leaving his wealth and ease
A stubborn will to please,
Ducdame,ducdame, ducdame;
Here shall he see
Gross fools as he,
And if he will come to Ami.“’

Jaques thinks that "all the world is a stage and all

the men and women merely players."*’ His cynicism

resembles Hamlet's melancholy in fact, and its meta­

physical overtones imply that life if the staff of

illusion: if life is a dream, it is a black and farcical

one. His taste runs toward the tragic, and in his

famous speech on the seven ages of man, we have the

tragic sense that all ideal are subject to time, that all

flesh is grass, that all splendor 'ends in mud and ashes.

In his scepticism, Jaque often seems merely moody and

perverse, however, and the authority that his meditations

often have in the reader's ear is not consistent. Touch­

stone's view of his situation seems better balanced

in fact than that of Amiens or of Jaques. While the

former is too gullible and the latter too acidic,

Touchstone demonstrates that the fool can be.intel-

legenily resigned:

Aye, now I am in Arden; the more fool am I;

when I was at home, I was in a better place; but
7
travellers must be content.

In the carnival atmosphere of the play's central

(or 'green world') section masking is an important

adjunct to folly, whoses workings lead us back to wisdom.

While the fool, Touchstone remains detached by his crit­

ical wit, Rosalind (the real protagonist of the play)

is simultaneously in the action and beyond it by means

of her disguise as Ganymede. We should remember the com­

 72

plexity of this disguise involves, according to Jan

Kqtt, not two but three levels: "Rosalind" is really

a boy actor pretending to be a girl who is pretending

to be a boy. Thus in one sense, if loss of identity

lies at the heart of the comic experience, Rosalind

has lost her identity in the forest. She is part of the

general chaos, and perhaps her disguise is an indication

that as a young girl, still dedicated most closely to

Celia and her father, she does not have a clear idea

of her sexual role. She shares, that is to say, in the

whole atmosphere of folly that must be experienced in the

Green world or dream world, but which is a stage in

Barber's development "through release to clarification."'*

By the end of the play, Rosalind will have overcome her

ambivalence and be ready for mature marriage, a state

which mirrors the larger pattern of reformed comic society.

In another sense however Rosalind is even more

than Touchstone in control of her folly and an instigator

 73

of actions which she understands or "overpeers". Rosalind

is thus a "Touchstone" who brings others to a reali­

zation of their true worth and nature. Like the fool

she induces the comic i.c&fcha±Bis of those who live in the

delusion of their wisdom. In Bertrand Evans' terms, she

"over peers" the other characters; she does not confuse

herself with her mask, but sees things as they are. Yet

others cannot see through her mask. One of Shakespeare's

most lively heroins, she is the unseen seer, the master

of the revels which she has- set into movement.

She retains this superiority, for example, in the

scenes with Orlando who is clearly .less mature and know­

ing than she is. She is in effect testing her future

lover when she pretends to be:herself. Orlando thinks

he is kissing and courting Ganymede as a rehearsal for

real, hetrosexual love and does not realize that the

mock-situation is in fact the real one. We shall see the

same charade of sex-changes in Twelfth Night later on

 74

and there too we may rea^ ot as a sign of the inhibitions

and narcissism of the young lovers in whom love is in

a state of !!frozen immobility awaiting a spring thaw."

Through a series of miraculous events the evil

duo of the play - Duke Frederick and Orlando's brother,

Oliver - experience sudden conversions, and the way is

finally cleard for the reconstituted society of Duke

Senior to arise amid a series of marriages. Rosalind drops

her trans-sexual disguise and weds Orlando who has

proved himself worthy of this clever girl. Celia is

partioned off to Oliver. Silvius and Phebe, the past­

orals are married and even Touchstone is drawn into

the biological flux when he marries Audrey. All receive

the benediction of Duke Frederick (the opposite of the

original senex iratus):

Wedding is great June's crown:

0 blessed bond of board and bed!
'tis Hymen peoples every town;
High wedlock then be honored:
Honor, high honor, and renoun
to Hymen, god of every town."^
 75

We must make some exception to this happy finale

however in the case of Jaques, thei'.dour, sceptical man.

Like Malvolio in Twelfth Night, this puritanical thinker

is left outside the pattern of marriages and almost

outside the redeemed society. Jaques elects to;, stay

in the woods with the now self-exiled Duke Senior. His

place is with the tragic and the alienated. And there

is a trace of his final melancholy even in the union of

Touchstone and Audrey. The fool is not to be strictly

separated from the satirical and sceptical thinker, as

we have seen. As Jaques has identified with and envied

Touchstone, so the latter shows his rimfe&llectual de­

tachment in the disillusioned and realistic manner in

which he accepts Audrey. Touchstone seems to fondly

patronize her as a poor but necessary thing and to

look at marriage in the chilly light of St.Pauls advice:

it is "better to marry than to burn:" Thus even Touchstone,

surely one of Shakespeare’s jollier creations, we

 76

find signifigant links with the disillusioned and

sceptical mind of tragedy which stands outside the

cyclical getting and begetting of the life-process,

rather appalled after all by the physical world. We

shall see the tendency even more exaggerated in the

character of Feste, Shakespeare's last fool within the

comic genre. "Oh that I were a fool1

. I am ambitious

for a motley coat says Jaques in epvy of Touchstone.

