‘Wise enough to play the fool’: Clown and Class in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night
Immersion chez les fous

Par Benjamin Perriello
Publication en ligne le 15 octobre 2026

Table des matières

Article au format PDF

‘Wise enough to play the fool’: Clown and Class in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night (version PDF) (application/pdf – 219k)

Introduction

This fellow’s wise enough to play the fool,
And to do that well craves a kind of wit:
He must observe their mood on whom he jests,
The quality of persons, and the time,
And, like the haggard, check at every feather
That comes before his eye. This is a practice
As full of labour as a wise man’s art;
For folly, that he wisely shows, is fit,
But wise men, folly-fallen, quite taint their wit. (Twelfth Night, III.1.64-72.)¹

1The observation of Viola after her exchange with Feste at the beginning of Act 3 of Twelfth Night is one of Shakespeare’s most explicit reflections on the nature of clowns and fooling. This passage echoes Robert Armin’s writings about fools, and as Karin S. Coddon has pointed out, it goes beyond a purely meta-theatrical reflection on clowning or a homage to Armin's reputed comedic skill. Instead, the passage suggests the extent to which the comic actor – the fool or clown – serves a morally didactic function.² Furthermore, as he is “wise enough to play the fool” (III.1.64), Feste’s wisdom in folly is both central to the inversion and reversal at the heart of the play. It is also a key insight into the political and social environment of both the play and the contingent social and historical context in which it was written and performed.

2As an allowed fool, Feste’s dramatic function is linked to his social function. His mockery is one of the ways that as a subordinate character he dallies with his superiors in what one might term a scripted liberty. In keeping with the long history of the fool, Feste the clown serves as a foil to the hubris of tragic protagonists. In addition, the scripted liberty of the clown is a tool to understand and further question representation of lower classes in the early modern theater.

3In this paper, I will argue that Feste’s social status in the fictive economy of Illyria is intimately related to the didactic function of demonstrating the wisdom of folly. This depends on how we are to define both the fool and the clown, and determines how the scripted liberty of Feste functions in Twelfth Night.

The economy with the play and the play in an economy

4The fool’s dramatic function within the play converges with the fool or clown’s social function within the society from which the play emerges. As Michael D. Bristol pointed out over forty years ago, “theater continually redefines itself in relation to other closely related social, cultural and artistic orders.”³ However, this is not to suggest that there is a strict and transparent equation between theater and various social realities, whatever they might be. Theater is not a perfect mirror of the world in which it plays. The early modern theater had its own concerns and preoccupations, both material, social and political. Although there is no one-to-one relationship between the theater and society, it seems entirely legitimate and even necessary to adopt an interdisciplinary approach, as other recent scholars have done, such as Nathalie Rivière de Carles.⁴ This entails renewing ties with previous scholarship in the light of current questions in order to understand society through the theater, and the theater in society. Simply put, on the one hand, theater was like a shifting bell-weather; in Shakespeare’s case, light and sensitive enough to reflect the slightest changing airs. On the other hand, theater was itself an actor, playing a role that had definite consequences within society.

5More specifically, the clown characters have a specific role in what we may call the economy of the play. I mean this in both senses of the term. First, the economy of the play refers to its functionality as a work of theater, which includes the interaction of its various characters and how their respective roles move the play forward. Secondly, I would argue that the fictional society of each play has its own economy in the material sense of the term, or how the resources and power is distributed within the fictional society of the play. Who is beholden to whom, and why? These questions are particularly important when we consider the role of Feste within the economy of Twelfth Night.⁵

Fool or clown?

6Up to the present, I have used the words “fool” and “clown” interchangeably. What is a fool and what is a clown? Is there a difference between the two, and what were their respective social statuses? I propose to answer this question with a brief overview of the principal scholarly works that have focused on this question.

