Yeomen of the Guard

ARGUMENT
Colonel Fairfax is to be executed, and this is the day the sentence is to be carried out. A relative has levelled a charge of sorcery against him in order to inherit the fortune which comes should Fairfax die unmarried. Fortunately, the Colonel has a good friend in the Tower, Sergeant Meryll of the Guards, to say nothing of Meryll's daughter, Phoebe, who is in love with the noble prisoner. Meryll's son, Leonard, has been appointed Yeoman, and his father plans to keep him in hiding, get Fairfax out of his cell, and introduce Fairfax among the Yeomen as his "brave son, Leonard with whose exploits all England is ringing." To Phoebe is entrusted the delicate task of getting the dungeon keys from Wilfred Shadbolt, the jailer, who is in love with Phoebe.

Meanwhile, Fairfax has explained his predicament to the Lieutenant, who goes to find him a wife, so that the kinsman will be thwarted in his attempt to inherit the Colonel's estate.

A pair of wandering comedians come into the story - Jack Point and Elsie Maynard - and the Lieutenant arrives on the scene in time to prevent their possible injury by a boisterous crowd. The Lieutenant induces Elsie to consent to a brief marriage with Fairfax by offering her an hundred crowns, badly needed by Elsie for her sick mother. Jack Point wishes to marry Elsie himself, but, on being assured that the bridegroom will be dead within the hour, agrees to the plan, and shortly after is appointed jester to the Lieutenant.

Phoebe successfully steals the keys from Wilfred. Fairfax is shaved and dressed as a Yeoman, the Yeomen and townspeople assemble, the headsman and the block are in place, and all is ready for the execution when it is discovered that Fairfax has escaped! Jack Point despairs at hearing the shocking news, and Elsie faints in the arms of Fairfax as the curtain falls.

Act Two opens with the Yeomen confessing that their search for the criminal has been in vain, while Dame Carruthers and the crowd deride them for their failure. While being nursed back to health by the Dame, Elsie talks in her sleep. As a result, the Dame discovers that Elsie married Fairfax. Fairfax, still as Leonard, is agreeably reassured to find that his bride is the lovely Elsie.

Point concocts a scheme with Wilfred to free Elsie from her present quandary, in which they pretend Wilfred discovered Fairfax in the act of escaping and shot him dead as he tried to swim the river. Wilfred fires a shot, and when the whole crowd gathers to find out what is the matter, the two conspirators present their story. Believing them, the citizens hail Wilfred as a hero.

Point eagerly proposes to Elsie, but Fairfax, as Leonard, calmly steps in and carries her off, leaving both Point and Phoebe in despair. Through Phoebe's hysterical outburst, Wilfred learns the truth, and she consents to marry him as the price of his silence about the plot. Dame Carruthers has also heard the revelation, and promptly takes possession of Meryll, whom she has been pursuing for years, under the same terms.

Elsie enters for her wedding to the supposed Leonard. But the reprieve, delayed by Fairfax's greedy kinsman, arrives - Fairfax is alive, and free! Once more she is plunged into despair as her husband, a man she has never seen, approaches.


Ambrose's View

JESTER, n. An officer formerly attached to a king's household, whose business it was to amuse the court by ludicrous actions and utterances, the absurdity being attested by his motley costume. The king himself being attired with dignity, it took the world some centuries to discover that his own conduct and decrees were sufficiently ridiculous for the amusement not only of his court but of all mankind. The jester was commonly called a fool, but the poets and romancers have ever delighted to represent him as a singularly wise and witty person. In the circus of to-day the melancholy ghost of the court fool effects the dejection of humbler audiences with the same jests wherewith in life he gloomed the marble hall, panged the patrician sense of humor and tapped the tank of royal tears.

This definition was written by Ambrose Bierce and published in 1911.


Amsterdam

In part to maintain the pretense (for Salah's benefit) of Ins & Outs being an events publication, Eddie decided to lead with a piece on Amsterdam's famed Festival of Fools, which would be taking place at various indoor venues, as well as on the streets, for nearly three weeks in June. The pretense evaporated, however, when the cover story ("Fools Rush In," by Woodstock Jones)) was instead a quasi-magical account of the making of Jacques Katmor's cult film The Fool. (4) Events listings (particularly the kind that never really date) would always be a part of Ins & Outs, but right from the start it was a given that this was an entirely different sort of magazine than what Salah was hoping for.

Fooling Around the World:
The History of the Jester
(from Chapter 1: Facets of the Fool and
Chapter 7: Stultorum Plena Sunt Omnia, or Fools Are Everywhere)


"Who Is Not a Fool?" ["Qui non stultus?"]
- Horace (65-8 B.C.), Satires, 2.3.158

Then come jesters, musicians and trained dwarfs,
And singing girls from the land of Ti-ti,
To delight the ear and eye
And bring mirth to the mind.
- Sima Xiangru (ca. 179-117 B.C.) Rhapsody on the Shanglin Park

The jester is an elusive character. The European words used to denote him can now seem as nebulous as they are numerous, reflecting the mercurial man behind them: fool, buffoon, clown, jongleur, jogleor, joculator, sot, stultor, scurra, fou, fol, truhan, mimus, histrio, morio. He can be any of these, while the German word Narr is not so much a stem as the sturdy trunk of a tree efflorescent with fool vocabulary. The jester's quicksilver qualities are equally difficult to pin down, but nevertheless not beyond definition.

