Fools for Love: Fooling and Feeling

Abstract

How do I fool thee? Let me count the ways. Foolery has many guises, and, as we have already seen, the word fool has different denotations and competing connotations. We began with artificial fools or jesters who make merry to entertain, using jokes, banter, and wordplay for fun and enlightenment. This chapter focuses on three romantic comedies staged between 1598 and 1602 in which the predominant form of fooling is to deceive or trick, to fool someone unaware of the pretense: Much Ado About Nothing, As You Like It, and Twelfth Night. Here many lovers resemble natural rather than artificial fools because, of course, anyone in love is a fool for love. Amorous idiocy or mad love involves many types of foolery, including contests of wit, masquerades, festivals, rituals, holidays, staged performances, and, most important for our purposes, trickery and subterfuge. As Moria stresses, “This deception, this disguise, is the very thing that holds the attention of the spectators” (Erasmus 43). Chaloner’s 1549 rendition, “the feignyng and counterfaityng is it, that so delighteth the beholders,”² provides two terms that figure egregiously in Shakespeare’s anatomy of folly: feigning and counterfeiting.

Clowns and storytellers have an almost magical ability to manipulate things and situations so as to make seem possible what is impossible and false what is true.

—Dario Fo, Tricks of the Trade¹

The lunatic, the lover, and the poet Are of imagination all compact.

(MND 5.1.7–8)