7From the late Middle Ages into the early modern period, the fool and later the clown had an evolving dramatic function, giving them somewhat unique statuses. More often than not, they were popular characters, manifestations of the lower classes and their preoccupations, usually assigned a comic role. One could best sum it up as ridendo dicere verum: to speak the truth by means of laughter.⁶ Derived from the late Medieval folk-play tradition, the stage fool’s engagement with social reality was often material, implicitly and explicitly criticizing social injustice and inequality.⁷ For example, The Second Shepherd’s Pageant, one of the Wakefield plays, opens with the shepherds lamenting their oppression and spoliation: “We are so hammed, / Fortaxed and rammed, / With these gentlery-men” (1.15-18).⁸

8As Enid Welsford observed, the fool had a dramatic and a social function because the fool was both a dramatis persona and a member of society.⁹ However, in her wide-ranging study of the fool and his social function, Welsford uses the two words “fool” and “clown” interchangeably and without definition. Less than twenty years later, Leslie Hotson also sidestepped the question, focusing on the fool as the only wearer of motley.¹⁰ In 1984, Sandra Billington wrote that the clown “was understood to be the country bumpkin” who “kept their country clothes and manners.”¹¹ Three years later, David Wiles dedicated a chapter to the clown in playhouse terminology, in which he argues that in the Elizabethan texts, “the clown refers to the actor a company employed specifically to be its clown.” He argues that the word “clown” enters the language in the Elizabethan period because it expressed a new concept, “the rustic who by virtue of his rusticity is necessarily inferior and ridiculous.”¹² Robert Hornback was more thorough. Drawing on Wiles, he stated that the clown referred to both the part and the player. He based his definition on the Oxford English Dictionary, writing that the clown was “a fool or jester, or comedian in an entertainment.”¹³ Robert H. Bell’s interesting work makes no distinction between the two terms.¹⁴ More recently Alice Equestri has written that the characters created for Arnim in Shakespeare’s romances are not “‘fools’ in the standard meaning of the term” but “clowns,” this being a broad term for the characters who bring laughter to a play.¹⁵

9There are three conclusions to draw from the above. First, the fool and the clown are not one and the same. The Oxford English Dictionary states that the clown is “a person similar to a fool or jester, as a character in drama”¹⁶ (emphasis mine). In this regard, Hornback is slightly mistaken; simply put, all clowns had the characteristics of the fool, but not all fools were clowns, because the fool precedes the clown.

10Second, almost all of the aforementioned scholars have ignored the wealth of material written in Latin. With the exception of Welsford (who does cite some Latin texts), no scholar has done an exhaustive study of different terms used to designate the fool in the Middle Ages into the early modern era. These include the terms insipiens, fatuus, stultus and morio, all of which may variously be translated as “fool.” This begs the question: what differences, if any, exist between the use of these words in influential early modern texts written in Latin?

11Finally, the clown is inextricably linked to the lower classes. The primary definition of the clown is “a person from the countryside; a peasant, an agricultural labourer,” and by extension, his manners are boorish. An early and notably clown, Dick Tarlton, used the garb and guise of the rustic as part of his routine.¹⁷ The stage-clown is therefore the dramatic interpretation of a distinct social reality in the early modern period. He subsumes some of the important traits, characteristics and functions of the fool, including the moral or spiritual dimension of the fool, best typified by Erasmus, to which I will turn later in connection to Feste’s foolery.

12The social reality out of which the stage clown emerged was one of violent social, economic and demographic change. From 1580 to 1600, London’s population doubled from 100,000 to 200,000 inhabitants, while the total population of England only rose by 20%. The cause of this rapid growth in the city’s population was migration.¹⁸ The late 16^th and early 17^th centuries witnessed a massive exodus of disposed rural poor, forced from their lands by the successive Enclosure Acts. Many went to London, where their presence arguably led to the emergence of the recurrent clown characters in early modern theater. In a sense, they are the amalgamated projection of the lower social class, with the specific traits of the rustic. From Hamlet to Macbeth, the clown characters in Shakespeare are all working men: porters, diggers and servants. Moreover, they are characterized by specific ways of speaking and acting, some of which reproduced the discursive strategies that formed part of the fool’s repertoire.

13The fool cum clown served a similar function to the arborescence of late medieval traditions that served as reminders of one’s mortality. These included the vanitas, the memento mori, and the ubi sunt traditions. The fool, like Death, has a restorative role, reminding the other characters of their folly; furthermore, there is abundant iconographic and textual evidence from the late Middle Ages and the early modern period in which the Fool and Death are explicitly conflated (moros/mors), particularly in the wake of the social and political disruption of the successive plagues¹⁹ (or even curative, if we consider the distemper of the bodily humors). In short, the clown rebukes, resists and reclaims his social status by talking back to his social betters, all of which relates to the function of Feste in Twelfth Night.