The Chinese terms used for "jester" now seem vaguer than the European, most of them having a wider meaning of "actor" or "entertainer." In Chinese there is no direct translation of the English "jester," no single word that to the present-day Chinese conjures an image as vividly as "court jester," fou du roi, or Hofnarr would to a Westerner. In Chinese the jester element often has to be singled out according to context, although the key character you does seem to have referred specifically to jesters, originally meaning somebody who would use humor to mock and joke, who could speak without causing offense, and who also had the ability to sing or dance: "The you was also allowed a certain privilege, that is, his 'words were without offence' . . . but the you could not offer his remonstrances in earnest, he had to make use of jokes, songs and dance." The term is often combined with other characters giving differing shades to his jesterdom, an acting or a musical slant, for example: paiyou, youren, youling, changyou, lingren, linglun. All could include musical and other talents, chang suggesting music, ling, playing or fooling, and pai a humorous element to bring delight. Several of these terms are too frequently translated as "actor" regardless of where they appear on the etymological chain of evolution and even though they were used long before the advent of Chinese drama.

Perhaps the earliest antecedents of the European court jester were the comic actors of ancient Rome. Several Latin terms used in medieval references to jesters (including numerous church condemnations of them), such as scurrae, mimi, or histriones, originally referred either to amusing hangers-on or to the comic actors and entertainers of Rome. Just as there is now no clear distinction between the terms for "actor" and "jester" in Chinese, so the Latin terms could merge the two. If there was no formal professional jester in Rome, the comic actors fulfilled his functions, sometimes even bearing a striking physical resemblance to what is usually considered a medieval and Renaissance archetype. With periodic imperial purges against actors for their outspokenness, many of them took to the road and fanned out across the empire in search of new audiences and greater freedom. Successive waves of such wandering comics may well have laid the foundations for medieval and Renaissance jesterdom, possibly contributing to the rising tide of folly worship that swept across the Continent from the late Middle Ages.

An individual court jester in Europe could emerge from a wide range of backgrounds: an erudite but nonconformist university dropout, a monk thrown out of a priory for nun frolics, a jongleur with exceptional verbal or physical dexterity, or the apprentice of a village blacksmith whose fooling amused a passing nobleman. Just as a modern-day television stand-up comedian might begin his career on the pub and club circuit, so a would-be jester could make it big time in court if he was lucky enough to be spotted. In addition, a poet, musician, or scholar could also become a court jester.

The recruiting of jesters was tremendously informal and meritocratic, perhaps indicating greater mobility and fluidity in past society than is often supposed. A man with the right qualifications might be found anywhere: in Russia "they were generally selected from among the older and uglier of the serf-servants, and the older the fool or she-fool was, the droller they were supposed and expected to be. The fool had the right to sit at table with his master, and say whatever came into his head." Noblemen might keep an eye out for potential jesters, and a letter dated 26 January 1535/36 from Thomas Bedyll to Thomas Cromwell (ca. 1485-1540) recommends a possible replacement for the king's old jester:

Ye know the Kinges grace hath one old fole: Sexten as good as myght be whiche because of aige is not like to cotinew. I haue spied one yong fole at Croland whiche in myne opinion shalbe muche mor pleasaunt than euer Sexten was . . . and he is not past xv yere old.
Fuller's History of the Worthies of England (1662) gives an account of the recruiting of Tarlton, jester to Elizabeth I (r. 1558-1603), that further illustrates this informality:

Here he was in the field, keeping his Father's Swine, when a Servant of Robert Earl of Leicester . . . was so highly pleased with his happy unhappy answers, that he brought him to Court, where he became the most famous Jester to Queen Elizabeth.
A dwarf-jester called Nai Teh (Mr. Little) at the court of King Mongkut of Siam (r. 1851-68), described by Anna Leonowens in Anna and the King of Siam, was similarly recruited:

He was discovered by one of the King's half-brothers on a hunting trip into the north and brought to Bangkok to be trained in athletic and gymnastic tricks. When he had learned these, he was presented to the king as a comedian and a buffoon.
A German, Paul Wst, declined an offer of a post as jester with the sort of brazen dismissiveness that explains why he was asked. When Duke Eberhard the Bearded of Wrtemburg (1445-96) invited him to be his jester he replied, "My father sired his own fool; if you want one too, then go and sire one for yourself" ("Mein Vater hat einen Narren fr sich gezeugt, willst du aber einen Narren haben, so zeuge dir auch einen"). The same story is attributed to Will Somers, who uses the joke to mock Henry's predilection for chalking up wives:

His Majesty after some discourse growing into some good liking of him, said; fellow, wilt thou be my fool? who answered him again, that he had rather be his own father's still, then the king asking him why? he told him again, that his father had got him a fool for himself, (having but one wife) and no body could justly claim him from him: now you have had so many wives, and still living in hope to have more, why, of some one of them, cannot you get a fool as he did? and so you shall be sure to have a fool of your own.
The post of court jester might also appeal to somebody in need of a safe haven. The thirteenth-century French tale of Robert le Diable has him fleeing a populace baying for blood and forcing his way past the footmen to gain access to the emperor, who duly takes him under his wing as a jester, saying that nobody should be allowed to beat him. Alfred de Musset's play Fantasio (1834) is about a dandy whose job as jester allows him to escape and evade creditors, and a Scottish miscellany tells us how one of the most roguish historical jesters found his vocation:

