Shakespeare: Folly, Humanism & Critical Theory

Sam Gilchrist Hall! surveys folly and wisdom in Shakespeare's world and beyond.

- Sam Gilchrist 

When Roman emperors rode in triumphal processions, they would have a fool in the chariot with them, continually whispering to them something along the lines of “You are only human. You too will die – just like beggars and slaves do.” Shakespeare returns to the idea of mortality obsessively in Hamlet (c.1600); for instance, when the antic Prince rhymes: “Imperious Caesar, dead and turn’d to clay, / Might stop a hole to keep the wind away.” Indeed, one of the most striking images of late medieval Europe is the Dance Macabre or Totentanz, in which all classes join hands with death. In Rome, as in medieval Europe, the spectre of death served a levelling function. No matter who you are, sooner or later God is going to cut you down. This insight also reminds us that institutions and discourses that seem immutable are not set in stone, but embodied in that most perishable of things, human flesh.

Folly

With the publication of Erasmus’s Praise of Folly (Moriae encomium) in 1509, the old order of folly was swept away. Whereas the author of the Ship of Fools (Narrenschiff, 1494), Sebastian Brandt, had inveighed against the moral corruption of mankind, in Erasmus’s hands folly becomes a way not only of exposing the hypocrisy and despotism of those in power, but also of understanding ourselves and our place in the world, not least because it provides a tool to fathom the limits of reason.