A Study of Fools in Shakespeare's Comedies: the Case of Falstaff

Abstract

This article explores the role and function of fools in Shakespeare’s comedies in terms of liminal experiences and carnivalesque laughter. Through a detailed analysis of Falstaff in The Merry Wives of Windsor (1600), the article will show how fools mainly play with the grotesque realism of physical bodies and how they can impose primitive playfulness and subversive awareness on both characters and audience. In a rigid Elizabethan society with stringent control and hierarchy, fools provided their audience with the experience of temporary displacement and trespass using uncontrollable bodies and floating discourses of them. Moreover, fools effectively implement their subversive roles to reveal the unpleasant conflicts and disorders existed in a society refusing the fictional concept of seamlessly harmonious social structure. They also created the laughter which effectively delivers serious and ridiculous meanings of the subjects in a community. Thus, Shakespeare powerfully displays ambiguous and complex characteristics of comedies by integrating fools with the carnivalesque energy of laughter.