Archie Armstrong . . . after having long distinguished himself as a most dexterous sheep-stealer, and when Eskdale at last became too hot for him, on account of his nefarious practices, he had the honour of being appointed jester to James I. of England, which office he held for several years.
Tarlton tended pigs, Archy stole sheep, and Claus Hinsse (d. 1599), jester to Duke Johann Friedrich of Pomerania (d. 1600), began his working life as a cowherd. Wamba, "son of Witless," the jester in Sir Walter Scott's Ivanhoe, was, like Tarlton, a swineherd, and Claus Narr (Fool), one of Germany's most famous and long-serving jesters, was tending geese when he was recruited. He was jester to four Saxon electors and one archbishop during the last quarter of the fifteenth century and first quarter of the sixteenth, and there are more than six hundred stories about him. One day when the first of his patrons, Elector Ernst (d. 1486), was traveling through Ranstadt with a lot of horses and wagons, Claus became curious about all the commotion and went to see what was happening. Worried that his geese would be stolen, he secured the goslings by putting their necks through his belt while he carried the older geese under his arms. When Ernst saw him he laughed at his simplicity and decided he was a born jester. He asked Claus's father's permission to take him to court:

"That would be great, Sir! I'd be relieved of a great encumbrance thereby; the youth is no good to me - he makes nothing but trouble in my house and stirs up the whole village with his pranks." ["Sehr gern, Gndiger Herr, ich wrde dadurch eines grossen Verdrusses berhoben, denn der Junge ist mir nichts ntze, in meinem Hause macht er nichts als Unruh, und durch seine Possen wiegelt er dass ganze Dorf auf."]
Ernst then gave Claus's father twenty guilders as compensation for the strangled goslings and other gifts besides. The story is an insight into the charitable element often involved in the recruiting of "naturals." To a poor family, a natural might be a heavy burden, and it could clearly be a relief to have him taken in and looked after by a wealthy family. Generally speaking there is little to suggest that this was not done in a humane and kindly manner, although in England there was a law allowing the estates of a natural to be handed over to a person offering to care for him, which could lead to their being recruited under false pretenses.

A similar story is told of Jamie Fleeman (1713-78), the Scottish jester to the laird of Udny. He complemented his jesting duties with those of a cowherd and goose guardian, and when he one day grew irritated by the geese wandering willy-nilly, he twisted some straw rope around their necks and started walking home, unaware that they were being throttled one by one. By the time he realized it was too late, and since it was a rare breed of geese, he would have been in big trouble. So he dragged the corpses into the poultry yard and stuffed their throats with food. When asked whether the geese were safe and sound, he replied cheerfully, "Safe! they're gobble, gobble, gobblin' as if they had nae seen meat for a twalmonth! Safe! Ise warran' they're safe aneuch, if they hae nae choked themsells."

In India the same entrance requirements prevailed: make me laugh and you're in. Tenali Rama, one of the three superstar jesters of India, is said to have earned his position as jester by making King Krsnadevaraya laugh. According to one story, he contrived for the king's guru to carry him around on his shoulders within sight of the king. Outraged at the humiliation of his holy man, the king sent some guards out to beat the man riding on the guru's shoulders. Tenali Rama, smelling impending danger, jumped down and begged forgiveness of the guru, insisting that to make amends he should carry him on his own shoulders. The guru agreed, and when the guards arrived the guru was duly beaten. The king found the trick amusing enough to appoint Tenali Rama his jester. In China, despite the abundance of anecdotes about jesters once they enter royal service, there is very little background information available. Nevertheless the universal jester skills displayed by the Chinese jesters suggest that their appointment was as meritocratic as in Europe.

A description of Rabelais's Panurge encompasses many of the jester's characteristics: "Irreverent, libertine, self-indulgent, witty, clever, roguish, he is the fool as court jester, the fool as companion, the fool as goad to the wise and challenge to the virtuous, the fool as critic of the world." He could be juggler, confidant, scapegoat, prophet, and counselor all in one. If we follow his family tree along its many branches we encounter musicians and actors, acrobats and poets, dwarfs, hunchbacks, tricksters, madmen, and mountebanks.



A Cavalcade of Cavorting Fools

Foolery, sir, does walk about the orb like the sun, it shines everywhere.
-William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night (3.1.39-40)

We have all seen how an appropriate and well-timed joke can sometimes influence even grim tyrants. . . . The most violent tyrants put up with their clowns and fools, though these often made them the butt of open insults.
- Desiderius Erasmus, Praise of Folly
The court jester is a universal phenomenon. He crops up in every court worth its salt in medieval and Renaissance Europe, in China, India, Japan, Russia, America and Africa. A cavalcade of jesters tumble across centuries and continents, and one could circle the globe tracing their footsteps. But to China the laurels. China has undoubtedly the longest, richest, and most thoroughly documented history of court jesters. From Twisty Pole and Baldy Chunyu to Moving Bucket and Newly Polished Mirror, it boasts perhaps more of the brightest stars in the jester firmament than any other country, spanning a far wider segment of time. The jester's decline began with the rise of the stage actor as the Chinese theater became fully established during the Yuan dynasty. In many respects actors seem to have taken up the jester's baton not only in entertaining their patrons, but also in offering criticism and advice no less clear for being couched in wit. Perhaps only in ancient Rome did jesters and actors overlap so much.

In comparison with those of China, the numerous jesters of Europe, although flourishing for some four hundred years, are something of a dazzling display of shooting stars. Perhaps because the European court jesters were so inextricably linked with the tradition of folly that straddled the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, their time was relatively short-lived, and they died out more or less as the fashion for folly faded. But for as long as they lasted, which was no mere blip, their influence permeated court life. It is a common belief that Europe was the center of the court jester's cosmos, providing the control against which other jesters, such as they are, may be measured. Yet in a sense Europe is the exception rather than the rule, precisely because the fortunes of the European court jesters rose and fell with the tsunami-scale wave of medieval and Renaissance fool mania that engulfed the Continent. The concept of folly with all its variegated hues permeated Europe at all levels for several centuries, and it is against this backdrop of colorful and often contradictory manifestations of "folly" that the European jester must be seen. There were certainly jesters before the tidal wave began to swell, but it is on its crest that we see them come surfing in.

