Literature and Intellectual Disability in Early Modern England

Folly, Law and Medicine, 1500-1640

Alice Equestri

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781000424997
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Arte dramático

Fools and clowns were widely popular characters employed in early modern drama, prose texts and poems mainly as laughter makers, or also as ludicrous metaphorical embodiments of human failures. Literature and Intellectual Disability in Early Modern England: Folly, Law and Medicine, 1500–1640 pays full attention to the intellectual difference of fools, rather than just their performativity: what does their total, partial, or even pretended 'irrationality' entail in terms of non-standard psychology or behaviour, and others' perception of them? Is it possible to offer a close contextualised examination of the meaning of folly in literature as a disability? And how did real people having intellectual disabilities in the Renaissance period influence the representation and subjectivity of literary fools?

Alice Equestri answers these and other questions by investigating the wide range of significant connections between the characters and Renaissance legal and medical knowledge as presented in legal records, dictionaries, handbooks, and texts of medicine, natural philosophy, and physiognomy. Furthermore, by bringing early modern folly in closer dialogue with the burgeoning fields of disability studies and disability theory, this study considers multiple sides of the argument in the historical disability experience: intellectual disability as a variation in the person and as a difference which both society and the individual construct or respond to. Early modern literary fools' characterisation then emerges as stemming from either a realistic or also from a symbolical or rhetorical representation of intellectual disability.

1
Introduction

Fools, From Popular Culture to Disability Studies

If we had to indicate the most popular, pervasive, and long-lasting stock character of the early modern English stage – albeit with developments and changes in time – that would probably be the fool. Sometimes referred to synonymously, stage fools and clowns are often viewed as evolutions of devils or Vice characters of medieval and sixteenth-century mystery and morality plays, who combined their antagonistic action against godly forces or Virtues with a conspicuous dose of farce, foolery, or also wit.¹

Though certainly more prominent in England than elsewhere, fools were not peculiar to English culture alone. Analogue figures were found in other countries, like France, Germany, and Italy.² Their main function was merrymaking and, in their most sophisticated forms, witty satire against the faults of the main characters and of society more broadly. Fools were at odds with their fictional worlds: scapegoats, licensed rebels against hierarchy, mediators between audience and stage, and sometimes privileged moralisers of society. Not by chance, they were usually marginal to the main plot. Far from being confined only to drama, stage fools and clowns had long had their counterparts in real-life entertainers, who had also influenced them: professional household and court fools, who occasionally took part in revels;³ or street joculators, jugglers, mimes, and minstrels, whose progenitors can be traced back to Germanic and Roman times. Dressed-up fools were also protagonists of annual carnival entertainments and ecclesiastic ‘Feasts of Fools’⁴ as well as rural Morris dances and folk festivals.⁵

The fool might also transcend their simple embodiment as entertainer to become a personification of the universal human folly in falling prey to vice. Epitomising the aphorisms stultorum numerus est infinitus or stultorum plena sunt omnia,⁶ it is especially in this signification that the fool appeared in medieval and early modern art⁷ as well as in humanist works like Sebastian Brant’s Ship of Fools (1494) and Erasmus’ Praise of Folly (1511). In early modern England, such thinking shaped not just the notion of folly in morality plays but also, later into the sixteenth century and in the seventeenth, in non-dramatic prose or verse literature, where the fool as a stand-in for the erring man was a major representation of folly – as in Nicholas Breton’s poems and pamphlets, John Davies’ Gulling Sonnets (1596), Robert Armin’s Quips Upon Questions (1600), Thomas Dekker’s Gull’s Hornbook (1607), Samuel Rowlands’ A Foole’s Bolt is Soone Shot (1614), or Henry Hutton’s Follies Anatomie (1619). This tradition also coexisted with jestbooks narrating comic anecdotes about real or legendary fools – for example Scogging’s Jests (1570), Tarlton’s Jests and News Out of Purgatory (1600), Jack of Dover (1604), Armin’s Foole Upon Foole (1605), and Archie Armstrong’s A Banquet of Jests (1630).

Despite the variety of forms the concepts of fool and folly took, there is one crucial common trait among them, which will be the focus of this book. It is an aspect rooted in the essence itself of the fool: the assumption that foolishness or folly signifies a certain irrationality, a non-normative intelligence, or a way of thinking often physicalised as intellectual impairment. It is, however, a characteristic that scholars have too often considered self-explanatory or obvious, focusing instead on the many moral, symbolic, rhetorical, or performative implications of that supposed irrationality. Lack of intelligence per se and its psychological causes are themes that are often cursorily or elusively discussed. Paromita Chakravarti has previously noted this gap, questioning the ‘lopsided historiography of Renaissance folly which tends to focus exclusively on the philosophical and literary representations of the morosoph rather than on the medical, legal, folkloric, anthropological and terratological accounts of the natural fool’,⁸ that is the intellectually disabled person. Though the main aim of her essay is to use these approaches to uncover the link between the natural fool, the child, and the New World native, by ultimately reading Shakespeare’s Caliban as a ‘monstrous natural’ she points at a promising, much larger area for literary scholars of folly to work on.