But Jaques wants not the festivity of comedy so much as

freedom to punish folly with the string of satire like

Hamlet, who uses madness as a mask to assail the cor­

ruption of the sane court, Shakespeare's mature fools

grow away from the simple celebration of.nature toward

the realization that there may be something."rotton" at

the heart of things which laughter cannot exorcise.

 NOTES TO CHAPTER FOUR

1) Henry Norman Hudson As You Like It, p.xvii

2) William Shakespeare Op. cit. p.

3)Henry N. Hudson Op. cit. p.x/ii

4) William Shakespeare O p . c-it. (II,v,47)

Op. c i t . (II,vii,2-9)

Op. c i t . (II,v i i , 139-140)

Op . cit. (II,iv,16-18)

8 ) C.L.Barber Shakespeare's Festive Comedy , p.6

9) Ibid. Op. cit. p.112

10)William Shakespeare Op. cit. (II,vii,42-43)

 CHAPTER FIVE
TWELFTH NIGHT

In this chapter, I will study Feste, the court-

fool of Twelfth Night, in relationship to his environment.

Twelfth Night, or What You Will, was probobly

written for the performance on the twelfth night, that

is, the last night of Christmas holiday, January 6 th,

1601; morever, it was first printed in the first Folio,

where it occupies pages 255-7 in the division of comedies.

The plot may be summarized as follows: Viola and Sebastian,

twin brother and sister, are shipwrecked and thrown ashore

at different places on the coast of Illyria, each

believing the other is drowned. Viola disguises herself,

as a boy, (Cesario) and becomes the page of Orsino, the

Duke of the island. She falls in love with him. However,

4 1

he wants to marry Countess Olivia and sends 'Cesario'

to persuade the lady to wed him. But Olivia falls in

love with the page, instead. Meanwhile, exploring the

 79

town, Sebastian is followed by the sea-captain who res­

cued him, Antonio. Antonio appears before Viola, whom

àée takes for Sebastian, and is arrested by Orsino's

officers. Later on, Olivia persuades Viola's brother to

marry the Countess, thinking that she is 'Cesario', and

at last, when brother and sister are together, the mistakes

are explained and Viola marries Duke Orsino, while

Sebastian becomes Olivia's husband.

i
In the 'low' plot, Sir Toby Belch, Olivia's uncle,

Sir Andrew Aqucheeck and her maid Maria play a trick on

the Countess' steward, Malvolio. They send him a letter

which he thinks to be a loveletter from Olivia; in it

he is told to dress and act in a strange way to gain her

love. When he appears as was recommended, he is treated

as a madman, and much fun is made of him by the foolish

wiseman, Feste, who is Olivia's clown.

As a clown, Feste (whose name suggests fête -

feast) should embody the carnival spirit. Ye£, Feste

is not really the representative of fantasy and holiday,

 80

but of remorseless and strictly counted time. It is

he who makes us feel and face the world beyond holiday.

Feste is a different kind of festive spirit, and his

name seems rather ironic.

Feste is the professional jester in Countess Olivia'S

household. As a clown, his main function is to juggle with

words until everthing, including the truth, is upside

down and inside out. Feste not only jests, but perceives
I -

and states the fact of his jesting: "A sentence is but

a cheveril glove to a good wit; how quickly the wrong side

1
may be turned outward." Furthermore, his humor is intel­

lectual rather than comic: "he is not Olivia's fool,

2
but her corrupter of words." With what quickness of

brain he pretends to misunderstand 'Cesario's' question:

"Dost thou live by thy labor?/ No, sir, I live by the

3
church." For these and other reasons, Viola is right in .

saying to Feste: "This fellow is wise enough to play

a fool . ' * 4
 81

The clown may turn his foolery into mimicry of

anybody or anything. In fact, Festes fooling is a

pretense. G.Santayana affirms, in his article "The

Comic Mask",

"for the actor is able to revert from those

assumed attitudes to his natural self; whilst
his models have no natural self save that imit-
able attitude and can never disown it, so that
the fool feels himself superior as universal
satirist, to all actual men, and the belabours
5
at them unmercifully."
I

In the section on Carnival traditions, we mentioned

the clown. But we should.now observe that clowning

is connected with the use of the mask. Feste is the

only professional among a crowd of amateurs; he clowns

for a living. He never commits the amateur's mistake

of confusing his personality with his mask. Mentally,

he is not a fool: "Lady, no cuccullus non facit monachum,"

£
that's as much as to say "I swear no motley inrjny brain,"

he tells his mistress Olivia. He wears the mask of folly

 82

rather to hide his lonely apprehension of truth behind

illusion. Although he may have deliberately chosen his

role, society determines its conditions; now that he is

growing old, (he had already jested for Olivia's father)

his life is becoming difficult. Olivia spurns him: "Go

to, you're a dry fool. I'll no more.of you; besides,

7
you grow dishonest." Again she explains, "Now you see,

8
sir, how your fooling grows old and people dislike it."

Sir Toby Belch's niece seems to imply that people of her

own generation don't have the same sense of humor which

the previous generation had.

It is important to emphasize a point, which has

already been mentioned and this point is.Jan Kot's :

"A fool who is recognized for a fool, who has

accepted the fact that he's only a jester in the
service of the prince(in our case, of Olivia's)
ceases to be a clown. But his assumption is that
every man is a fool; and the greatest fool is he
who does not know he is a fool." 9

This ironically fits Olivia herself.

