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    Nico Letta
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    Kaiser, Praisers of Folly. Erasmo, Rabelais and Shakespeare.

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    Kaiser, Praisers of Folly. Erasmo, Rabelais and Shakespeare.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF or read online from Scribd
    Flag for inappropriate content
    30 views9 pages

    Cap. 0. Prologue

    Uploaded by

    Nico Letta
    Kaiser, Praisers of Folly. Erasmo, Rabelais and Shakespeare.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF or read online from Scribd
    Flag for inappropriate content
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    PROLOGUE: THE FOOL guocggeueeeeuuuusNsueCIED ‘Tue traditional mocto of the bistrionem, reterited an observation lobe Theatre, torus mundus agit xe men have made about their Lives since elasial a to have asked if he had ac Greek poet wortiy o iquity. As Caesar Augustus lay dying, he is sad dl the play of life properly; and the last ne, Palladas of Alexandria, as he beheld the ruins of his Hlllenistic world, philosophized thar all life was a stage and that a man must either learn to pur aside his seriousness and play or else endure the pains of existence. Throughout the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, the simile, with its somber attitude toward illusion and realty, continued to capture men's imaginations; and when, as late as the seventeenth century, Don Quixote borrows it from Exasmus to expound it to his simple squire as though it were original with him, Sancho, who is something of an proverbs, causticilly replies, “A brave c to me, chat have heard it often. Even as he has sat in the theat the presence of the gods in their the Tey la Comedie apparoist un exemple (Ok clzeun de son fait les actions eonternple Le monde est le Theatre, & les hommes, ators. TEs Fortune qui est maitese dela Scene Apress les habite, & de la vie humaine tear & les destin sont les grands spectateurs, watching the actors, man has felt , watching him enact his part: The metaphor, in pondering the insubstantial pageantry of life, sug gests thatthe life enacted on the great globe itself is no more lasting or significant than that enacted on the stage and concludes that what we live is merely a play or an illusion or @ dream. Turning upon the PRAISERS OF FOLLY ne on to make other plays in on ms are made on, that Ja vida es suefio, aplication may or may not be that we metaphor, men have g that We are such scuff as dre der Traum ein Leben, The bur che emphasis of anima shall wake in another, more lasting that sees life asa play is upon the brevity of this life, upon its lusory or illusory character, and upon the fact that the curtain will finally ker Rates fall and the play end — that we only lve, in V Thus masch we playing 1 our latest rest, Onely we dye in earnest, at's no les! and the metaphor, th infer th Yee if life is short, artis Ion the mortality of life, manages at the same time ro tality of art. For to say that everyone phys a role in the drama of life is to explain life with the imagery of art and to preserve life's transitory moment in the amber of arts eternity. As such, che meta- phor also implicitly contains the basic assumption of all art, that it is ‘ow in that art which is literature, man has tried plays in the drama of life, and in doing so he ether intentionally of unintentionally, a mimetic an imitation of life, ta describe the role has thereby left chronicle of his existence. If all the world is indeed a stage of looking at this chronicle is to see it as a succession of personae, s who pass across the stage. Though the number of literary protagonist of roles that men and women play is infinite and though all of are being enacted all the time, man, in his literary imitations 0 drama, has given the part of the protagonist nov’ to one and now t0 another of the actors. Certain figures, that is, have at certain times been chosen from among the infinite variety of roles for positions of predominance on the stage of literary history, because they have somehow seemed to represent symbolically ‘the assumptions and arguments, the aspirations and nostalgia of their 3 “Tbe Poems of Sir Waltr Rlegh oA. M.C. Lam (London, 920) 48 stibed query of Augurae Caan ate Suetonius, De city Cacsoram, ty remark, Tia; for Ronse pac, see Ociorer complete, ed. Pas EStmonice Garni), XIN sae A conenene cxalogu of ease expres: ons ofthis topes proved fa Rudalps Him, Lucian to AMeipp ip and Bete is) foe anf. For ner gecurenees te Jean Jarquot; “Le ‘Tate da Mond’ de Saltire & Cadet” Revue del brane compar, SOXXL (95) acpi and Ancorlo Vara oF Tens del Gra Testo dt Sunde? Boletin de RETA de Buona Len de Barecons, YXIM (930, 1538 TE FOOL 3 En gests differen, en diferens langages, Roys Princes & Bergers jouéne leurs personnages? aladin, the shepherd, che savage, the artist, the ach with his characteristic scenery, gestures, age, has had his particular moment on the stage when he ‘erter able to articulate che thoughts of his time than any of the other dramatis personae. At one moment, for example, the curtains part to reveal a_pilgrim moving along a road. He is middle-aged, and the season is spring; and whether he descends the winding path to carth’s infernal core or climbs the craggy Mountain of Virtue or rides the fabled roads eastward to Canterbury or south to Compostela, it isthe same man, from the same time, on his way to God. He is Everyman, the symbolic pprotagonise for his age. Many scenes late, the curtains pare again to reveal a man moving along a road, but itis neither the same man nor the same road. This time he is young, and the season is late summer. His sep is firms his pockets are empty; his