In Quest of Folly

Abstract

What is folly? “Foolery … shines every where”¹ in Shakespeare’s plays. It encompasses infatuation, homicide, jokes, or holiness; follies can be sublime or ridiculous, tragic or trivial.² Folly’s basic meaning is lack of reason, wisdom, or understanding—hence error, misperception, confusion. Derived from the French folie, it suggests madness. Homer’s “Ruinous Folly” is the goddess Até, who distracts and blinds mortals.³ To the Hebrew prophets, folly denotes evil or sin—either plain ignorance or willful defiance of God: “The fool hath said in his heart, there is no God” (Ps. 14:1).⁴ It is a subject to which Jeremiah, Isaiah, Ecclesiastes, and the prophets return repeatedly: “As a dog returneth to his vomit, so a fool returneth to his folly” (Prov. 26:11). To fool someone can also mean to trick or deceive. In either sense, to be fooled might be amusing or confusing, painful or disastrous. Finally, the conception of folly as what fools say and do gives the more abstract notion of folly a local habitation and a name. Very often fool comes attached to another epithet: “moral fool,” “vain fool” (Lr 4.2.58, 4.2.62), “a bitter fool and a sweet one” (Lr 1.4.138), godless fool, wise fool, holy fool, Christian fool. Elizabethans often distinguished between a natural fool, meaning a simpleton or lunatic, and an artificial fool, who “professionally counterfeits folly for the entertainment of others”⁵ and is conscious of the role he plays.