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The Anatomy of Folly in Shakespeare's ``Henriad''

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The anatomy of folly in Shakespeare's ``Henriad'' ROBERT H. BELL Abstract Folly, as Johnson said of comedy, has been ``particularly unpropitious to de®ners,'' struggling to conceive a notoriously indeterminate term. ``Folly'' is usually derogatory, pinned on any disbeliever or adversary, telling us as much about the judge as the judged, or ironically laudatory. While ``folly'' ¯aunts its maddening elusiveness, fools will rush in where wise men fear to tread. This essay explores the concept of folly, investigates its perti- nence for literary criticism, and tests its usefulness in a consideration of literature's greatest fool, Falsta. The fool's cross-eyed vision always threatens to become a revelation; what starts as impish play may end as prophecy. Fools divide and confuse us, so that we either scant or privilege folly by reducing it to diverting babble or magnifying it into encoded prophecy. A great fool has amazing powers of disorientation: he is an avatar of disequilibrium. Disabled yet enabled, invincible yet particularly vulnerable, the fool is always double, both lightning bolt and lightning rod: his bad luck might bring me good luck, so we make room for fools but keep our distance: there with/but for the grace of God go I. The Fool has a strange duality, like the medieval monarch, two separate ``bodies,'' one enduring, potent, capable of revival, personifying survival and adaptability; the other marginal, susceptible, provisional, easily hurt. Shakespeare's most majestic fool dramatizes folly's powers, perils, and paradoxes. Foolishly immersed in the ``lower bodily element,'' Falsta imagines himself somehow freed from natural law; simultaneously Caliban and Ariel, he is enmired yet aloft, immanent yet transcendent, that quality wonderfully characterized by Bradley as Falsta 's ``inexplicable touch of in®nity.'' When ``Falsta riseth up'' from playing possum, his comic Humor 14±2 (2001), 181±201 0933±1719/01/0014±0181 # Walter de Gruyter 182 R. H. Bell resurrection seems the de®nitive triumph, ``the true and perfect image of life indeed.'' This ``great fool'' not only arms life but outrageously redeems it with ``counterfeit'' or bogus scriptural idiom. Falsta robustly embodies the power of folly and dimly, occasionally perceives its limits. In 2Henry IV, Falsta, obviously enfeebled, becomes more the object than the source of humor. The banishment of Falsta is not humorous and it hurts. As a seemingly imperishable fool, exuberantly enacting folly, Falsta liberates life from fact, in de®ance of reason and pursuit of joy. Falsta's force draws us all into the ®eld of folly, so that the great fool is our double whose loss we deplore. folly: ``want of understanding; weakness of intellect; criminal weakness; depravity of mind; act of negligence or passion unbecoming gravity or deep wisdom'' (Samuel Johnson's Dictionary) ``The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man doth know himself to be a fool.'' (Touchstone, As You Like It, V.1.30±31). ``to be noble might then come to mean: to entertain follies.'' (Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 92). ``to punish my missed readings _'' (student's recitation of King Henry IV's line, ``To punish my mistreadings _'') Folly, as Johnson said of comedy, has been ``particularly unpropitious to de®ners,'' struggling to conceive a notoriously indeterminate term. ``Folly'' is usually derogatory, pinned on any disbeliever or adversary, telling us as much about the judge as the judged, or ironically laudatory, as used by Touchstone or Nietzsche. While ``folly'' ¯aunts its maddening elusiveness, fools will rush in where wise men fear to tread. This essay tries nobly and probably foolishly to explore the concept of folly in general and to consider in particular Shakespeare's anatomy of folly in ``The Henriad,'' especially in the ®gures of Falsta and Prince Hal. Traditionally, especially in literature, fools are a potential source of wisdom or insight: foolish nonsense may be Foolosophy or somehow ``jocoserious'' (Joyce, Ulysses 1986: 553). As though to oer an alternate or competing ``gospel,'' fools regularly cite scripture. Sometimes the fool's gospel is explicitly promulgated, as when Erasmus's Folly mounts her podium or when Tristram Shandy brazenly proselytizes: ``True Shandeism, think what you will against it, opens the heart and Anatomy of folly in Shakespeare 183 lungs, and like all those aections which partake of its nature, it forces the blood and other vital ¯uids to run freely thro' its channels, and makes the wheel of life run long and cheerfully round'' (Sterne 1940: 338±339). The fool's cross-eyed vision always threatens to become a revelation; what starts as impish play may end as The New Jerusalem or as Joyce's New Bloomusalem. Strong fools, like Erasmus's Folly, Panurge, Falsta, Lear's Fool, Tristram Shandy, Dostoevsky's Idiot, Joyce's Bloom or Shem, make assets of their