mind is filled with thoughts of Napoleon, ot with Wertherian dreams of love and poetry, or with great expectations. Behind him he leaves the blacksmith’s forge or the printer’s shop in the provincial town, a devoted friend, a tearful mistress, a loving family; and che road is the coach road to London or Paris. As spectators, we are able to determine many things about his time from the particular gure who is chosen, the landscape against which he moves, and the way in which he behaves. For each of them lls us not only his own personal story, bue something about his world as well. He is, ag Taine called him, the personnage régnant of his epoch; “his sentiments and his ideas are those of an entire genera- Ie is with another such symbolic actor, the fool, that this study is concerned. Like all the others, the fool also has his moment as personnage régnont, and when he docs we may see in him too the embodiment of one aspect of an age and the articu ‘of thought characteristic of that thing surprising about the fact that this should be so, and of all such ly some- personae perhaps none comes to the front of the stage quite so un- The icy of the Pl amr at (Pai ronoage régnnt is developed in Hippolyte Tsine, De eas 4 PRAISERS OF FOLLY expectedly. We are generally prepared to aceept almost any literary Ihero as spokesman for his age, and as ws look back over the centuries ie seems understandable that such figures as the shepherd and the ienight should have had, at particular gines such predominant roes conferred upon them. But for the fool it seems an unlikely assignment. Not only would his folly sem to make him unworthy of such a part bat also is role would seem, by its very nature, to be subservient to those roles given to figures of greater dignity. Consequently, when hie finally does begin to play the protagonist, he denies certain of our assumptions about him and to some degree violates our sense of decorum: we are aware that something extraordinary has happened. Yet move to the center of the stage i precisely what he does. And jse as the medieval pilgrim as protagonise would claim that c0 go through life was to be a pilgrim, so the fool as protagonist has the tudacity to invoke the classical image of the world a5 a stage and Claim that to be a foo! isto act the pliy of life. ie was the Renaissance that brought the fool into the limelight on the stage of literature; and chough he has antecedents as far back as the world of classical antiquity, the figure evoked by the word foo! js really a creation of the late Middle Ages. When we hear the word, ‘we think of a smal, dwarfish man, often hunchbacked, who wears 2 ‘cout of motley with its asinine hood and bells and carries a bauble fr marotte, OF course, there is also 2 less specific connotation to the Word fool. proverbially it refers simply to any human being who is eprived of reason — the stupid, the ignorant, the mad, the foo! sh ‘The Rigoleto-type fool evoked by the word — the coure jester of the fifteenth century —is in fact only the formal, atficial imitation ff the actual fools, the madmen and idiots, who wandered loose through the medieval world, Between the two extremes of the village Fdioe and the court jester, the nacural and the artificial fool, there are fs many degrees of fooldom and foolery as there are degrees of madness; but whoever is called foolisi, whether the lover, the dupe, the sinner, or the theatrical clown, i called so because he acts like a man deprived of his wits —like the natural fool. Upon this “bell ‘without a clapper,” as he was sometimes called, the Middle Ages rang many changes, and when the first major fool of the Renaisance txelims, “Good lorde, what a Theatre is this worlde? how many, THE FOOL s and divers are the pageants that fooles phic therin?” * she calls to mind all of the many fools that the Middle Ages had developed. “These types and their socal, terary, and theatrical histories have been carefully raced and catalogued, notably by Olive Busby, Barbara Swain, and Enid Welford, and their studies are an essential incro- duction to any examination of the Renaissance fool. To reiterate all that has been written on this would require a lengthy digression from four subject, and there is litle need to repeat what has been so Sulequately set foreh elsewhere. Ie may be useful, however, to sum- inane briefly whae the Middle Ages thought a fool was, especially ‘nce the Renaissance authors whom we shall be considering assumed thar thee readers had a certain image of the foo! in mind. ‘Since it upon the protorype of the natural fool that al che more sophisticated and artfiial fools are based, we may sce these atrades, Inost clearly and in their most pristine form if we consider what the Middle Ages thought of the simple idiot. The first point eo be made fs that they knew him well. Indeed, i is hard for ws co imagine how ‘common the spectacle of idiocy or insanity must have been in @ world that knew nether the techniques of modem medicine nor those ofthe payehological clinic, Generally such ereatures could be seen almost Grerywhere. Violent madmen, of course, who were thought to be possesed by devils, were crtured and incarcerated, frst in the monas- ries and later in such insirtions as that celebrared etymological Source, the Hospital of St, Mary of Bethlehem in London On the ‘ther hand, the feeble-minded were simply allowed to roam free, for they were harmless, Their heads seemed as empey a8 a pair of bellows, nd accordingly from the Latin word for bellows the name foo! ot fou was coined for them. Set apart fom normal human beings by bis empry-headed irrationality, the innocent fool was to the Middle ‘Ages more of a thing than a being, and he became ro them simply an

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