Although the jester died out as a court institution (if not as a function), about the sixteenth or seventeenth century in China and the early eighteenth in Europe, there have been pockets of resistance to his demise. European homes less grand than those of kings and prelates harbored jesters for a century or two longer than the courts, a domestic jester being recorded at Hilton Castle in county Durham in the eighteenth century and a Scottish jester, Shemus Anderson (d. 1833), at Murthley Castle, Perthshire. The Queen Mother's family, the Bowes-Lyons, was "the last Scottish family to maintain a full-time jester." A history of the manor of Gawsworth describes a Samuel Johnson (1691-1773) as "one of the last of the paid English jesters. . . . In addition to his being employed as jester or mirth-maker by the manorial Lord of Gawsworth, he was a welcome addition at parties given by the neighbouring country families, when he had free license to bandy his witticisms, and to utter and enact anything likely to enliven the company, and to provoke mirth and laughter."

In Persia the autocratic Shah Naseredin (r. 1848-96) had all his courtiers quaking except the jester Karim Shir'ei, whose name means "opium addict" but also implies someone of lazy or sleepy demeanor. Karim Shir'ei would ridicule the whole court, including the shah. Once the shah asked whether there was a shortage of food, and the jester said "Yes, I see Your Majesty is eating only five times a day." One member of the shah's entourage had the title Saheb Ekhtiyar ("Authorized" [by the shah]). When they were out traveling Karim Shir'ei's donkey stopped at a gate, and the jokester found a pretext to mock the courtier by addressing the ass: "If you want to stop you are Saheb Ekhtiyar [authorized], and if you want to go ahead, you are also Saheb Ekhtiyar [authorized]." Like many famous jesters before him, his name is still used as a peg for jibes and jokes.

Perhaps the most recent examples of the court jester are among the ritual clowns of African and American tribes whose mocking, corrective, and unbridled topsy-turvy antics have been documented by twentieth-century anthropologists. These are not all strictly speaking court jesters, in that they do not usually serve one master, belonging more to the whole tribe or village. Also, their license is often limited to specific periods, although during such festivals or rituals their freedoms and duties accord with those of the permanently privileged jester. However, there are some tribes that have had permanently appointed jesters, such as the African Wolof jesters and the Sioux "contrary," or heyhoka, and "jesters . . . were also attached to many African monarchs. They were frequently dwarfs, and other oddities; and their duties included besides the playing of jokes, the singing of the praises of their rulers. . . . 'But it must not be thought that these bards were mere flatterers . . . they also had licence to make sharp criticisms.'"

The court jester is universal not merely in having been at home in such diverse cultures and eras, but also in taking his pick from the same ragbag of traits and talents no matter when or where he occurs. Above all he used humor, whether in the form of wit, puns, riddles, doggerel verse, songs, capering antics, or nonsensical babble, and jesters were usually also musical or poetic or acrobatic, and sometimes all three. Some physical difference from the norm was common whether it was in being a dwarf or hunchback or in having a gawky or gangly physique or a loose-limbed agility - his movements might be clumsy or nimble, but they should be somehow exaggerated or unusual. There is a Ming dynasty description of a jester that captures this, for besides always hitting the mark with his gilded tongue, he would "unleash his body and fling his limbs around, drumming his feet and flapping his tongue; he was steeped in wisdom." "Capering" is the word that springs to mind, perhaps a physical reflection of his verbal agility:

I have seen
Him caper upright, like a wild morisco
Shaking . . . his bells.


The Importance of Being Jest Earnest

But this Will Summers was of an easie nature, and tractable disposition, who . . . gained not only grace and favour from his Majesty, but a general love of the Nobility; for he was no carry-tale, nor whisperer, nor flattering insinuater, to breed discord and dissension, but an honest plain down-right, that would speak home without halting, and tell the truth of purpose to shame the Devil; so that his plainness mixt with a kind of facetiousness, and tartness with pleasantness made him very acceptable into the companies of all men.
- A Pleasant History of the Life and Death of Will Summers (1676)

In short, the King liked him so well, that he did few Things without Archy's Advice, in so much, that he could have scarce had greater Power had he been made Regent of the Kingdom.
- The Ass Race (1740)
Of at least equal importance with his entertainer's cap was the jester's function as adviser and critic. This is what distinguishes him from a pure entertainer who would juggle batons, swallow swords, or strum on a lute or a clown who would play the fool simply to amuse people. The jester everywhere employed the same techniques to carry out this delicate role, and it would take an obtuse king or emperor not to realize what he was driving at, since "other court functionaries cooked up the king's facts for him before delivery; the jester delivered them raw." An informal survey of the man in the street has shown that most people will pinpoint the jester's right to speak his mind as one of his salient characteristics. I have encountered only one person who considers this to have been more myth than reality:

There are many stories which show a jester as the only person who could counsel a stubborn king, and as such the myth of the court jester suggests that jesters could act as a check on the whimsical power of absolute monarchy. . . . I have been engaged in producing and reproducing a common myth of jesters. Even though the jesters dance right next to the power of the king, the text has been depoliticized in that it has effaced the history of the fool, and elaborated on images conjured up by Erasmus, then Shakespeare, in the task of making jesting reasonable and responsible, and thus political in modern times. . . . The respected, responsible, official jesters only functioned in small historical windows of possibility, for example: fourteenth and fifteenth century Italy and around the turn of the seventeenth century in England.
Even if the jester's famous veracity were only a myth, it would have been established long before Erasmus. And we have seen the impressive extent to which jesters everywhere were allowed and encouraged to offer counsel and to influence the whims and policies of kings, by no means being limited to "small historical windows of possibility." We have seen numerous examples of a jester advising or correcting his monarch and the recorded instances are particularly abundant in China. The Chinese records give us an idea of just how effective a jester could be in tempering the ruler's excesses, for the occasions when his words of warning were either ignored or punished are heavily outnumbered by those when he was heeded and even rewarded.