Feste is able to penatrate the mask of all the

 83

characters in Twelfth Night and, yet, he succeeds in

retaining his own. He sees through the disguises of

society because he is above and beyond it; he succeeds

in keeping his own mask for he is above and beyond it;

he succeeds in keeping his own mask for he is a pur­

veyor of illusion, after all, an actor, whose main function

is not to be himself.

Earlier we observed the following points:

a) "The fools are conspicuously classless, or at very

least difficult to place in the social hierarchies."^

Although, like Feste, they may haunt the houses of the

mighty, they are neither of the upperclass nor distinctly

of any other;

b) "The fools are a law unto themselves; that is,

they so speak what they think, they're expected, even

incited to do so, and yet they can be punished for'it

Feste is not punished, just warned by Maria that he will

 84

be hanged for being a truant. He replies: "Many a

12
good hanging prevents a bad marriage." The critic

Edward Arnold affirms that:

"this ironic right to speak is often referred to

as the fool's license and it's usually assumed
that it is a tradition and not a palpable real­
ity. Whether or not the artist's license has
created a fool's license - depicting something
that did not exist, but was well known as a
tradition or whether some fools did possess a
written license is not known." 13

Feste's highly omniscient character: as soon as

he is presented in the play, Maria's secret is no secret

for him anymore. He chastizes his lady in the sense of

showing Olivia the artificiality of her mourning her

dead brother: "The more fool, madonna, to mourn for

your brother's soul in heaven." 14 He certainly realizes

that her mourning is an excuse for not accepting Duke

Orsino, who "loves" her, or, rather is in love with

the idea of being in love. As a clown, Feste's philos­

ophy demands that he show the truth and abolish myths.

 85

That is what he does with Orsino, Duke of Illyria:

"Now the melancholy god protect thee, and the tailor

make.thy doublet changeable tafetta, for my .mind is

very opal." 15 The clown claims that as changeable in

color as opal might be, so changeable in love and -behavior

is he, the Duke. We see Orsino's folly in his opening

speech:

If music be the food of love, play on;

Give me excess of it, that surfeiting,
The appetite may sicken and so die.
•: Enough', no more. 16

Listening to music, it seems that Orsino want’to cap­

ture a moment of intense delight he had in the past.

17
"That strain again." Since he concludes the re-cap­

ture to be impossible, the Duke replies: "It had a dy-

18
ing fall." ^It looks like as if Orsino is wrapped in

colored paper and cannot distinguish between actual

and delirious love. This "being in love with the idea

of being in love" is rather a fixed idea of being in love

with the idea of being in love. Reason is necessary for

love to succeed; however reasoning is something impos­

sible for Orsino. Indeed, he's changeable, for, on one

hand, he is in love with Countess Olivia, while five

minutes later, his heart belongs to Viola. As a matter

of fact, there is a separation between those two loves

of the Duke: a bridge of self-contradiction and self-

destruction.
Proof of Feste's omniscience in Twelfth Night

is the fact that he foresees Malvolio's fate:

Malvolio:"infirmity, that decays the wise,

doth ever make the better fool.
FesterGod send you, sir,'a speady infirmity,
19
for the better increasing of your folly."

Even though Feste knows the masks of all characters,

he never discovered Viola's; Shakespeare implies with

this that Viola as 'Cesario' is wholly in the truth and

knows exactly who she is.

The third characteristic of the court-fool, •

according to Enid Welsford, is "that despite an assumed

simplicity, his utterances are unsimple." 20 We may see

this when Sir Toby Belch and Andrew Aquecheeck are eat­

ing in Olivia's house, and Feste, the jester, appears.

Sir Andrew anounces: "Here comes the fool, i'faith,"

but Feste replies: "Did you never see a picture of we

21
three?" , meaning that all three are fools. How fool­

ish are Countess Olivia's uncle and his companion not

to see the clown's wisdom, which proves them to be ex­

amples of foolish wisemenm, in Erasmian nomenclature.

Feste's philosophy is that everybody is a fool and, as

we have often observed, the greatest fool is he who does

not realize his.foolishness.

Sir Andrew Aquecheek might stand for Sir Toby's

parrot, since he repeats his words and imitates him, with­

out even understanding what he says. He is too far below

Feste to apprehend the depth of the jester's wisdom,

which is the fruit of bitterness, of pretending t-o be

what he is not in order to survive.

Sir Toby calls Feste an ass; later on, towards

the end of the play, when mostly all the characters have

been unmasked, Feste, in a language of grief and sorrow,

tells Duke Orsino that he does what he does for his pro­

fession, and not because he likes it.

"Marry sir, they praise me and make an ass

of me; now my foes tell me plainly I am an ass;
so that by my foes, sir, I profit in the know-
2
ledge of myself, and by my friends I am abused."

Viola, disguised as 'Cesario', thinks of Feste

as the merry fellow who makes his living by playing

tricks on others, and, so, doesn't care for anything.

However, he does care for something, as he himself replies

By speaking in superficial terms, he implies a "deep

structure" Only he has the gift of wisdom, for wisdom

is something that just concerns him after all: He is the .

one who, unseen, sees almost everything.

Furthermore, Feste's statements to Sebastian

"I am afraid this great lubber, the world, will prove

23
a cockney" and "The whirgling of time brings in his

24
revenges" show that if the actual fool saw life with
 89

the eyes of the wise fool, they would have understood

the. meaning of his words. Since they do riot, they are

1 buts' and we laugh at them rather than with them. Aqe-

cheeck and his friends were unable to understand the

fact that the fool's heart can suffer even while clowning.

