The fool is a fact, and he is the only fact that cannot be governed by the comic dream. He has a mastery of music and song and of all the resources of language as well.
Yet he is a mere jester. Levin This fellow is wise enough to play the fool, And to do that well craves a kind of wit. He must observe their mood on whom he jests, The quality of persons, and the time; And like the haggard, check at every feather That comes before his eye. What is love? But when I came, alas, to wive, With hey ho, the wind and the rain, By swaggering could I never thrive, For the rain it raineth every day.
The passing of time is painful [for everyone, but particularly for Feste, as he does not travel through it as others do], may even seem unendurable, but there is nothing for it but resignation, the wise acceptance of the Fool. Evans, G. Blakemore, ed.
The Riverside Shakespeare. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, Bulletin 17 January : Quarterly 9 Spring : Northwestern U P, Click here for a printable version Home. T he Fool is a stock character used by many playwrights, but in Twelfth Night , Shakespeare diverges from the typical character of the jester to create Feste, a man who is more than simply a Fool.
Geoffrey Bush proposes that the reason the Fool, in general, is thus unaffected by the ending of the comedy is because the fool is not in progress towards himself, the fool is always himself, and he preserves what he is by ignoring a world rushing headlong toward weddings. He is caught in a position of immobility, where he must observe others continuing on with their lives without being able to do so himself.
But Bush does not take into account the idea that such stasis might be crippling to a Fool such as Feste, and that, trapped in a life that never changes, his words might begin to be touched by melancholy and hints of bitterness, dark undertones that result from the loneliness of a perpetual existence in such a confined cage. Feste is constrained by his role as a Fool. As part of his function as an allowed Fool, Feste is permitted greater freedoms than virtually any other servant, and is given leave to use his wit and intelligence to suggest to others that it is they who are the fools, not he.
And yet he is caged by these freedoms; they isolate him from others. But his intelligence is crippling, because he can only express his observations in the maxims of the Fool; as anything else, he would be criticised for speaking truths that people do not want to hear. Bet you'd like to know where you can get your hands on one of those. Feste's job is to entertain by singing, dancing, cracking jokes, and bagging on everyone around him.
As literary critics often point out, he seems to embody the spirit of Twelfth Night festivities, which are all about having a good time and flipping the bird to authority figures. Check out " What's Up with the Title? Feste is a genius with words and has a knack for punning, word play, and witty repartee, which he puts to use throughout Twelfth Night. As "Cesario" points out, even though Feste is a "fool," he's the wisest cat in Illyria: This fellow is wise enough to play the Fool, And to do that well craves a kind of wit.
He points out that Olivia's excessive mourning is over-indulgent and "foolish" and notes Duke Orsino's extreme moodiness when he compares Orsino's mind to an "opal" that changes color. Even while he clowns around with the rowdy Sir Toby, he also provides some shrewd commentary about Toby's excessive and dangerous behavior.
A foolish fool? Though Feste is more closely related to the second meaning of the word, Elisabethans were familiar with all of them and they would usually come across with characters who would play the part of the fool, and who could be said to have such characteristics as the ones given by the Oxford English Dictionary.
Feste is everything but a stock character. Stock characters are usually flat characters who do not undergo any kind of development throughout the play and whose presence, though patent in the play, is not essential to the story line nor to the action. Feste is also able to recognize and criticize the fools subject to foolery, the self-proclaimed wits who are not witty at all. Since it is their lack of self-knowledge what makes them fools. These examples show that Feste, differently from other fools or clowns depicted in the English literature, is witty and intelligent.
Clown: I think his soul is in hell, Madonna. Olivia: I know his soul is in heaven, fool. Clown: The more fool, Madonna, to mourn for your. Take away the fool, gentlemen. TN, I: V, Feste is a rather melancholic clown, as may be inferred from his songs. There is an ironic tone in his songs that provides the play with a bitter-sweet ending. The play is a comedy because it has a happy ending; actually it is Feste in one of his songs who foreshadows the happy ending:.
Feste: an omniscient presence. The best example to support this idea is found in Act 3, when the clown says to Viola, disguised as Cesario:. Shakespeare may have wanted to provide Feste with a wider view and knowledge of all the characters, since he is the one to carry out the judgements on the other characters. This is just an interpretation very much subject to checking, however, I agree with some of the reasons which motivate it.
Firstly, it is worth noting that Feste is not involved emotionally with any of the characters in the action. This is the fact which supports the idea commented a few paragraphs before that Feste is not a participant but rather a commentator of the action. This gives him the status of a character placed above the action. In this way he knows everyone in the play and can infer more information about them than any other character.
Finally, and in spite of interacting with all the characters, it is his ability to avoid attachment to them which allows him to become a critic of their actions. It is through this commentary that Feste can assert his true wit over the true foolishness of the other characters.
His insightful dialogue provides criticism and interpretation of the central events of the comedy. Both Feste and Puck are adjacent characters to the story whose function turns out to be essential for the action of the play. Though they are provided with a different hue, they both belong to the same color. I will focus here on the similarities held by these two charming and complicated characters and to what point they differ in what they resemble.
However, both of them get into trouble with their masters just for the same reason: they act rather freely for a servant. Feste leaves without permission, blatantly ignoring his mistress rules. They also reconcile with their masters later on, by using each their best strategy: Feste wittily holds a conversation with Olivia that makes her forget about his misdeed and Puck uses his management of magic to sort the situation out. They both love to play pranks on the rest of the characters and humor is their most important trait.
Nevertheless, Feste proves to be a more malevolent or rather self-conscious figure than Puck.
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