Outlandish Outsiders and Carnival Heroes - A journey through Shakespeare's world of fools.

In her seminal study of the fool, The Fool: His Social and Literary History, Enid Welsford writes: ‘the fool … is an amphibian equally at home in the world of reality and the world of imagination’. Shakespeare’s fools all occupy this liminal place; both literary characters and historical personages they transcend the written page becoming part of the public arena. Despite being fixed to a period of time, Shakespeare’s fools are timeless, belonging to somewhere yet nowhere at once. They are both a part of and apart from society, spectator yet player, conformist yet carnivalite, product yet producer of the politics and poetics of their time. The carnival world they inhabit or at times create is at once imagined reality and realised imagination; a concrete utopia, a shifting ambiguity – like the fool – that perpetually resists definition. This paper will investigate the role and purpose of the Shakespearean fool.