Feste as clown

14Who exactly is Feste? Is he a clown or a fool? With a name derived from the Italian festa, or “revels”, the mercurial Feste is pivotal to the carnivalesque inversion and reversal that underscores Twelfth Night. Furthermore, what Feste does and why he does so are intimately related to his social status within the imaginary society of Illyria.

15Feste’s name is mentioned only once in the dialogue in the folio edition, and never in the stage directions or speech prefixes, where he is invariably referred to as “clown;” the other characters call him a “fool.”²⁰ Feste was played by Robert Armin, who took over the clown roles when Will Kemp left the Chamberlain’s Men in early 1599. In his collaboration with Shakespeare, Armin’s clown roles developed into something like a combination of the eiron and chorus of Greek tragedy. Armin would go on to play Touchstone in As You Like It, the Gravedigger in Hamlet, Lavatch in Measure for Measure, the Fool in Lear, and the Porter in Macbeth, to mention only a few of his roles. Armin’s characters were a “new and distinctive line of sagacious fools”, “artificial” as opposed to “natural.”²¹ Cesario/Viola’s astute comment about Feste being “wise enough to play the fool” closely parallels some of Armin’s writings about foolery. As Armin wrote: “[f]or he shall have what thou that time has spent, / Playing the foole, thy folly to content.”²²

16As a clown, Feste’s character “as full of labour as a wise man’s art” drew upon a long-standing tradition that emerged in the Middle Ages and passed through the Humanist tradition in which the wisdom of folly was a central trope. Although comic and lowly, the fool had a moral and spiritual superiority. “Moriones et fatui omnium felicissimi,” wrote Erasmus in his Moriae encomium (In Praise of Folly): “[f]ools and sots are the happiest of all.”²³ As such, the fool is not only the astute commentator of society where folly is a foil, the means to gull the proud; he enjoys a moral and spiritual superiority, in tandem with the important notion of reversal in Christian theology. This is part and parcel of Erasmus’ serio ludere, or “joking seriously”²⁴; arguably one may find parallels with Feste’s role in the topsy-turvy of Twelfth Night.

17There is a biblical tradition that conveys the idea of wisdom in folly by mocking the pretensions of the powerful:

Si quis videtur inter vos sapiens esse, in hoc saeculo, stultus fiat ut sit sapiens. Sapientia enim huius mundi stultitia est apud Deum. Scriptum est enim : comprehendam sapientes in astutia eorum

18which the King James version translates as:

Let no man deceiue himself: If any man among you seemeth to bee wise in this world, let him become a foole, that he may be wise. For the wisdome of this world is foolishnesse with God: for it is written “He taketh the wise in their owne craftinesse (Iob 5.13).” (1 Cor. 3:18-19).²⁵

19The title of Erasmus’ text Moriae Encomium is a pun and a nod to his great friend, Saint Thomas More, who himself kept a fool, one Henry Patenson, identified in the sketch by Holbien as “Mori morio,” or “More’s fool.”²⁶ The habit of keeping a fool was linked to the aforementioned medieval practices related to death and humility, which persisted into the early modern period. They were based on cyclical notions of time and fate. Feste echoes such calls for humility he says, “And thus the whirligig of time brings in his revenges” (V.1.369-70) when at last Malvolio has been humiliated.²⁷

20What then do we make of the festive inversion in Twelfth Night? As Karin S. Coddon argues, is it a “mere fantasy inversion”, or a test of the limits of power, aristocracy and the late feudal economy?²⁸ And what is Feste’s role in all of this? “Wise enough to play the fool”, one may argue that Feste’s wisdom in folly is also related to the material conditions of the actor and Feste’s role in the fictive society of Illyria. Malvolio may be a social climber, but Feste’s character never loses touch with the unique struggles of the lower-class servant on the threshold of a newly emerging socio-economic order. As Ralph Berry observed, “Feste, more than anyone else in Shakespeare, suggests the historic shift from servant (idealized in Adam) to today’s service industry. Independent, detached, ruthlessly professional in his dealings, he refuses to be absorbed into the needs of his employers.”²⁹ As a more recent scholarship has argued, “Feste is a transitional character in a play about transition” in that he “takes steps away from late feudal dependence and towards cash payment.”³⁰ Like the actors in the early modern era, Feste has two seemingly opposed means of income: he is a part of Olivia’s aristocratic household but he also sells his labor to any willing buyer. Feste has to cadge, selling his song and wit. “Come on, there’s a sixpence for you,” says Sir Toby, “[l]et’s have a song” (II.3.30).³¹ The early modern theater faced a similar situation, positioned as it was between aristocratic patronage and the commercial success dependent on a paying public.³² Troops were dependent on aristocratic patrons and permission but the theaters also depended on the bottom line: getting the theatergoers in, and keeping them there.