It is in the nature of jesters to speak their minds when the mood takes them, regardless of the consequences. They are neither calculating nor circumspect, and this may account for the "foolishness" often ascribed to them. Jesters are also generally of inferior social and political status and are rarely in a position (and rarely inclined) to pose a power threat. They have little to gain by caution and little to lose by candor - apart from liberty, livelihood, and occasionally even life, which hardly seems to have been a deterrent. They are peripheral to the game of politics, and this can reassure a king that their words are unlikely to be geared to their own advancement. Jesters are not noted for flattery or fawning. The ruler can be isolated from his courtiers and ministers, who might conspire against him. The jester too can be an isolated and peripheral figure somehow detached from the intrigues of the court, and this enables him to act as a kind of confidant.

The jester also had humor at his disposal. He could soften the blow of a critical comment in a way that prevented a dignified personage from losing face. Humor is the great defuser of tense situations. Among the Murngin tribe of Australia it is the duty of the clown to act outrageously, ludicrously imitating a fight if men begin to quarrel. In making them laugh at him, he distracts their attention from their own fight and dispels their aggression. Quintilian (ca. 35-100) comments on the power of jesters' humor to carry the day:

Now, though laughter may be regarded as a trivial matter, and an emotion frequently awakened by buffoons, actors or fools, it has a certain imperious force of its own which it is very hard to resist. . . . It frequently turns the scale in matters of great importance. [Cum videatur autem res levis et quae ab scurris, mimis, insipientibus denique saepe moveatur, tamen habet vim nescio an imperiosissimam et cui repugnari minime potest. . . . Rerum autem saepe . . . maximarum momenta vertit.]
The foolishness of the jester, whether in his odd appearance or his levity, implies that he is not passing judgment from on high, and this may be less galling than the "holier than thou" corrective of an earnest adviser. One of the most effective techniques the jester uses to point out his master's folly is allowing him to see it for himself. Rather than contradicting the king, the jester will agree with a harebrained scheme so wholeheartedly that the suggestion is taken to a logical extreme, highlighting its stupidity. The king can then decide for himself that maybe it wasn't such a good idea after all.

The jester is in a sense on the side of the ruler. The relationship was often very close and amiable, and the jester was almost invariably a cherished rather than a tolerated presence. This leads to the kindliness of jesters: they could be biting in their attacks, but there is usually an undercurrent of good-heartedness and understanding to their words. If they talk the king out of slicing up some innocent, it is not only to save him from the king's wrath but also to save the king from himself - they can be the only ones who will tell him he suffers from moral halitosis.

The jester is also perceived as being on the side of the people, the little man fighting oppression by the powerful. By fooling wisely ("en folastrant sagement"), the jester often won favor among the people ("gaigna de grace parmy le peuple"). In the folk perception of southern India a king was hardly considered a king without his jester, and the continuing appeal of the court jester in India, in stories and comic books, is perhaps equaled only in Europe. He may have disappeared from the courts and corridors of power, but he still has a powerful hold on the collective imagination. Yet he is no rebel or revolutionary. His detached stance allows him to take the side of the victim in order to curb the excesses of the system without ever trying to overthrow it - his purpose is not to replace one system with another, but to free us from the fetters of all systems:

Under the dissolvent influence of his personality the iron network of physical, social and moral law, which enmeshes us from the cradle to the grave, seems - for the moment - negligible as a web of gossamer. The Fool does not lead a revolt against the Law, he lures us into a region of the spirit where, as Lamb would put it, the writ does not run.
In Europe and India the most eminent jesters were household names, as top-class comedians are today, and stories about their jokes and tricks circulated freely, as they still do in India - there is even a kind of lentil soup named after Birbal. The star jesters of China may also have enjoyed this celebrity status, as Ban Gu's biography of Dongfang Shuo suggests:

Shuo's jokes and sallies, his divinations and guesses, shallow and inconsequential though they are, were passed around among the ordinary run of people, and there was no stripling or cowherd who failed to be quite dazzled by them.


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Copyright notice: Excerpted from pages 1-6 and 233-247 of Fools Are Everywhere: The Court Jester Around the World by Beatrice K. Otto, published by the University of Chicago Press. 2001 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. This text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of U.S. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that this entire notice, including copyright information, is carried and provided that the University of Chicago Press is notified and no fee is charged for access. Archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the University of Chicago Press.

Kenzaburo

The second group are stories in which Oe relates characters who he establishes in the theater of the myths and history of his native forest village, but who interact closely with life in today's cities. This world of Oe's fiction, starting with Bud- Nipping, Lamb-Shooting and followed by The Silent Cry, came to shape the core of his entire literature. Making full use of new ideas of cultural anthropology, these works represent the totality of Oe's world of fiction, as evidenced in Letters to My Sweet Bygone Years (1987), a work about a young man who, banking on his cosmology and world-view of Dante, strives but fails to establish a politico- cultural base in the forest. Contemporary Games is a story that alternates between myth and history, which Oe supports with the matriarch and trickster principles he draws from cultural anthropology. He rewrote this work in narrative form as M/T and the Wonders of the Forest* (1986). With the aid of W.B. Yeat's poetic metaphors, Oe embarked on writing The Flaming Green Tree*, a trilogy comprised of Until the 'Savior' Gets Socked* (1993), Vacillating* (1994), and On The Great Day* (1995). Oe has announced that with the completion of this trilogy, he will enter into his life's final stage of study, in which he will attempt a new form of literature. The implication of this project is that Oe deems his effort at presenting his cosmology, history and folk legend as having been brought to full circle, and that he has succeeded in creating, through his portrayal of that place in the valley and its people, a model for this contemporary age. It also implies that he considers Hikari's becoming a composer, in actuality, surpasses the importance of his own literature about him.