defects, and convert clowning into commentary. Yet even such simple receptivity to folly risks taking Foolosophy too seriously, for the fool like a child in dress-up loves to impersonate and mock the grownups. Sorting out the tomfoolery from the moral is sometimes a fool's errand, but an unavoidable challenge of folly; a basic problem in contemplating clowns and fools is that they may say anything for the sake of a joke. Fools divide and confuse us, so that we either scant or privilege folly by reducing it to diverting babble or magnifying it into encoded prophecy. Sifting the jocose from the serious keeps readers busy and leaves little hope, or danger, that anybody will ever settle the issue, for here the border between fooling and meaning is always open. Compounding the diculty of interpretation is that fools may be not merely bumptious, inspired clowns like Bottom but natural fools, disturbed or downright crazy. Natural or arti®cial, the Fool abides our questions but will not stay for an answer. Generalizations about folly must be heavily hedged or expressed paradoxically because the fool by de®nition eludes de®nition: he exists topsy-turvy, willy-nilly, to defy categories of understanding. A great fool has amazing powers of disorientation: he is an avatar of disequilibrium, a spanner in the works, a local lord of misrule, yet he usually lands on his feet. To accompany a fool is thus to experience vicariously both exhilarating freedom and titillating fear, the pleasure and peril of exploring no-man's land, a shifting, evanescent, murky world of will-o'-the-wisps and fool's gold. It is not simply that we are tricked and illuminated by the fool's license to kid; more likely, we recapitulate time and again the movement of folly, discovering signi®cance only to see it slip from revelation to mirage, or vice versa. Fools multiply vertigo, or create a hall of mirrors designed to amuse and calculated to discombobulate. Like Feste moving between the courts of Orsino and Olivia, fools in the medieval and early modern era ``led an easy wandering existence'' 184 R. H. Bell (Foucault 1988: 8) and were not ordinarily segregated, banished, or incarcerated. Shakespeare's ``primitive'' genius confoundingly mingles clowns and kings to query our conception of separate realms of discourse, court and tavern, civilization and its discontents, reason and madness. By the eighteenth-century, as if in keeping with neo-classical decorum, the need to keep cultural categories distinct, clowns or fools were ``normally'' segregated or distinctly separated from society, except in places sanctioned for play like the circus where the nimble trapeze artists may be interrupted by clowns aping their betters and threatening to drag the spectators into the arena. Foolosophers may be surprisingly erudite, allusive, obscure. They gaily pilfer material, and sometimes ¯aunt their thefts. Both Robert Burton and his closest follower in English literature, Laurence Sterne, make word-stealing a frequent theme and a running joke. Tristram Shandy castigates such nefarious practices in a denunciation largely cribbed from The Anatomy of Melancholy. For this eminent folly Finnegans Wake coins the term ``stolentelling'' (Joyce, Wake 1968: 424). Mimicry of authority is a favorite foolish enterprise: allusiveness which in other discourse enables meaning furthers folly's infuriating handy-dandy: just as folly's central beliefs or values are expressed jocoseriously, so its sources or references are treated willy-nilly: the most basic questions, what to think and feel about the text, remain vexingly problematic. In many of his metamorphoses, the fool is traditionally construed as innocent, sometimes literally insane (``a natural fool'') or preternaturally child-like, saying whatever pops into his head without troubling about decorum, decency, propriety, or privilege. The fool never stops asking those annoying, persistent, children's questions: don't you want to play? why do I have to do that? who says? To the fool life is a ``fond pageant'' (MND, III.2.114) seen vividly, in sharp outline, but without depth, oddly focused on some fantastic realm invisible or irrelevant to others. We naturally ®nd the fool's vision fetching and dubious, for like the child he perceives everything as bright, new, ever changing, and reacts to events with provisional passion, all a®re with excitement only until something else moves into view. Innocent and heartless and gay, the fool rarely fathoms anyone else's perspective, least of all another's suering, and even direct confrontation with woe is unlikely to move the fool except to make fun of feelings. Like the little tyrant in Auden's ``Mundus et Infans,'' the fool's infantile whims dominate his world: his immediate well-being is his top priority, to the exclusion of any Anatomy of folly in Shakespeare 185 competing consideration. What makes such behavior especially dis- com®ting is that we have all been just such tiny tyrants, taught or forced to do better whether we like it or not.
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