| When Shakespeare has Sir Toby exclaim “A plague o' these Pickle-herring!” in the first act of Twelfth Night , he is uniting English with German traditions of fools. Scholarship, however, since the nineteenth century through the present that deals with the fools of Shakespeare's plays has not considered important analogues and possible influences from German traditions of folly. This dissertation seeks to remedy the omission of German traditions by showing essential links that cultural and literary figures from Germany provided for the fools of late medieval and Renaissance England. After discussing in the first chapter major medieval conceptions of the fool figure and his folly to Western Europe, I analyze the critical history of Shakespeare's fools in the second chapter, using the Fool of King Lear as a fitting model. I conclude chapter two by addressing the highly influential theories of Mikhail Bakhtin, who presents sixteenth-century fools and folly as “carnivalesque”—referring to Carnival, for Bakhtin a time and space dominated by fools, who overturn normal (normalizing) social structures with their carefree, liberated, anti-authoritarian, and above all else, self-conscious enactment of social and political protest. I argue that this conception of the sixteenth-century fool establishes a series of grand anachronisms that make it ill suited to apply to Shakespeare's fools. I believe that German traditions of fools, moreover, which Bakhtin discards for his paradigm, can be seen to undermine his theories.; Chapter three presents these overlooked but influential traditions from Germany, and chapter four applies them to the fools of Shakespeare's plays. In this central chapter I argue that Shakespeare's fools considered alongside German traditions in fact reveal a progression in form and function from conventional characterizations toward ones that may be called “Germanic.”; The fifth and final chapter presents the transformations of the fool figure during the seventeenth century, when the fool fell silent in England. Only in Germany did the Shakespeare fools live on, as Pickle-herring , a figure that would later become important to German literary history. Today, traditional fools such as Eulenspiegel appear exclusively in children's literature, where they, like Shakespeare's fools in modern criticism, have been stripped of their didactic, humanizing, and artistic significance. |
