Otto's book covers vast territories, both geographical and temporal, and this vastness has its disadvantages. For this they were handsomely rewarded: James I's jester Archy Armstrong was bequeathed a thousand acre estate Hitard, Edmund Ironside's fool, six centuries before, got the entire town of Walworth. Henry VIII's jester, Will Somers, was allowed to call him Harry, or Uncle Richard Tarleton, the greatest fool of Shakespeare's time, and the favourite of Henry's daughter Elizabeth, was the only one able - in Thomas Fuller's wonderful phrase - to "undumpish" the testy queen.
#FOOLS ARE EVERYWHERE THE COURT JESTER AROUND THE WORLD FULL#
She cites a number of vivid relationships of this sort, full of a tenderness, a licence and an intimacy that was otherwise unobtainable by the monarch. The trust bestowed by his sovereign on a jester, is perhaps due, as Otto rather finely says, to "a shared sense of isolation". In an absolute monarchy, the jester alone could cause rulers to doubt their actions, make them reconsider, relieve them of their lonely eminence. Cromwell, for goodness' sake, had jesters. There were feasts of fools, in which social roles were inverted the craftsmen's guilds elected their own guild jesters there were religious orders that preached the healing power of laughter. The European phenomenon is of shorter duration, but of great intensity. Jesters flourished in China as long as there were emperors, for more than 2,000 years the fascinating history of Indian jesters is even longer. Their function, like that of Lear's Fool, was to upend logic, to relieve tension, to say the unsayable, invoking a kind of benevolent mayhem in order to restore the monarch, by means of laughter, to his full human nature - to sanity, in fact. However, these now unfunny jesters are the exact prototype of the Elizabethan stage jester. Each story is printed in Chinese characters under the translation, which prettifies the page but for non-Sinophones does little to illuminate Moving Bucket's most side-splitting gag, depending as it does on a triple pun in Mandarin. The emperor Zhenzong's favourite, Newly-Polished-Mirror, was succeeded by Going-Round-in-Circles, and sometimes, in the pages of Otto's book, one knows how he felt. No doubt one had to be there, but the repeated leaden thud of the punch line, followed by the tag "the king burst out laughing", soon becomes dispiriting. She is a Sinologist, and the starting point for her book was her discovery of the remarkably extensive documentation of Chinese jesters from as far back as the fourth century: we read of Jester-Twisty-Pole, Moving Bucket, Openly-Flawless-Jade, and receive generous examples of their wit. Otto, for her part, seeks to assert the universality of jesters, cataloguing their activities worldwide and across the centuries in different forms and under different names down to the present. In 1935, Enid Welsford produced her seminal and still authoritative study The Fool, a work of profound historical imagination and penetrating analysis which goes a long way to explaining why these strange figures continue to have such a strong hold on us William Willeford in The Fool and His Sceptre more than 30 years later probes their relationship to the collective unconscious even more deeply and Sandra Billington's A Social History of the Fool rewardingly illuminates the context in which they flourished. Otto barely mentions the Shakespearean fool her book seeks to establish the prevalence of the jester through the ages and across many cultures, not primarily on stage but in the royal courts of Europe, Africa and Asia.
They are not simply comics whose sell-by date passed a couple of centuries ago: they are the walking wounded, afflicted, possibly deformed, eccentric to within an inch of insanity, uttering shafts of uncomfortable truth yet exempt from censorship because of the extraordinary, mutually obsessive, relationships - intimate and public, political and personal - they have with their masters or mistresses. Their very existence at the heart of As You Like It, Twelfth Night and - especially - King Lear, is a haunting remnant of a different dispensation, a glimpse of another way of being, which speaks to some ancient race memory in us.
Yet if these infuriating characters were excised from the plays, the loss would be incalculable. "Hey nonny no," we collectively groan, as Touchstone or Feste or Lear's fool play their interminable word games, their incomprehensible riffs coming to a would-be triumphant conclusion with a ba-boom which invites, but so rarely receives, laughter and applause. Beatrice Otto begins her book somewhat optimistically with the observation "I have always loved jesters, but then who doesn't?" The exact opposite, I fear, is true: most people head for cover when the fool, in cap and bells, brandishing his bauble, capers on with a hey and a ho and a hey nonny no.
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