The fourth characteristic of the court-fools,

according to Welsford, is that "they express a with-

25
drawl syndrome." Their involvement in the action, incidents

and tensions of the play is peripheral. Edward Arnold

says: "this posture is implicitly comprehended on the

reading of the play, but becomes explicit when they're

26
experienced." The withdrawl syndrome suggests that the

fool may represent the author himself, (Shakespeare), for:

a) "the fool was an entertainer; so was Shakespeare; 27

b) the fool, as part of his professional function, lived

in and helped to sustain a world of illusion; so did

Shakespeare, as a dramatist, is the greatest examplar of

the way in which the artist uses illusion in the name

of reality."^
 There are two characters in Twelfth Night who

are contraries to each other: Feste, the wise fool, and

Malvolio, the foolish wise man. Feste is Olivia's jester

and the aim of his profession is to provide entertainment.

On the other hand, Malvolio represents the Puritanism

which was beginning to flourish.at the time the play in

discussion was written. As a puritan, Malvolio is strict

in morals and regards fun and pleasure as sinful. For

example, when the trio-Feste, Sir Andrew Aquecheek and

Sir Toby Belch are singing and drinking until late,

Malvolio's intervention is unsympathetic. Malvolio, who

despises folly, such as the fooling of Sir Toby Belch

and Andrew Aqucheeck and the comments of Feste, himself

emerges as a fool in his solemnity:

"My masters you are mad, or what are you? Have

you no wit, no manner, no honesty, but to gabble
like .tinkers at this time of night? Do you make
an alehouse of my lady's liouse, that ye squeak
out your coziers' catches without any mitigation
or remorse of voice? Is there no respect of
29
place, persons, nor time in you."
Because Malvolio, on one hand; speaks in the name of dec­

orum;- he refuses, on the other hand, to see things in

the way that good-humored society incites him to see.

He was considered mad, not in clinical terms, however,

but in the sense that he didn't follow the perscriptions

of society. This is what the quotation implies. We might

sau that Malvolio, because of this fact, is inprisoned

in the Dark Room, which stands for his closed self.

1i

It is Feste's job to purge Malvolio from his

puritanical ideas, from his 'self-love' as Mrs.Helen

O'Neil puts it. He attempts Malvolio's catharsis under

the mask of Sir Topaz.(The topaz was a jewel thought to

cure mad people.) The clown enters the Dark House to

purge Countess Olivia's steward; Malvolio cannot see the

jester because of the darkness; besides, Festes is a

master in the management of his voice. He baits Malvolio

unmercifully:

Feste (singing):"Hey Robin, jolly Robin. Tell me

 how thou lady does.
Malvolio: Fool !’130

Feste: My lady is unkind, perdy.

Malvolio: Fool I-3'*"

Feste:"Alas! Why is she so?

32
Malvolio: Fool, I say!"

Feste fails to purge Malvolio, for the strict

rules of Puritanism will never allow Malvolio to release

his true selfMrs.Helen O ’Neil affirms: "Malvolio is so

sick of self-love that his sufferings cannot reform it." 33

With this character, Shakespeare suggests the limits of

comedy: he seems to teil us that comedy is neither written

for all people, nor can it solve all their problems.

The fool here fails to perform his function and the fool­

ish wise man does not accept the lesson of comedy: "I'll

revenge on all the pack of you!" 34

It has been suggested that Feste, as a kin^ of

Socrates figure, is a relic from the past: he's old and

is no longer esteemed by his employer; he does not really

act, but just comments on the action rather fatalistically

 93

"But when I came unto my beds,

With hey, ho, the wind and the rain;
With toss-pots still had drunken heads,
35
For the rain, it rained every day."

Though his conscious philosophy is Erasmain, his soul

is weary and sceptical.

Feste is a kind of chameleon - he adjusts himself

according to the setting. Nobody likes him, and this fact

makes him realize that he has to look out for himself.

Therefore, he does not show affection for anybody: his

liking for Maria doesn't amount to fondness; he enjoys

singing and drinking with Sir Andrew, but he hates

drunkenness; his attitude towards strangers is extremely

cool,.he is not even attracted by Viola.

■ His attitude, then, seems to fit a withdrawl

syndrome, for this fool, (Shakespeare, we suggest), does

nothing to improve other characters; he just states facts

as a cool-reasoned outsider, who enters a situation, which

has nothing to do with him personally. He sees the world,

and reasons about it without any private emotional involvement.

 94

As a professional jester, Feste is given to song

and music, even though he might not be fond of merri­

ment any more. From song to song, Feste's lyrics show

a deepening philosophical melancholy. He is an extreme

example of the intellectual fool who has lost his sim­

ple roots in nature. He is.melancholy because he is in­

tellectual; therefore he makes so many wise observations

about life, observations which the 'natural' is un-

l
able to think of!

Each of Feste's songs is magnificiantly suitable

to the occasion it is sung:

"0 mistress mine'.where are you roaming?

