I
The implications inherent in the figure of the wise
fool grow out of the attitudes most societies have held
about real fools. The names he has been given suggest,
in their etymological undertones, the various charac-
teristics that have been attributed to the fool: that he
is empty-headed (μάταιος, inanis, fool), dull-witted
(μῶρος, stultus, dolt, clown), feebleminded (imbécile,
dotard), and lacks understanding (ἄνοοσ, ἄφρων
in-
sipiens); that he is different from normal men (idiot);
that he is either inarticulate (
Tor) or babbles incoher-
ently (
fatuus) and is given to boisterous merrymaking
(
buffone); that he does not recognize the codes of
propriety (
ineptus) and loves to mock others (
Narr);
that he acts like a child (νήπιος); and that he has a
natural simplicity and innocence of heart (εὐήθης, nat-
ural, simpleton). Though violent madmen have, of
necessity, usually had to be restrained or incarcerated
by society, harmless fools have often enjoyed special
privileges. Their helplessness has earned them the
pitying protection of the more fortunate, just as their
childishness has won them the license granted children
for their irresponsible—and often irreverent—words or
actions. Since they are guided by nothing but their
natural instincts, the fool and the child are not held
accountable to the rules of civilized society. For while
mature adults are enjoined from breaking society's
accepted codes of conduct and belief on the assumption
that they ought to “know better,” the fool, like the
child, is not expected to “know” anything. Because of
this, he has often been granted considerable freedom.
Perhaps more than anything else, it is this privilege
of speaking with impunity that was to make the “all-
licensed fool” so attractive to the literary imagination.
Moreover, though the fact that fools stand apart from
normal humanity sometimes caused them to be treated
as objects of derision, it also sometimes caused them
to be venerated. In the Middle Ages, as in certain
primitive societies, they were thought to be under the
special protection of God, and the possibility always
existed that what sounded like inane chatter was, in
actual fact, theopneustic glossolalia.
The modern psychologist has, retrospectively, taken
special interest in the personality of the fool; for in
Freudian terms he embodies the untrammeled expres-
sion of the id. Lacking any vestige of a superego, the
fool surrenders shamelessly to his bodily appetites and
natural desires, and he is regularly characterized by
his hunger, thirst, lust, and obsession with obscenities.
It has been pointed out that his very etymology has
a genital suggestion (follis), and the familiar bauble
of the professional fool is undeniably phallic. With no
social personality to mask his emotions, he is childlike
in the utter frankness of his responses: when happy,
he laughs; when sad, he cries. Since he is equally short
of memory and unable to follow anything to its logical
conclusion, the past and the future are meaningless to
him as he happily lives in and for the moment. In-
structed only by his senses and his intuition and seeking
only self-gratification, he is the pleasure-principle
personified. His enemy, the superego, represents all the
ordered conventions and civilizing rationality of soci
ety which he finds both incomprehensible and intoler-
ably repressive. However we may choose to express
the antithesis—id vs. superego, heart vs. head, chaos
vs. order, anarchy vs. culture, nature vs. art, passion
vs. reason, pleasure vs. virtue, Carnival vs. Lent—his
allegiance is always unmistakably clear and one-sided.
By at least the end of the twelfth century (and
probably earlier), the fool had achieved the eminence
of having his own feast day. The famous, sometimes
infamous, Fête des Fous gave the lower clergy, if only
ephemerally, the traditional freedom accorded the fool.
Related to the Roman Saturnalia and embodying the
spirit of carnival misrule, the Feast of Fools found its
Scriptural authority in a verse from the Magnificat:
Deposuit potentes de sede, et exaltavit humiles. Almost
three centuries later, when these blasphemous celebra-
tions had been driven out of the church, they were
taken over and expanded by the secular Sociétés
Joyeuses in the towns and universities. Emulating the
sub-deacons of the cathedrals, students and urban citi-
zens took the opportunity to lord it over their betters
and mock authority, both temporal and religious, with
assumed amnesty. But the original Scriptural sugges-
tion of The World Turned Upside-Down continued to
be closely associated with the fool. For by his very
nature, the fool is iconoclastic, not simply irreverent
but potentially subversive in his inability to compre-
hend the assumptions on which authority is founded.
He is too simpleminded to see the emperor's new
clothes and too unsophisticated to refrain from point-
ing out the nakedness of the truth.
At the same time, the fools of the Fête des Fous
and the Société Joyeuse were not, of course, genuinely
simpleminded, and the distinction must be made be-
tween the authentic or natural fool and the artificial
or professional fool. Though we do not know when
it first appeared advantageous for a normal man to
assume the guise of a simpleton, there are accounts
in Xenophon, Athenaeus, Lucian, and Plautus of pro-
fessionally amusing parasites who earned their bread
and butter with idiocies, and wealthy Romans kept
deformed buffoons in their households whose
impudence was legendary. Their descendants are the
Rigoletto-type fools of late-medieval and Renaissance
Europe with their traditional costume of motley, cap
and bells, and marotte. They had their heyday in the
fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and a few of them
achieved such fame that their names are still known
to us. At least one of them, the fool of François I, is
supposed to have been truly witless, and the famous
fool of Sir Thomas More had suffered brain damage
as the result of a fall from a church-steeple; but most
of them were men of normal intelligence who found
it profitable to adopt motley for its ability to amuse
and the impunity it gave them to speak freely. The
professional jester, whose wry quips tended not only
to amuse but often to correct his master, personifies
the penchant all fools have for commenting on the
morals of others and affairs of state. One of the most
characteristic gestures of
le fou glossateur, as one critic
has called him, is to hold a mirror up for our scrutiny
and to exclaim, “
tu quoque!” It is this aspect of the
fool which was to achieve its most moving realization
in the nameless court fool who accompanies King Lear
across the barren heath of the world.
