Fool Characters In Shakespeare's Play
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The Role of Fool in Shakespeare’s Plays
In many Shakespeare’s plays, fool characters or comic characters are always include regardless of the genre of the play. This shows the importance of a fool character in Shakespeare’s plays as general fools only appears in comedy. They are called the fools or jesters as their characters are very similar to a modern clown, they lack common sense and are alienated from the play. Fools are not just used by Shakespeare, but in many medieval plays as well. According to Wells, fool or comic characters in Shakespearian literature is “type-character, related to the domestic fools kept in royal and noble households. There were wise fools–intelligent men who employed as entertainers–and natural fools–idiots that kept for amusement” (Wells, 2013). Fools are not the minor characters who come up on stage and amuse the audience, they are essential in a play, especially in the comedy genre. “He was apart from the ordinary man, irresponsible, but adept at uttering home truths which others would be afraid or too proud to acknowledge” (Salingar, 1976). As different forms of fool characters existed, they have a distance role to perform in the play. In the William Shakespeare’s comedy, A Mid-Summer Night’s Dream, Nick Bottom is the popular fool character while in tragicomedy The Tempest, Trinculo and Stephano are the comic characters, this essay will focus on this three comic characters. This essay argues that the role of fool characters in
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In his play, Twelfth Night, William Shakespeare has his characters participate in the practice of deception and dishonesty of others - after all, the foundation of Shakespeare’s play resides within a lie. One of the major deceptions in the play is executed by the Illyrian countess, Olivia, as she repeatedly claims to need solitude to mourn her brother’s death in order to avoid Duke Orsino and his obsession towards her. This deception contributes to the meaning of the work as a whole by adding the thematic message, deception and dishonesty is sometimes the better option when it comes to love. From the beginning of the play, Olivia is introduced as the grieving countess that has recently lost a brother.
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play. Especially, when the Fool first appearance is in Act 1, scene iv, after Cordelia had moved away with the King of France and Kent has banished out kingdom even after the storm and others disguiser figures, It seems, they are appearance on the stage at the same time frequently . Indeed, the Fool becomes Lear 's voice of reason and conscience, actually, Fool tries to move Lear 's Conscience at most times but when he feels that Lear seems to be torturing within his mind and heart, again he tries to calm him by the cleverly way ."The Fool sees or tries to see, the humorous potentialities in the most heart wrenching of incidents"(Knight,2005:187).
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Also, their witty comments to each other make for highly entertaining moments. Claudio allows other people to fool him into believing untrue things, which leads to dramatic altercations with numerous characters. Dogberry’s unwittiness leads to a coincidence that saves the whole play and creates an ironic feeling that the least intelligent character discovered the evil plot. “The wit of Shakespeare’s play informs the words spoken by the characters, places the characters themselves as truly witty and intelligent, inappropriately facetious, or ingeniously witless, suggests the lines of action these characters will
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Chris Wiley, in his essay, “Fooling Around: The Court Jesters of Shakespeare” divides the fools into three categories: ‘Clowns’, who turn farce into precise science, ‘Dunces’, who use their lack of intelligence as the medium of human and the princes of fooling, and ‘court jesters’ who turn fooling around into a respectable position. He calls the jester, a ‘restrained down” and an “educated dunces”. Critic Roger Ellis has observed that the fools were frequently given the reign to comment on society and their action changes the social view, Shakespearean fools demonstrate a subversive potential. Critic Roberta Mullini argued that such characters can be constructed as disrupting the traditional
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Being Deceitful Lead to Deaths Being deceitful is kind of like saying a little white lie, and lots of people are being deceitful nowadays. Some people do not think twice when they are being deceitful, so they end up in bad situations. An example of this is in Romeo and Juliet, a tragedy written by Shakespeare. There are scenes where it showed Romeo and Juliet being deceitful, which led to terrible results, or in their case, their death. For example, Juliet was being deceitful to her parents when she asked permission to have confession, Romeo was being deceitful to Tybalt when he insulted Romeo, the second time Juliet was being deceitful was when she told the nurse about going to Friar Laurence for confession.
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