Billy's Essay

Jesters

Jesters were very important to the king's court. They entertained the King and told jokes. Jesters were also called fools. There were three different types of jesters. There were the Natural fools, Dwarfs and Artificial fools. Natural fools were physically and mentally handicapped. The family of the fool would often go to the local lord and ask him to take in the handicapped person. This became known as begging him a fool. Sometimes the family would tie the person's limbs so they could deform him so they could beg him a fool. Dwarfs were also used as fools. Some of the dwarfs wore fine clothes that mocked the fashions of the time. Other fools wore brightly colored outfits. Some Princes thought a complement to their fool as a complement to themselves. Artificial fools were the third class. They were smart and sarcastic. They became jesters because it gave them the freedom to say things about their master/lord that they couldn't say otherwise. The artificial fool is the type of fool we think of today. Fools were treated differently depending on who their masters were. Some were treated extremely well, while others were treated like horses and dogs. Jesters were only put to death if they committed a crime. They were not beheaded on the chopping block if they displeased their master. Sometimes if they displeased their master they were beaten. Often they were beaten to death. The last woman fool was Kathrin Lise in 1722. Eventually keeping a fool went out of fashion in the seventeenth century.


Bob's View

The jesters doctarine is old as the world. It is based on tow major rules:
1. the rule of discration
and
2. the rule of influance
The rule of discration do with the fact that a true jester always will be regarded as a fool, as a not importent person, one that is presence in the room is not taken seriously, this rule gives the jester his power for when you are considered equal to the dust as the dust itself you'll be able to enter any place with no difficulty. More than that, the things that you'll say will enter even the most stuborn heart in the same way that waters go through the hardest rock.

The rule of influance do with the fact that all jester are thriving to change the world by influancing the leaders of the human race, but this they'll achive by the nonsense and the foolishness. Know that they are very very wise.

The jesters are the favorite children of the elements of the sky - that is the fire and air. Being such they have alot of talents given to them by the air - king of all knowledge, and by the fire - queen of all passion.

Tarot

The next card is not numbered on its face, but it has been assigned the next-to-last letter in the Hebrew alphabet, Shin, making it correspond to number 21. This is the Fool. Visible here is a very specific formulation of the Fool as scapegoat, the well-known yearly sacrifice who atones for the sins of the people. This scapegoat tradition started with the Hebrews in the Holy Land. At the new year, they would assign all the negativity that had happened in the village to a goat, giving to it the role of the devil, the vessel that held all their sins. Then they would chase it around the village throwing sticks and stones and calling names, eventually driving it out to expire of its wounds in the desert. In this way the villagers would then feel relieved of all their year's sins.

By the time this tradition trickled into Europe in the Dark Ages, it was transformed, and the carrier of the village sins became the village idiot rather than livestock. At this point it could be some old crone who was getting demented with age, or a child with a birth defect. This person would be singled out and designated the scapegoat. You can see on the card, his clothes are stuffed with straw. He's wearing bells on his belt, like a leper. He's the straw man who gets blamed for everything. The leper's bell, the goat ears and the dunce cap with the horns on it are all clues, not only to the medieval scapegoat tradition, but to earlier Hebraic roots.

The corn wand refers back to the Empress card, and to pre-Christian mysteries of the Holy Fool. He is an emissary of the Great Goddess who enters this world to gather intelligence for his patroness on the state of the human experiment. Yearly he is sent back to the Goddess carrying messages from the people saying, "Accounts are closed. We have paid for our sins, and now the year is cleared".

Notice that the Fool's bag is red and black, symbolizing the blood of life and the obscurity of the underworld. His life force is packaged up neatly, with no loose ends, in anticipation of his journey "beyond". He's being used in a very specific ritual format to release the people from their sins by carrying them away, and as such he's also the pied-piper, because the bad spirits of the village follow him out.

The letter Shin is the Divine Fire, karmic or celestial fire. He's carrying the sins of the village into the furnace of the gods to be melted down and reborn. (The word hell derives from a Germanic goddess who was the goddess of the underworld. She received the souls of the fallen warriors, put them in her cauldron, cooked them down and reforged them into new warriors. Her name was Hel.) This pre-Christian conception details the process of taking the past, breaking it up, recombining it and recasting it as the future. The Fool stands in the doorway between the visible and the invisible worlds.

The Fool steps off the edge of the mountain as if the Spirit were bound to hold him up. After the long, twisting path of the Major Arcana, having just reawakened to his eternal spiritual nature in the cycle, he now has a choice whether to reincarnate again or not. He has won his way back up to higher ground, but it looks like he will sacrifice it all again, tumbling back down into another body and another incarnation. I see this Holy Fool as being on the Boddhisattva path, bound to life after life for the service of humanity, not satisfied with personal liberation until all souls are rescued from the Wheel of Time and Incarnation.


Poe

Q:I need to write a 4-5 page research type paper on Poe's Hop Frog. Anything would be helpful!