0 stay and hear Iyour true love's coming,
That can sing both high and low,
Trip no further, pretty sweetting,
Journeys end in lovers meeting,
Every wise man's son doth know." 3 6 (11,111,33-38)

According to Mrs.Helen O'Neil, this song foreshadows

the happy ending of the play: "journeys end in lovers

meeting." On the other hand, when Feste sings this tune,

Sir Toby Belch and Andrew Aquecheeck listen to him; the

former embodies the carnival spirit and the other,

actual unrealized foolishness. This song is an irony

towards Sir Andrew, whose.love for Countess Olivia

is a mere bubble. Lady Olivia would never love such

an idiot'. Furthermore, the songs of a drunkard could

never be masterpeicesI In this respect, Sir Toby Belch

neice knew her place. In his second song, also sung to

Sir Toby Belch and Andrew Aquecheek,

"What is love? 'Tis not hereafter;

Present myrth hath present laughter;
What's to come is still unsure.
In delay there lies no plenty;
Then come kiss me, sweet and twenty,
Youth's a stuff will not endure."^ (II,III,41

Feste's change of character begins; that is, his view

°f fact starts being philosophical. Here, he makes us

aware of the similarity between love and comedy. For

comedy, time is the condition of present existence;

moreover, comedy is immersed in time, in the and and

now. The same happens with love, and it is Feste who

affirms:
 "What is love? T 1 is not hereafter;
Present myrth hath present laughter;
37
Youth's a stuff will not endure."

The critic Mrs.O'Neil agrees with this Shakespearian

fool, warning those who wait too long. She illustrates

this point, the theme of carpe diem, by examplifying

Olivia who wasted her uouth in self-imposed seclusion.

Feste's third song is dedicated to Orsino, Duke

of Illyria. It represents an invitation to death due

to unrequired love. Therefore it shows the pattern of

deepening melancholy. As Mrs.O'Neil affirms: "The mood

of this song is based upon the convention, but it is

exactly what the Duke calls the food of love:"

"Come away, come away, death,

And in sad cypress let me be laid;
Fly away, fly away breath;
I am slain by a fair maid.
My shroud of white, stuck all with you,
0 prepare it;

My part of death, no one so true

Did share it. •

Not a flower, not a flower sweet,
On lay black coffin let there be strewn;
Not a friend, not a friend greet
My poor corse, where my bones shall be thrown
 A thousand thousand sights to save,
Lay me 0! where
sad true lover never finds my grave,
"? Q
To weep there." (II,iv,49-64)

Festers last song is the sad song of Humanity: the

clown realizes Mankinds cycle of life - infancy, youth,

old age and death. He does not judge, but simply states

his thoughts. In the last stanza of Feste's final song

we suggest that the jester is like Shakespeare himself,

for there are indications that the playwright will turn

from the comic genre now toward the darker world of

tragedies. The last ballad goes like this:

"When that I was and a little tiny boy,

With hey, ho, the wind and the rain;
A foolish thing was but a toy,
For the rain it raineth every day.

But when I came to man's estate,

With hey, ho, the wind and the rain;
'Gainst knaves and thieves men shut their gate,

For the rain it raineth every day.

But when I came, alas, to wive,

With hey, ho, the wind and the rain;
By swaggering , could I never thieve,
For the rain it raineth every day.
 But when I came unto my beds,
With hey, ho, the wind and the rain;
With toss-pots still had drunken heads,
For the rain it raineth every day.

A great while ago the world begun,

With hey, ho, the wind and the rain;
But that's all one, our play is done,
4o
And we'll strive to please you every day."
.(V,I,369-389)

Mrs.O'Neil interprets Feste's last song as follows:

"When he was a tiny boy he knew very well that

foolish things were unimportant. But he grew
up to become a clown and felt the sadness of
being rejected along with the knaves and thieves.
Later, Feste got married, but it was an un­
happy experience for him. To be a clown, he
had to associate with drunkards (like Sir
Toby)-, probobly far into the night, when he
should have been home with his wife.(This is
a hint to prove his marriage was unhappy).
In the lat verse, Feste begins to philo­
sophize. We remember that he is an old man,
towards the end of his career. He realizes
that life is not perfect and the world is so
old that it is futile to try to change it now.
The wind and rain are reminders of haesh real­
ity so different from the "make-believe" of
the play., But Feste will not persue these .mel­
ancholy thoughts. It does not matter; the play
is over, and there is pleasure to be had; if
not in life, at least in the theatre." 41
 Finishing Chapter V, we dare to say that as the

twelfth night, January 6 th, marks the end of Christmas

celebrations, this is Shakespeare's farewell to wit.

Moreover, it is the end of Merry England, of the bright

day of the Tudor houses, where hospitality and entertain­

ment were so predominant. It foresees the era of flour­

ishing Puritanism, which caused the theatres to be closed.

For Paul: Chapter Five: Mrs. Helen CVNeill .

We surely agree with Mrs.0'Neill's statements

concerning Feste's last song. It concerns Mankind's

period of life: during childhood, serious things or

problems unimportant to us; when we grow up poorly,

nobody likes us. As old people, the "make-believe"

world is certainly more pleasant than the harsh one.

And being,so, dream is more agreeable to our eyes than

reality, although if it is only illusory.

 100

Notes to Chapter Five

1) Quotation taken from the New Swan Shakespeare edition

of-Twelfth Night. (Ill,I,9-11).

2) Ibid. Op. cit. (111,1,29-30).

3) Ibid. Op. cit. (111,1,1-2).

4) Ibid. Op. cit. (Ill,i;29-30).

5) George Santayana. The Comic Mask and Carnival in

Robert W. Corrigan. Comedy;Meaning and Form, p.7 3.

I
6) Quotation from op. cit. (I,v,48-9).

7) Ibid. Op. cit. (I,v,36).