This is the subject I will explore: the overlap between fool characters in literary texts and Renaissance understandings of natural folly. My corpus will consist of dramatic, poetic, and prose works published or written in England between the early sixteenth century and the first decades of the seventeenth. This time span will allow the inclusion in this analysis of proto-fool types from the sixteenth-century morality tradition and of late comic characters who are often overlooked because they were created after the English golden age of fools – coinciding with the careers of the comedians Richard Tarlton (1530–1588), William Kemp (1560–1603), and Robert Armin (1563–1615) – at a time when this character type had started to decay.⁹ Though all the characters I will discuss belong to the conceptual category of ‘fool’, there are important nuances among them that warrant a diversified nomenclature and determine a varied linkage with natural folly, which may be either realistic or symbolic. Typical of Tudor drama were Vices, who might be more or less foolish but usually had a great comic vocation. Partly linked to the Vices were those we may call ‘moral’ fools: the sinful Everymen figures of many sixteenth-century morality plays and the erring protagonists of later didactic or satirical poems and pamphlets. Though endowed with lesser comic power, these figures were described as fools because of their folly in ignoring virtuous moral precepts. Yet perhaps the term ‘fool’ fits most straightforwardly the literary versions of ‘natural’ fools – people born with low intellect – and of ‘artificial’ ones – professionals who pretend folly for entertainment. Artificial fools, who typically coincide with licensed court fools or jesters, are often wise in their foolery, particularly in Shakespeare – however, this does not mean that they are not influenced by Renaissance paradigms of intellectual disability. In this book, the term ‘clown’ will indicate instead lowly comic characters (i.e. rustics, servants) who can be somewhat foolish but are neither natural fools nor jesters. Yet, because clowns are not always foolish and their overall number in early modern plays definitely exceeds that of proper fools,¹⁰ I focus here on figures whose foolishness is more apparent or better stressed. A final category is that of ‘gulls’, typically noble foolish characters who become the victims of mockeries and pranks, and are therefore often derogatorily called ‘fools’.

Analysing these types, I seek to answer some questions. What does it mean that English literary fools were fools? What does their full, partial, pretended, or constructed irrationality entail in terms of non-standard psychology and behaviour or of others’ perception of difference? Is it possible to offer a contextualised examination of early modern literary foolishness as a disability? Demonstrating that it is definitely possible, I extend the Renaissance discourse on natural folly to observe how it permeates the characterisation of all fool types. This implies understanding intellectual disability not only as something that tangibly impairs a character, but also as a wider rubric: a system of ideas figuratively attached to, wielded, and even claimed by characters variously perceived as being different. Disability thus influences all fool types to some degree, regardless of their positioning in what we may call an ‘intelligence spectrum’. Only a few characters can be said to be truly ‘disabled’ by any standards: the majority can instead be located somewhere between disability and normative intelligence, with witty fools approaching most or even coinciding with normativity. And yet, Renaissance technical descriptors of intellectual disability and their implications invariably influence the characterisation of each fool type. In other words, my considerations here should not be read in opposition to consolidated critical stances on fools, particularly on wise fools’ wit. Rather, they are compatible with and complementary to them: the laughter-making and subjectivity of fools are not only the result of the development of specific comic forms, but also the result of the clear influence of historical descriptions of intellectual disability.

Seminal cultural studies on the fool have generally discussed natural folly or fools’ intellectual difference hastily and superficially. Enid Wels-ford’s The Fool, claiming that the fool was ‘not altogether devoid of sense’¹¹ and that ‘mere stupidity’¹² was not the key to their success, simultaneously implied a degree of non-normativity as a basic but uninteresting attribute of the character and preluded to the book’s focus on the fool’s special abilities. When Welsford mentioned ‘stupidity’, ‘mental derangement’, or ‘half-wittedness’, she eschewed a systematic analysis of its meaning or pragmatic manifestations even when she discussed natural fools kept as court entertainers throughout history¹³ or when she asked whether ‘half-wittedness [is] essential to the part [the clown] plays in village ceremonial’.¹⁴ ‘Folly’ was thus used either as a vague or culturally fraught term, obscuring its historical valence as the epitomisation of non-metaphorical notions of intelligence. More recent studies like, chronologically, Anton C. Zijderveld’s Reality in a Looking Glass, Beatrice Otto’s Fools are Everywhere, Vicki K. Janik’s Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art and History, and John Southworth’s Fools and Jesters at the English Court have followed Welsford’s approach, evidencing similar gaps. Introducing the ‘natural’ versus ‘artificial’ fool dichotomy, these works do not discuss in depth the former’s intellectual disability or if/how it had an influence on the latter’s pretence. And, though they devote whole sections to natural fools, they focus more on real or fictional fools’ lives than on their disability and how it was historically understood.¹⁵ The same goes for Sandra Billing-ton’s classic A Social History of the Fool which, other than considering fools’ theological poise between vice and innocence, mostly discusses their cultural performativity as integral to the ‘Fool behaviour’.¹⁶

This general tendency in overlooking or not clearly systematising the manifestations of fools’ ‘unintelligent’ behaviour is even more evident in investigations of Elizabethan and Jacobean stage clowns like David Wiles’ Shakespeare’s Clown, Robert Bell’s Shakespeare’s Great Stage of Fools, Bente A. Videbæk’s The Stage Clown, or older studies like Olive M. Busby’s Studies in The Development of the Fool and Robert H. Goldsmith’s Wise Fools in Shakespeare. Somewhat more consideration of witlessness is given in William Willeford’s The Fool and His Sceptre, which presents the fool’s transhistorical attributes. Willeford remarks that ‘a fool looks and acts silly in various ways, such as grimacing, and that what they say is empty of meaning’, that they are ‘deficient in judgment or sense’, whether altogether or ‘with regard to social decorum’,¹⁷ and that it is specifically this defectiveness or unclear ‘psychic aberration’¹⁸ that grants them freedom from responsibility.¹⁹ Th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: Fools, From Popular Culture to Disability Studies
• Section 1 Law
• Section 2 Medicine and Physiognomy
• 8 Epilogue: Intellectual Disability, Embodiment, and Humour in Early Modern Literature
• Bibliography
• Index