21Where does this leave Feste? An allowed fool, Feste navigates in the shifting terrain of conflicting socio-economic models, exercising his scripted liberty and serving as the catalyst to the play’s carnival logic through deed and word. While Sir Toby may be a parody of the seasonal Lord of Misrule, the real motor is Feste.³³ The best example of this is in Act 2 scene 3, which follows the pattern of intrusion, procession and expulsion. “My masters are you mad or what are you?” cries Malvolio as he irrupts onto the scene to expel the revelers (II.3.85).³⁴

22Feste here inherits some elements from the late Medieval theater: he is like the character Cacurgus in Misogonus, whose name may derive from the Latin cachinnus, “the boisterous laugh.”³⁵ Noise, disruption and movement: these are Feste’s hallmarks, and they are part of the plebeian culture of carnival, a scripted liberty, part of the festive cycle of the fool.

Conclusion

23At the beginning of Act 3, Viola likens Feste the clown to a haggard, or a hawk, who must “check every feather that comes before his eye” (III.1.68-9).³⁶ When she tries to get a straight answer out of Feste, something as simple as where he lives, the clown answers literally, or by the card, to which Viola protests. Feste’s reply to Viola’s remonstrance is telling: “[t]o see this age! A sentence is but a cheverel glove to a good wit: how quickly the wrong side may be turned outward” (III.1.9-11).³⁷ Feste’s license was in fact an established way of speaking, common to nearly all of Shakespeare’s clowns. He is the “corrupter of words” (III.1.35), a process elsewhere qualified as “equivocation.” For example, in the Graveyard scene of Hamlet, the protagonist is amused but a little ruffled by the Gravedigger – whom the manuscript identifies as a clown:

24How absolute the knave is! We must speak by the card, or equivocation will undo us. By the lord, Horatio, this three years I have took note of it: the age is grown so picked, that the toe of the peasant comes so near the heel of the courtier, he galls his kibe (V.1.115-118).³⁸ In the Porter scene of Macbeth, the clown again refers to the equivocator and equivocation:

Faith, here’s an equivocator, that could swear in both the scales
against either scale, who committed treason enough for God’s
sake, yet could not equivocate to Heaven” (II.3.7-9).³⁹

25but the Porter also says that drink:

provokes, and unprovokes: it provokes the desire, but it takes
away the performance. Therefore much drink may be said to be
an equivocator with lechery: it makes him, and it mars him; it
sets him on, and it takes him off; it persuades him, and dis–
heartens him, makes him stand to, and not stand to. In con–
clusion, equivocates him in a sleep, and giving him the lie,
leaves him” (II.3.24-30).⁴⁰

26The Porter’s remarks, far from being comic relief, offer an extended and humorous reflection on the moral vacillations of the play’s protagonist, exercising the canny perceptiveness that is the domain of the stage clown, just as Feste turns the meaning of words inside out like the cheverel glove.

27The carnivalesque in general, and in Twelfth Night specifically, is intimately connected with plebeian modes, social practice and ways of surviving and coping with the hierarchical structures in the early modern period.⁴¹ Festivity, role reversal, jest, humor and mockery are important elements in the topsy-turvy that defines twelfth night, both as play and practice. But another important element is the discursive strategy of Feste. Itself a form of reversal, it is common to all clown characters in Shakespeare. It is how they talk back to their superiors, and one of the few indications that we have of how lower-class people might have negotiated the difficult and tumultuous times of Shakespeare’s day. At the end of the play, the disrupted social order is restored: man has his maid and maid her man, each according to their rank. That is, all with the exception of Feste.

Bibliographie

Notes

Pour citer ce document

Quelques mots à propos de :  Benjamin Perriello

Droits d'auteur

This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License CC BY-NC 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/fr/) / Article distribué selon les termes de la licence Creative Commons CC BY-NC.3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/fr/)