8) Ibid. Op. cit. (I,v,35). '

9) Jan Kott. Shakespeare, Our Contemporary, p.241.

10) Edward Arnold. Shakesperian Comedy, p.147

11) Ibid. Op. cit.,p.148.

12) Quotation is taken from op. cit. (I,v,16).

1#) Edward Arnold. Op. cit.,p.6 6 .

14) Quotation taken from the New Swan Shakespeare Edition

Op. cit. (I,v,61)

15) Ibid. Op. cit.. (11,^,70-71) .

16) Ibid. Op. cit. (I,I,1-1).

17) Ibid. Op. cit. (ibid.,3).

18) Ibid. Op. cit. (ibid.,4).

19) Ibid. Op. cit. (ibid, v,66-67).

20) Edward Arnold. Op. cit.,p.148.

21) Quotation taken from ibid.,o p . cit.. (11,111,13-15)

22) Ibid. Op. cit. (V,I,13-17).

23) Ibid. Op. cit. (iv,1-11-12).

24) Ibid. Op. cit., (V,I,356).

25) Edward Arnold. Op. cit., p.149.

26) Ibid. Op. cit., ibid.

27) Ibid. Op. cit., p.158.

28) Ibid. Op. cit. ,p.l59.

29) Quotation is taken from op. cit. (11,111,75

30) Ibid. Op. cit. (IV, 11,62-63).

31) Ibid. Op. cit. (IV,II,65-66).

32) Ibid. Op .cit. (IV,II,67-68) .

33) Helen O'Neill. Twelfth Night.p.10.

34) Quotation is taken from Op. cit,(V,1,357) .

35) Ibid. Op. cit.(V,1,381-384) .

 102

36) Ibid. Op. cit. XII,III,33-37) .

37) Ibid. Op. ci'tv (11,111,41-46).

38) Helen O'Neill. Op. cit., p.9.

39) Quotation is taken from op. cit. (II,iv,49-64) .

40) Ibid. Op. cit.(V, I, 369-389.) .

41) Helen O'Neill. Op.cit. p.9.

 CHAPTER SIX

KING LEAR

The Tragedy of King Lear was first performed in

1608, based on models whose origins must be sought for

in the dim world of celtic legend or the even more

remote world of nature-myths. The story is first pre­

sent in literature in Geoffrey of Monmonths latin

history of England, Historia Britonum,~*~ composed around

1130. Shakespeare's play was evidently composed between

1605 and 1606.

The sub plot of the Earl of Gloucester and his two

sons was certainly based on Sir Phillip Sidney's Arcadia

a collection of romances in the pastorial style (159 0).

Yet there are many innovations and changes that Shakes­

peare' s imagination added to his models: for example

Lear's madness, Cordelia's hanging, and her father's

death. In the subplot, Edgar's madness seems to have

been Shakespeare's invention.

 The plot of the play may be summarized as follows:

King Lear of Britian, feeling the burden of his years,

decides to divide his kingdom among his three daughters

He tells Goneril, Regan and Cordelia that their share

of the inheritance will depend on their love for him,

and he asks each for a testemony of this love. The

i '
two elder daughters, Goneril and Regan, protest that

their love is beyond their power to express and that

they have no joy in life besides his love. The younger

daughter Cordelia replies, however: "I cannot heave my

heart into my mouth: I love your majesty according to

3
my bond, no more nor less." The angry Lear then de­

cides to divide the third (and largest) part he had

reserved for Cordelia among her two sisters. The Earl

of Kent, who speaks in Cordelia's defense, is banished

from Court, though he returns disguised to serve old

Lear. The King of France marries Cordelia even though

she is disinherited, while Goneril marries the Duke of

Albany and Regan, the Duke of Cornwall.

' After a short period, the old king finds out that

hi-s-oldest daughters are abusing their power, and he

realizes his •foolishness in dividing his kingdom and

giving away his possessions. Driven to distraction by

the ingratitude of his daughters who refuse to support

his retinue and insult him, he goes off into the stormy

night accompanied by his fool and the Earl of Kent.

On the heath, they take refuge from the storm in a

hovel, where they find Edgar, the legitimate son of

the Earl of Gloucester. Edgar has had to flee for his

life from the treachery of his brother, the bastard

Edmund. For his own safety, Edgar has assumed the dis-.

guise of a beggar, "Mad Tom".

After scenes in which Lear touches the depth of

his madness, E^gar meets his father Gloucester wander­

ing on the heath and cares for the old man, who has

been blinded, without revealing his identity to his

father. Edgar agrees to lead Gloucester to Dover,

where the King';of France and Cordelia are landing with

an army to put Lear on the throne again. Meanwhile Lear

too, with the aid of the Duke of Kent, has reached

Dover and rejoins Cordelia in the French camp. Lear

seems to have regained his sanity through the agency

of the Fool, Edgar, and Kent,'but just as the play

seems to be taking a happy course, the French army

loses the battle against Edmunds forces and father

and daughter are made prisoners.

The play ends in a series of deaths: Regan is pois­

oned by Goneril, who loves Edmund, the former1s husband.

Goneril then kills herself after Edmund is slain by

his half-brother Edgar in single combat. Edgar describes

how Gloucester's heart 'burst itself' when the latter

discovers that 'Mad Tom' is really his loyal son.

Then Lear's heart also bursts when he sees the body of

Cordelia who has been murdered by Edmund's order.

Folly has several faces in this play and the fool

is mirroced by other characters who share his function.

