The Fool in William Shakespeares As You Like It Essay -- William Shak

The Fool in William Shakespeares As You Like ItThe bell ringer is one of the first character archetypes that any student of literature learns how to analyze. disrespect his seemingly light or even pointless chatter, the lounge about usually manages to say some fairly important things. Upon further study, the student may perceive that it is because of his penchant for silliness that the fool is given leave to depict even offensive truths about the other characters. What happens, though, when one fool encounters some other? Fools are not used to being subject to one others wit this experience of being held up to a phase of mirror is generally reserved for the characters who must undergo some variety show to further the plot. step and Jaques manage to break that rule, and merely by coexist seem to compete. Both live up to some part of our mind-set of the fool, but neither manages to fill the graphic symbol entirely. Which one comes closer is a matter worthy of some d ebate. In her book The Fool His kind and Literary History, Enid Welsford devotes a chapter to The Court-Fool in Elizabethan Drama and briefly discusses As You Like It specifically. She at one point describes fools as being partly within and partly outside the action of the drama. (244). This idea is applicable to Touchstone and Jaques, but in a slightly different way than she mean it. She was describing characters drived by circumstance in that liminal state--characters with no desire to survive to either side of their middle ground. Also, she describes the differences between Touchstone and Jaques, both in appearance and attitude. Most importantly, she mentions that Touchstone exposes affectation but he is candid ofcriticism, and his judgments are r... ... encroaching on his territory. Jaques is a sort-of fool in a sort-of court, but Touchstones presence brings in a light of the rest of the worlda factual fool from a real courtthat shatters Jaques before he ev er has a chance to flim-flam a single stone at Touchstone. Jaques attempts to find a place for himself, then, simply read as a strange, lost man fashioning faces in a glass. There is no way that Jaques can make it Touchstones inherent liminalitywhere Touchstone slips seamlessly from one world to the next, in and out of the action, Jaques just hops jerkily back and forth akin someone walking on hot coals. He never lands in any one place long enough to really earn himself. It is for this reason that Touchstone fills every facet of the fools role more ably than Jaques, up until the bitter end when Jaques takes the traditional fools ending and stands alone.