-- Marty LaRue (Dutchy501@aol.com), May 09, 2001

A: The theme of this(I believe)late story(1849) is obviously revenge(the jester Forunato eg. in The cask of Amontillado). Hop Frog's girl is insulted and hurt by the tyrannical king and his toady ministers. The teeth gnashing is a powerful omen of warning. The cruel game. Hop frog and his lady escape via the chain of victims, the burning King and his ministers.
On an easy level the jester is obviously a Poe figure(moreso perhaps than in any other story) vis a vis the other jokers(who favored long, broad jest of low quality). This is very much a symbol of his literary theory. The ministers are fat- not so the crippled jester, a thing of derision as well as humor. The King forces the jester to drink. Trippetta pleads for him and gets wine tossed in her face. Allusions to other Poe stories(Masque of the Red death, ourang-outang from Murders of the Rue Morgue. That Poe compares his art to the low skills of the jester shows bitterness on a level far deeper than the surface story. One of the reasons this tale is not popular perhaps is that it is too brutally uncomfortable a statement of intense hatred standing for Poe himself near the end of his life. The fear and temptation and the effects of drink on Poe.

I can't help, though I may be totally wrong, in comparing this to Dante's Inferno(last circle of Hell- like the court room, chandelier and cupola), for Poe must have felt like a jester in hell himself. Whether the girl stands for Virginia, or more likely, his pure soul as such a figure often does in his poems, the medieval allusions can be intriguing. The King-Satan? The gnashing of teeth- Satan chews traitors. The trap- Dante has to climg Satan's furry hide to escape. The Great Chain of Being(clothing the King and his ministers as apes and leading them to their doom. etc.) He called the Boston literary circle the Frog Pond(Aristophanes play of same name?). Hop Frog is a child's game of using the back of the one in front to leap over.

I would have some misgivings, were I one of those literary adversaries of Poe, and should invite me to participate in his new magazine, The Pen (he died before its inception). He definitely had some revenge in mind once he attained his hard fought success. As with many of Poe's stories there is lot more than a simply told plain tale. Did he mean it to be his last "jest", his last Gothic Tale? He hinted he had other avenues to explore but the unfinished fragment of "The Lighthouse" (another circular ascent) suggest he still had a lot to get off his chest.

-- P.E. Murphy (murky@rochester.rr.com), May 10, 2001.


Twain

Mark Twain the licensed jester
from Tribune (1943-nov-26)

by George Orwell
(pseud. for Eric Blair (1903-1950))
MARK TWAIN has crashed the lofty gates of the Everyman library, but only with Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, already fairly well known under the guise of "children's books" (which they are not). His best and most characteristic books, Roughing It, The Innocents at Home, and even Life on the Mississippi, are little remembered in this country, though no doubt in America the patriotism which is everywhere mixed up with literary judgement keeps them alive.

Although Mark Twain produced a surprising variety of books, ranging from a namby-pamby "life" of Joan of Arc to a pamphlet so obscene that it has never been publicly printed, all that is best in his work centres about the Mississippi river and the wild mining towns of the West. Born in 1835 (he came of a Southern family, a family just rich enough to own one or perhaps two slaves), he had had his youth and early manhood in the golden age of America, the period when the great plains were opened up, when wealth and opportunity seemed limitless, and human beings felt free, indeed were free, as they had never been before and may not be again for centuries. Life on the Mississippi and the two other books that I have mentioned are a ragbag of anecdotes, scenic descriptions and social history both serious and burlesque, but they have a central theme which could perhaps be put into these words: "This is how human beings behave when they are not frightened of the sack." In writing these books Mark Twain is not consciously writing a hymn to liberty. Primarily he is interested in "character," in the fantastic, almost lunatic variations which human nature is capable of when economic pressure and tradition are both removed from it. The raftsmen, Mississippi pilots, miners and bandits whom he describes are probably not much exaggerated, but they are as different from modern men, and from one another, as the gargoyles of a medieval cathedral. They could develop their strange and sometimes sinister individuality because of the lack of any outside pressure. The State hardly existed, the churches were weak and spoke with many voices, and land was to be had for the taking. If you disliked your job you simply hit the boss in the eye and moved further west; and moreover, money was so plentiful that the smallest coin in circulation was worth a shilling. The American pioneers were not supermen, and they were not especially courageous. Whole towns of hardy gold miners let themselves be terrorized by bandits whom they lacked the public spirit to put down. They were not even free from class distinctions. The desperado who stalked through the streets of the mining settlement, with a Derringer pistol in his waistcoat pocket and twenty corpses to his credit, was dressed in a frock coat and shiny top-hat, described himself firmly as a "gentleman" and was meticulous about table manners. But at least it was not the case that a man's destiny was settled from his birth. The "log cabin to White House" myth was true while the free land lasted. In a way, it was for this that the Paris mob had stormed the Bastille, and when one reads Mark Twain, Bret Harte and Whitman it is hard to feel that their effort was wasted.

However, Mark Twain aimed at being something more than a chronicler of the Mississippi and the Gold Rush. In his own day he was famous all over the world as a humorist and comic lecturer. In New York, London, Berlin, Vienna, Melbourne and Calcutta vast audiences rocked with laughter over jokes which have now, almost without exception, ceased to be funny. (It is worth noticing that Mark Twain's lectures were only a success with Anglo-Saxon and German audiences. The relatively grown-up Latin races whose own humour, he complained, always centred round sex and politics never cared for them.) But in addition, Mark Twain had some pretensions to being a social critic, even a species of philosopher. He had in him an iconoclastic, even revolutionary vein which he obviously wanted to follow up and yet somehow never did follow up. He might have been a destroyer of humbugs and a prophet of democracy more valuable than Whitman, because healthier and more humorous. Instead he became that dubious thing a "public figure," flattered by passport officials and entertained by royalty, and his career reflects the deterioration in American life that set in after the Civil War.