(a) We have Lear himself, the fooish wise-man who

does not realize that love cannot be measured. He

must be purged of his egotism and pride by the agents

of folly.

(b) Principle among these is Lear's fool who from

the beginning warns the king of his mistake. From

behind the mask of his profession (he is an official

court-jester) he implies that it is Lear who is the

*

real fool. In the scenes on the heath, the fool height­

ens the sense of chaos with his topsy-turvey humor

which is ultimately intended to produce Cathartic

effects in the king.

(c) Edgar, disguised as Mad Tom carries the deliber­

ate dislocation of Lear's already dislocated mind

still further from the fool. Edgar performs the same

function later, still disguised, with his own father,

Gloucester. Like Lear, Gloucester has been blind to

the real nature of love and has favored the false

love of Edmund, who like Goneril is purely machiavillain.

 Lear has ruled for many years and the habit of

power has hardend his heart. Though he wants to give

up the office of king, he does not want to surrender

his power to command, and believe that he can command

love. This selfish blindness constitutes■his tragic

flaw, for which he must be punished by the fates.

But as his nemesk returns to him in the pathetic

scenes of exclusion and exposure on the heath we begin

to feel that universal justice is in truth being car­

ried too far, and that it may be a devil and not a

god at all who is distributing this justice.

It is when he goes mad on the heath that Lear sees

himself truly as a "poor, forked creature" who has

real links with others of his bird - a fool among fools

I am a very foolish old man.

...And to deal plainly,
4
I fear I am not in my right mind.

Through madness Lear finally catches sight of other •

people's sufferings - the Duke of Gloucester's, for

example:
 Let the superfluous and dieted man
That slaves of your ordinance,
That will not see
Because he doth not feel, feel your power quickly
So distribution should under excess, --
5
And each man have enough.

When he regains his sanity, which he can only do through

the tonic experience of folly, he can finally prop­

erly value Cordelia's love, and tell the false from

the true. Unfortunately, it is a little late: ‘when

he sees Cordelia dead, he seems to confuse her with

the fool:

And my poor fool is hanged,

no, no, no lifel
Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life,
And the no breath at all?*’

The fool in King Lear is different from the rest

of Shakespeare's fools: Shakespeare made him one of

those kindly creatures who, having once received an

idea into their brain, are incapable of parting with

it. His mental activity consists in going over the same

srring, sometimes with ingenuity, sometimes bitterly,

but always calculated. In his grief for Cordelia's

banishment, the Fool almost forgets his role and

makes us readers believe that under a veil of humor,

he is deeply serious.

On the other hand, the Fool makes the folly of

Lear the aim of his humor; his words are not simply

words, but advice which has deep signifigance. When

immediately after Goneril's cruel speech to the King,

I

the Fool breaks out, "Out went the candle and we were

7
left darkling," the light of the moral world has

ceased to shine, and the darkness grows relentlessly.

As the King descends into madness however, the Fool

guides and directs the former's folly: he jests in

order to cheer Lear up. In a similar way, he expresses

his devotion to Lear in the scene of the storm, where

his theme is that those who are fools in the eyes of

the world are^ justified by a higher power. It is im­

portant:- n to observe however that the fool has his

place in the tragedy only as long as the King is able

to perceive the fool's truth. There is no longer

need or room for the Fool after the King actually

goes mad. At this point the Fool vanishes, saying,

"I'll go to bed at noon." 8 This sudden withdrawl of

the:-Fool, together with the fact that (unlike Shakes­

peare's other fools) he is nameless suggests that he

is like something inside of Lear himself, an alter-ego.

Lear: Who is it that can tell me who I am?

9
Fool; Lear's shadov.

At the moment that Lear crosses into insanity, the

Fool is replaced by 'Mad Tom': his catharsis has

succeeded only too well and he vanishes forewith

from the action.

What G.Wilson Knight calls the 'Lear Universe'

is one in which disorder has both comic and tragic

dimensions. Thus the chaos of the storm which reveals

a derangement of logic which is at the heart of the

Fool's joking. In the storm of metaphsical evil and

in the folly which imitates it, the high is made low

amd the low is exalted. Whether we weep or laugh at

the inversion of the universe seems uncertain. In his

Elizabethan World Picture, E.M.Tillyard discusses the

chain of being, which the Elizabethan believed traced

as heirarchical order -front God and the angels down

to animals, plants, and minerals. He presents the

scheme whereby the order of the external,

I natural

universe was exactly reflected in the arrangeme&t

of the society. Thus the order that descended from

God to the minerals corresponds to the heirarchy

of King, nobility, commons, down to the fool and

beggar, who are the lowest on the human social scale.

The humor of the fool, turning as it does upon the

inversion of this fixed conventional pattern, carries

with it a suggestion of daemonic chaos which is not

so inappropriate in a tragedy as it might first seem.

Early in this thesis we stated that.incongruity,

which seems to lie at the heart of all joking, is

not exclusively a trait of the comic. In King Lear

we see it may as easily elicit tragic reactions.

 Notes to Chapter Six -, King Lear

1) Henry Norman Hudson The Tragedy of King Lear, p.X

2) Ibid. Op. cit., p.xxii

V William Shakespeare Op. cit. (I,i,96

4) Ibid. op- cit . (I,V, 50-52).

