The Fool is Among Us
The Fool invites us to look under the masks, to become more conscious and to live more freely.
--
In Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well, when the boastful soldier and courtier Parolles says that he has found The Fool, the licensed clown Lavatch replies, ‘Did you find me in yourself, Sir?’ (Act 2, Scene 4). Somehow, we are all fools, and we all wear masks. The Fool invites us to look under the masks, to become more conscious and to live more freely.
An attempt to spot The Fool
As a generic archetype representing the fundamental creative urge, still holding all potentials, The Fool moves between play and seriousness and takes various and multiple shapes according to specific needs.
The Fool has been jestering at least since classical antiquity and the ancient Orient, in countless manifestations of folklore, theater, literature and public life. The Fool was the buffoon and laughter-maker of ancient Greece and the Middle-Ages, the court jester of medieval Europe, praised by Erasmus, a.k.a. the “Prince of the Humanists”, and the village-idiot in Russian lore.
Around the globe, The Fool takes the shape of the coyote in Native American mythology, the signifying monkey in African American culture and the fox of the Chaco people in South America.
The Fool has been incarnated in various individual characters throughout the ages, such as Vidusaka, the good-hearted and trusted friend of the hero in the Sanskritic tradition and Twisty Pole, the emperor’s dwarf jester of the Qin dynasty, who acted as a social safeguard, by providing a corrective to the pretentious vanity of officialdom. Nasreddin Hodja, the Seljuq witty satirist, sometimes wise, but often, too, a fool, appeared in thousands of stories that usually had a subtle humour and a pedagogic nature; he has frequently been compared to the northern European trickster Till Eulenspiegel, whose name translates to “owl mirror” and who has been playing practical jokes on his German contemporaries, exposing vices at every turn, at least since 1515. Harlequin, the Italian nimble and astute servant of the 17th century commedia dell’arte and the ingenious hidalgo, wandering knight, Don Quixote, also personified The Fool.