Mark Twain has sometimes been compared with his contemporary, Anatole France. This comparison is not so pointless as it may sound. Both men were the spiritual children of Voltaire, both had an ironical, sceptical view of life, and a native pessimism overlaid by gaiety; both knew that the existing social order is a swindle and its cherished beliefs mostly delusions. Both were bigoted atheists and convinced (in Mark Twain's case this was Darwin's doing) of the unbearable cruelty of the universe. But there the resemblance ends. Not only is the Frenchman enormously more learned, more civilized, more alive sthetically, but he is also more courageous. He does attack the things he disbelieves in; he does not, like Mark swain, always take refuge behind the amiable mask of the "public figure" and the licensed jester. He is ready to risk the anger of the Church and to take the unpopular side in a controversy in the Dreyfus case, for example. Mark Twain, except perhaps in one short essay "What is Man?", never attacks established beliefs in a way that is likely to get him into trouble. Nor could he ever wean himself from the notion, which is perhaps especially an American notion, that success and virtue are the same thing.

In Life on the Mississippi there is a queer little illustration of the central weakness of Mark Twain's character. In the earlier part of this mainly autobiographical book the dates have been altered. Mark Twain describes his adventures as a Mississippi pilot as though he had been a boy of about seventeen at the time, whereas in fact he was a young man of nearly thirty. There is a reason for this. The same part of the book describes his exploits in the Civil War, which were distinctly inglorious. Moreover, Mark Twain started by fighting, if he can be said to have fought, on the Southern side, and then changed his allegiance before the war was over. This kind of behaviour is more excusable in a boy than in a man, whence the adjustment of the dates. It is also clear enough, however, that he changed sides because he saw that the North was going to win; and this tendency to side with the stronger whenever possible, to believe that might must be right, is apparent throughout his career. In Roughing It there is an interesting account of a bandit named Slade, who, among countless other outrages, had committed twenty-eight murders. It is perfectly clear that Mark Twain admires this disgusting scoundrel. Slade was successful; therefore he was admirable. This outlook, no less common today, is summed up in the significant American expression "to make good."

In the money-grubbing period that followed the Civil War it was hard for anyone of Mark Twain's temperament to refuse to be a success. The old, simple, stump-whittling, tobacco-chewing democracy which Abraham Lincoln typified was perishing: it was now the age of cheap immigrant labour and the growth of Big Business. Mark Twain mildly satirized his contemporaries in The Gilded Age, but he also gave himself up to the prevailing fever, and made and lost vast sums of money. He even for a period of years deserted writing for business; and he squandered his time on buffooneries, not merely lecture tours and public banquets, but, for instance, the writing of a book like A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, which is a deliberate flattery of all that is worst and most vulgar in American life. The man who might have been a kind of rustic Voltaire became the world's leading after-dinner speaker, charming alike for his anecdotes and his power to make businessmen feel themselves public benefactors.

It is usual to blame Mark Twain's wife for his failure to write the books he ought to have written, and it is evident that she did tyrannize over him pretty thoroughly. Each morning, Mark Twain would show her what he had written the day before, and Mrs. Clemens (Mark Twain's real name was Samuel Clemens) would go over it with the blue pencil, cutting out everything that she thought unsuitable. She seems to have been a drastic blue-penciller even by nineteenth-century standards. There is an account in W.D. Howells's book My Mark Twain of the fuss that occurred over a terrible expletive that had crept into Huckleberry Finn. Mark Twain appealed to Howells, who admitted that it was "just what Huck would have said," but agreed with Mrs. Clemens that the word could not possibly be printed. The word was "hell." Nevertheless, no writer is really the intellectual slave of his wife. Mrs. Clemens could not have stopped Mark Twain writing any book he really wanted to write. She may have made his surrender to society easier, but the surrender happened because of that flaw in his own nature, his inability to despise success.

Several of Mark Twain's books are bound to survive, because they contain invaluable social history. His life covered the great period of American expansion. When he was a child it was a normal day's outing to go with a picnic lunch and watch the hanging of an Abolitionist, and when he died the aeroplane was ceasing to be a novelty. This period in America produced relatively little literature, and but for Mark Twain our picture of a Mississippi paddle-steamer, or a stage-coach crossing the plains, would be much dimmer than it is. But most people who have studied his work have come away with a feeling that he might have done something more. He gives all the while a strange impression of being about to say something and then funking it, so that Life on the Mississippi and the rest of them seem to be haunted by the ghost of a greater and much more coherent book. Significantly, he starts his autobiography by remarking that a man's inner life is indescribable. We do not know what he would have said it is just possible that the unprocurable pamphlet, 1601, would supply a clue but we may guess that it would have wrecked his reputation and reduced his income to reasonable proportions.


Collage (Ray Johnson)

Humor and games are the basic elements of the big collage. Humor is always present, whether in the form of verbal and visual puns or people enjoying activities outlined for the NYCS meetings. This Is all part of a general quality: word games, parlor games, mind games. Ray Johnson is very much the prankster, the trickster, and the jester. These factors--the games, humor, involvement--have contributed to many peoples' pigeonholing Ray Johnson into the Dada ethic. He has been referred to as "the Dada Daddy of mail art art mail ... mainstream from Marcel Duchamp."[l4] Clearly, there is a connection with the Dada movement and a certain fascination with Marcel Duchamp. But to think that Johnson is totally a Dada or neo-Dada is quite incorrect. One must also consider the Surrealists.