Aesthetics Of The Ugly: A Case Study Of Shakespearean Jesters

There were many jesters in the thirty-eight plays of WilliamShakespeare, whose performance exposed the exaggeration and hypocrisyof the European aristocracy; meanwhile, whose authentic thoughts andfeelings of life was expressed. Shakespearean jesters shared some similarqualities and features in appearance and costume, speech privilege, andpeculiar social status as well, with those traditional European jesters, butcarrying their own idiosyncrasy as a theatrical type of more complex andindividualistic characters who could be taken as round characters. A closeattention was paid in this thesis to four jesters, i.e. Touchstone, in As YouLike It; Feste, in Twelfth Night; Lavache in All's Well that Ends Welltogether with the Fool in King Lear, who were universally acknowledgedas prototypes of Shakespearean jesters by the internationalShakespeareans. The obscene Lavache in All's Well That Ends Well, thecynical Touchstone in As You Like It and the rude Thersites in Troilus andCressida, lashed their hatred to the upper class by their discovery of thetruth of life through their coarse and salacious speech, thus showing asuccessful characterization.For that reason this thesis strived to approach Thersites, Touchstoneand Lavache from a perspective of the aesthetics of the ugly. Prevailing in the latter half of the 19th century, aesthetics of the uglyregarded ugliness as an indispensable part in our life in the sense that itconstitutes an element of art. However, in the sense of traditionalaesthetics of the beautiful, the poetic and romantic languages were thebasis required by a drama. It was avant-garde art that initially broke thetraditional sense of harmonious beauty in the way of pursuing thosefactors resulting in disgusting senses such as sense of deformation, ofexaggeration, of absurdity, of death and so on. Grotesque behavior,pan-sexuality, consciousness of starvation, horror, absurdity, deathtogether with the sense of atonement were thought to be included in thecategory of The Ugly in Behavior. The foul-mouthed Thersites, beingcalled by Nestor as "a slave whose gall coins slanders like a mint", keptcursing all the time. As for Lavache, he seemed to fascinate in nothingbut sex never forgetting those obscene topics. Moreover, Touchstonedisplayed his arrogance and duplicity best represented in his conversationwith Corin and William. However, the ugly speech of Lavache,Toutchstone and Thersites was endowed with coarseness and obscenity inaccordance with the notions of the aesthetics of the ugly. It was thisugliness in Shakespearean jesters that formed their speoial way ofcriticizing the then hypocritical and extravagant society and thatcomposed a dissonant movement in comparison between the ugliness inbehavior and the affectation of then society to contribute greatly to the balance of minor characters, major characters, to the revelation of thetheme, and to the thoughtfulness made in the play itself.