IV
Erasmus' Stultitia ushers in that host of wise fools
who were to play such a dominant role in European
thought and literature for the next hundred years, from
Murner's Narrenbeschwörung (1512) to Cervantes' Don
Quixote (1605, 1615). It has often been observed that
the great fools of the sixteenth century are essentially
the creation of Renaissance humanism and their ironic
wisdom the result of the assimilation of Lucian by such
humanists as Alberti, More, and Erasmus himself. At
the same time, it is equally important to recognize the
evidence such fools supply that the hopeful ideals of
humanist philosophy were already being subjected to
increasing doubt. For the concept of folly, however
“wise,” is ultimately the antithesis of the concept of
the dignity of man; and if the medieval Feast of Fools
was religion on a holiday, the Renaissance triumph of
the wise fool was humanism on a holiday—or, perhaps
more accurately, humanism in mourning. The optimis-
tic dream of man and the heaven-storming possibilities
of human reason so proudly advanced by the humanists
of the fifteenth century did not concede much if any
wisdom to folly. Though the first humanist, Petrarch,
had claimed the wisdom of his own ignorance, the
ignorance he professed was not that of the fool but
only that of the non-Averroist. It is, significantly, only
in the sixteenth century, when the shadow of skepti-
cism fell across humanist thought, that the wise fool
emerges as the spokesman for his epoch. It is precisely
when he can no longer determine whether man is the
Godlike paragon of animals or the base quintessence
of dust that Hamlet puts on the antic disposition of
the fool and walks in the corridor reading Erasmus'
Praise of Folly.
Down the length of the sixteenth century, the wis-
dom of folly is described in all its nuances by such
diverse authors as Ariosto, Skelton, Rabelais, Folengo,
Nashe, Hans Sachs, Cornelius Agrippa, Francisco
Sanchez, Montaigne, and many others; the portrait of
the wise fool is drawn again and again by Breughel
and Bosch, Massys and Holbein, and countless minor
illustrators. When Olivia, in Twelfth Night, says of the
clown Feste, “This fellow is wise enough to play the
fool” (III.i.60) and when Touchstone, in As You Like
It, proverbially observes that “The fool doth think he
is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool”
(V.i.31), they are uttering what had by then become
commonplaces. In the age of Elizabeth, foolery did
indeed seem to walk about the orb like the sun and
shine everywhere; and one of Ben Jonson's last charac-
ters, looking back over the drama of the preceding
century, can nostalgically claim that “There was no
play [that is, of any merit] without a fool” (
Staple of
News, 1st Intermean, 35). For in England especially,
the wise fool found his true home in the drama of
Heywood, Marston, Middleton, Dekker, Jonson, and,
above all, Shakespeare. In both the comedies and the
tragedies, the Shakespearean wise fool has his splendid
role to play, from the bantering wit of Touchstone and
Feste to Yorick's gibeless skull and Cleopatra's death-
bearing clown. If Jaques, in the sun-dappled world of
Arden, can learnedly quote
The Praise of Folly to
demonstrate that all the world's a stage, it remains for
Lear, in the storm-tossed kingdom of tragedy, to ac-
knowledge that the world is “this great stage of fools.”
Lear's own fool is only the greatest of many who, for
all their motley, bring tears to our eyes because of the
profundity of their wisdom. Nor are those who wear
motley the only wise fools in Shakespeare: we better
understand such otherwise dissimilar characters as
Falstaff and Antony when we recognize that they too
manifest many of the traditional traits of the wise fool.
Significantly, the last of the great Renaissance fools,
Don Quixote, who rides forth as the age of humanism
is drawing to a close, is known to the world not for
his jesting motley but for his mournful countenance.
To be sure, his companion, Sancho Panza, is something
of a court jester without the office—or the court; but
by the beginning of the seventeenth century the pro-
fessional fool had almost had his day. Even his parti-
colored costume only partially survives in the Com-
media dell'Arte. The concept of folly, however, was far
from dead. For fools, whether specifically identified as
such or not, have continued down the centuries to call
into question the claims of learning, religion, and civi-
lization. Whenever human reason has most proudly
vaunted its achievements, it has been inevitably chal-
lenged by the mocking laughter of the wise fool. Long
after the Renaissance fool had made his exit from the
scene, from Grimmelshausen and Molière and Swift
to Dostoevsky's Prince Myshkin and Hauptmann's
Emanuel Quint and Yeats's Crazy Jane, the idea of the
wisdom of folly has persisted.