5) Ibid. Op. cit. (IV,VI,111-116)

6) Ibid. Op. cit. (Viii, 307-310)

7) Ibid. Op. cit. (I,iv,213)

8) Ibid. Op. cit. (III,vi,93)

9) Ibid. Op. cit. (I,iv,254-255)

 CONCLUSION

The subject of folly in renaissance literature

is a vast one, which we have attempted to limit by

foucussing on four representative Shakespearean plays

and by concentrating on the relationship between the

fool and the madman. In our discussion of the plays

we have emphasized the 'natural' and 'artificial'

I
components in the fools and traced a spectrum from

the more natural (Sir John Falstaff) to the intel­

lectual court fools of As You Like It, Twelfth

Night and King Lear.

Drawing chiefly on the anthropological critics

who derive from Cambridge School of Classical Anthro­

pology (Welsford, Barber, Frye and Gilbert Murray)

we have shown that in the Renaissance and medieval

world, madness was associated with inspiration: "the

lunatic, the loverctand the poet are of imagination

all compact." We have seen that under the mask of

folly/ the Fool of Shakespeare's dramas presents a

higher vision of truth which undercuts the fixed and

dogmatic conventions of society and reminds us of

our link with nature.

Let us go back now and try to answer the questions

we posed in Chapter One, part one.

We have found that it is indeed possible for the

fool to function outside of comedy, in the plays of his

torical and tragic genre. Just as the fact of incon­

gruity can be alternately tragic and comic, so the

elements of tragedy can overlap and mix in Shakespeare'

rendering of the fool. The fool always is marginal

to the action and shows a tendency to withdraw: a fact

that can have both comic and tragic signifigance.

Indeed we notice that in Lear, although the protag-

inist dies, his catharsis by the, fool seems to -have

succeeded. On the other hand, the comedies paradox- .

ically often show a catharsis that is incomplete

(Falstaff, Jaques, Malvolio). So tragedy is hidden

in the heart of comedy, and vice-versa.

Topical inversion and masking are, we have seen,

the means by which the fool seeks to induce the cath­

arsis of the deluded 'foolish wiseman'. It is through

the Carnival atmosphere of confusion and lost identity

that the comedies move toward their 'saturnalian' end:

" a through release to clarification", as Barber states

Comic action begins in an 'unredeemed' society where

people's true faces are really masks. To get rid of

the inner, unconscious mask that inhibits higher con­

sciousness, the fool puts on an artificial mask, and

urges the others to do likewise. Thus the 'Green W 6 rld'

(to use Frye's term) is a world both and more

natural than the everyday society with which comedy

begins. 'Natural' and 'artificial' traits mingle and

are confused in the fool - and we see even that ad-

amic man Falstaff can offer, stiff satiric criticisms

of society and perform the official function of the

court fool when he changes places with Hal in The

Tavern Scene.

- Finally we want to emphasize the seed of melancholy

that lies in the heart of every fool and links him to

the figure of the melancholy, philosophical and scept­

ical man who seems to be his opposite. Despite his

great heart, Falstaff is rebuffed and sent to the fleet

once he has served the purposes:,:' his Machiavellian

Master requires of him, Lears fool induces, through

■I ■

tonic treatment of madness, a clarity in the mind of

the old king who sees that he - and all men - are

really fools. But the fool disappears and the king

dies. Like Old Falstaff, the court fools of As You

Like It show signs of age and world-weariness. Touch­

stone often sounds like Jaques, who envies him, and

though this fool marries at the end of the play, he

sees this 'resolution' cynically and naturalistically.

In Twelfth Night,.Feste is old and weary of his job:

he looks forward to retirement and scorns his 'merry'

companions. At the end of the play he remains alone,

singing sadly of the wind and the rain while his

'patient' Malvolio remains unpurged and still bit

'terly puritanical. In the heart of ‘Joy’s grape',

the poet John Keats found the taste of melancholy

so it is with Shakespeare's fools.

 BIBLIOGRAPHY

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Stratford-Upon-Avon Studies, 1972. •

BARBER, C.L. Shakespeare1s Festive Comedy, Cleveland,

Ohio, Meridian Books, 19 59.

CORRIGAN, Robert W. Comedy - Meaning and Form, San

Fransisco, Chandler Publishing C o ., 1965.

FOUCALT, Michel. Madness and Civilization, New York,

New York, Vintage Books, 1965.

GODDARD, Harold. The Meaning of Shakespeare, Chicago,

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HARBAGE, Alfred. A Reader's Guide to William Shakespeare,

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HOLLAND, Norman N. The Shakespearean Imagination,

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HUNTER, G.K. King Henry IV. London, Macmillan Casebook

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KOTT, Jan. Shakespeare Our Contemporary. London,

Methuen and Co., 1972.
McMULLEN, Glenys. "The Fool as Entertainer and Satirist
Dalhousie Review, 50. (Spring 1970).

O ’NEILL, Helen. Twelfth Night. Great Britian, Heinmann

Eduacational Books, 1974.

SHAKESPEARE, William. As You Like It. Toronto, Glasglow

Brook and Co., 1915

__________ '
____ 1 Henry IV. Great Britian, Penguin
Books,1968.

___________ Twelfth Night. Great Britian, Longmans,

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__________ King Lear. Great Britian, Bigelow, Smith

•
and Co., 19 09.

TILLYARD, E.M. The Elizabethan World Picture . Great

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TRAVERSI, D.A. 1 & 2 An Approach to. Shakespeare.

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WELSFORD, Enid. The Fool; His Social and Literary

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