Court Jesters

An overview of the Fools Are Everywhere project which builds on the book of the same title, creating a global online resource dedicated to the study and appreciation of fools and jesters across history. 

Please visit: www.foolsareverywhere.com

It is not an easy task to understand the nature of carnival as it is shown by the many failures of the last century after Mikhail Bakhtin’s work became generally known. My book is an attempt to define carnival in relation to another entity that is always and necessarily associated with the carnival, still, easier to identify. The “Clown or Fool par excellence” embodies the carnival’s topsy-turvy attitude and transgresses all borders of reason and social order. Moreover, her repeated jumps to recover bear ritual laughter mocking the figure of Death. This is how the phenomenology of the clown par excellence and the carnival are ontologically related to each other. But, parallel to the strange fate of the clown “on stage” the carnival can become problematic as well. This is clearly visible in the Early Modern theatre of Shakespeare. The resentful exit of Malvolio leaves us confused in Twelfth Night. When the Fool disappears, others have to take on in the stormy night of King Lear. While the gravedigger and his friend, in Hamlet, are mockingly clowning, the grounds spits back a skull that already whispers: “God is dead.” This is how in Shakespeare’s plays the “decarnivalization of the world” is present on the Early Modern stage. I discuss and develop the concept of decarnivalization in order to reinterpret Shakespeare’s dramatic art.

Este artículo da a conocer los documentos inéditos de la testamentaría de Pablo de Valladolid así como los resultados de la investigación realizada a partir de los nuevos datos. El texto aborda la vida del bufón desde una perspectiva diferente a la de la historiografía tradicional, e identifica los años 1632-33 como un punto de inflexión en su biografía a raíz de su matrimonio con Beatriz de Villagrá y su entrada en la corte al servicio del rey. A partir de la documentación inédita se estudia su situación económica y su condición social y profesional.

This paper presents unpublished documents concerning the testament and estate of Pablo de Valladolid, as well as the results of research carried out based on this new evidence. The text examines the life of the jester from a different perspective to that of traditional historiography, identifying the years 1632-33 as a turning point in his biography, marked by his marriage to Beatriz de Villagrá and his appointment to serve the king. Based on these unpublished records, his economic situation and professional and social status are studied.

The Shiji 史記 chapter "Guji liezhuan" offers a collection of oral forms and practices that remind readers of the performed oral culture from pre-Han and Han times. Language games, storytelling, songs, rhymed speeches, informal fu 賦, as well as various modes of acting and expression contributed to the "smooth eloquence" of guji performances that succeeded in indirect remonstrance through the paired actions of facilitating 滑 and stopping 稽. In their own ways, these anecdotes also remind us of possible connections and dynamics between performance and its textual recounting, between oral culture and its written records.

Evocation of a court jester?
Challenge to binary thinking?
Disassociation of humour from governance?
Surprise?
Wonder?
Framing the riddle?
Missing insight?
Surreal embodiment of requisite complexity?
Solving the riddle?
Riddle of governance as a question?
Framing the paradox of a surreal context as a riddle?
Living with a riddle -- or within one?

A centuries-old history of relations between jesters with their rulers has been researched academically for 200 years. Incomplete sources do not make up a coherent picture of jesters' functioning at the courts of Pomeranian rulers and the reconstruction of their changing fortunes is not easy. Research on the history of Pomeranian court jesters has been conducted by A. Haas, M. Wehrmann, H. Lemcke, Z. Fafius, M. Glińska, J. Kochanowska, M. Majewski, J. Pokora. The autor analyses the stage of the creation of the "Hintz legend" and his tombstone, contrasting it with other interpretations, especially the one presented by Jakub Pokora (1995).

This paper looks at Edgar Allan Poe's "Hop-Frog" (1849) in connection with one of the oldest and richest themes in literature: revenge. First, I briefly distinguish it from two classic American fictions appearing during the next two years that also feature vengeful characters with some form of disability and/or deformity, Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter and Herman Melville's Moby-Dick. Second, I note Poe's copious allusions in the tale to his own writings, in particular another tale of revenge Poe published two and a half years earlier, "The Cask of Amontillado." Third, as I have done in connection with "Cask," I offer a generalized biographical interpretation of the story, linking it to Poe's "Some Secrets of the Magazine Prison-House" (1845) with its emphasis on "fat," exploitive "editors and proprietors" and thereby casting doubt on claims that Poe used the tale to settle scores with specific people or revenge himself on the reading public.1 In making this argument, I suggest that the story must be read not only vis-à-vis enslavement and slave rebellion, as several critics have done, but also in relation to imperialism.

This is a study in the way zany thinking penetrates levels of the mind to which rational logic finds no access. Even "madmen" or court jesters have to be wary if they stray into the area of politics, as King Lear's warning to his jester makes poignantly clear. "Sirrah, the whip."

: Disability is an umbrella name to refer a variety of conditions that result in some
kind of disenfranchisement or social exclusion on the basis of some inbuilt feature labelled as
defective or pathological. While people we would now label as disabled have lived well before
modernity, the use of this category distorts the lived experience of people who had their own
ways to address physical deformity. Some of the jesters Velazquez portrayed, as well as the
notion of monster, will guide our reflection.