Fools & Jesters

Trickster "is an instinctual creature who, like the real-life fool, is often compared to a child or an animal: psychologist Carl Jung, for example, describes Trickster's consciousness as "corresponding to a psyche that has hardly left the animal level."

The mental aberration attributed to both the fool and the trickster is often mirrored in his appearance, his bizarre attire or grotesque deformity immediately setting him apart from his fellow man. (Townsen 3)

"Tom Thumb's alphabet," from The child's coloured gift book, illustrated by the Brothers Dalziel, London, 1867
The word "Zany" has its roots in the Italian Commedia dell'Arte clown, Zanni

The clown "is a counter image of the sublime from which the audience is separated by an equally large distance. The spectator is the man in the middle..." (Zucker 314).

The clown "evokes laughter and gives some strange psychological satisfaction by an appearance and a behavior that elsewhere in society are repudiated, abhorred, and despised. He is not only allowed but even expected to act and to speak in a way which his audience, while being amused, considers entirely improper, inadequate, and out of order," (Zucker 310).

          This print by John Derricke called ‘The Image of Irelande’ dates from 1581.

 

Illustration to a Latin edition of Sebastian Brant's 'Ship of Fools', probably printed by Petri in Basel in 1572.
  c.1568-72 | Woodcut | British Museum

 

The World Reversed: Man plays the part of the Fool through foolish acts in many prints and books from the 16th century. The Allegory of the Ship of Fools:by the humanist Sebastian Brant, published in Basel in 1494. This work was illustrated by woodcuts showing ships loaded with fools drifting toward the "fool's paradise," called Narragonia" (Louvre Museum). 

Recently a commentator on The Daily Show referred to the Republican candidates as "a Noah's Arc of Idiots..."

 

The Ship of Fools | Hieronymus Bosch c.1510-15 | Louvre Museum
Inspired by the book:

Ship of Fools by Jake Baddeley, 2009.

Woodcut attributed to Haintz-Nar-Meister. | Illustration from Stultifera navis (Ship of Fools) by Sebastian Brant, 1498. University of Houston Digital Libraries

 

 

HOLY FOOLS

"Versatile rationality and obscene sensuality belong essentially together, because they are both taboo-breaking assaults on some hierarchical mythological order," (Zucker 311).

 

The Jester is almost always depicted carrying a staff, a phallic symbol also linking him to Mercury, the winged messenger of the gods.



Hermes | Artist Unknown | from jrfibonacci.wordpress.com

Jester's Staff, Bronze,15th c. | British Museum Collections



"The unifying symbolic image in pre-classical Greece is Hermes, the god of the rational psyche and of the phallus...It is therefore not surprising when in the astrological and alchemistic prints of the Renaissance we find the sign of Mercury-Hermes as that of the jesters and comedians." (Zucker 312).

 

In Christian thought:

"The devil as clown is the antagonist of the whole cosmic order. But...he himself is part of that order... The ridiculous presupposes the sublime, and the sublime in princely graciousness permits the presence of the ridiculous." (Zucker 312).

 

Social discourse also displays... built-in devices of criticism, of rebellion, of protest against existing structures, against boundaries, against the seriousness of order; and these devices are socially and ritually acknowledged. They are manifestations of the chaos on which order depends and over which it must reign supreme.  The other paradox of inverted social action, of chaotic topsy-turvydom, is that it remains a beacon pointed toward the positive, for with its constant attempt to create an antistructure, it cannot avoid structure or even deny it because, without it, chaos would not be possible. Such social figures of antistructure, which surpass the boundaries of the controlled, irreversible, perfect delineation of the world we find in the clown and the transvestite and in customs like the backward acting and reversing of speech at festive occasions (Koepping 193).

 

PROFESSIONAL FOOLS

"The vogue of the court fool seemed to have steadily increased during the fourteenth and to have culminated in the fifteenth and in the early sixteenth century, when he became a highly significant figure not only in social life, but still more in art and literature..." (Welsford 116) though there is evidence of court fools employed in Europe as early as the 12th century, and elsewhere long before.
Welsford writes that there is meagre evidence on the lives of court-fools, but that we can tell they were fed and clothed, received pay and medical treatment, and "were honorably buried," (119). This suggests a very different life and opinion of them than other performers received, who were traditionally vilified or looked down upon in ways equivalent to prostitutes.

In her widely referenced book, The Fool: His Social and Literary History, she writes of the fifteenth century, "Fools were employed by corporations as well as kings and noblemen... not excluding taverns and brothels." Professional Fools, amateur actors in Fool-Societies, and village idiots were coded by dress to mark them as fools. Court fools may have usually dressed as normal courtiers, while amateurs wore the recognizable motley, bells, hoods with ears, coxcombs and even tails. They carried bladders, swords or staffs." It has been pointed out that the fool thus adorned is not unlike the animal-mummers who... are usually supposed to be connected with religious ritual," (123).
 
Natural Fool vs. The Artificial Fool

• both employed at the professional level.
• The "natural" fool is the deformed, mentally-handicapped or otherwise "other."
• The artificial fool is an especially witty or acrobatic individual who worked more or less as a professional actor.

Townsen links physical deformity and idiocy as a symbol of the supernatural at work (12),and the costume of "professionals" especially at the town level was designed to "other" them or set them apart. Even the court fool, who may have worn no special costume, was set apart in his freedom to JEST, an act of border-crossing in itself, as many of the Jester's jokes would have crossed status boundaries, and many historical Jesters are recorded as having close personal relationships with the Kings and nobles they entertained.

 

 Fool |Mid-16th C., Painter Unknown.| Flemish | Wellesley College

From a series of four engravings by Franz Isaac Brun, 1555-1610. | British Museum Collections

From a series of four engravings by Franz Isaac Brun, 1555-1610 | British Museum

Costume study for a female fool | Circle School of Stefano dell Bella 1625-1664|  British Museum



Costume study for a fool | Drawn by Stefano della Bella 1625-1664.| British Museum

 

 Where is there any sacred myth, after the 19th century had completed its job of demythologizing the cosmos?...In a world which tends toward an absolute functionalization of the human,where man, faced with the myth of an unchangeable mechanism, drops into stupor, while he is manipulated and directed by powers out of his reach and his understanding-in such a world the clown becomes necessary again, as the one who affirms by denying. - Zucker, "The Image of the Clown," (316-17).