On the public stages, clowns often appeared between the acts and scenes of a play as well as when the play was finished in order to entertain the playgoers "with extemporaneous wit and buffoonery" (Douce 514). Clowns formed a type of theatrical sub-culture in which they could revel and joke in their own ways, the Renaissance equivalent of the stand-up comic. To extemporize, entertain, and critique, fools and clowns had to know their audiences intimately. As Viola says about Feste's fooling in Twelfth Night,
This fellow is wise enough to play the fool,
And to do that well craves a kind of wit.
He must observe their mood on whom he jests,
The quality of persons, and the time,
And, like the haggard, check at every feather
That comes before his eye. This is a practice
As full of labour as a wise man's art[.] (3.1.53-59)
Not all playwrights appreciated the extemporizing of the clowns. As Hamlet charges in his famous diatribe against clowns, "let those that play your clowns speak no more than is set down for them; for there be of them that will themselves laugh to set on some quantity of barren spectators to laugh too, though in the mean time some necessary question of the play be then to be considered" (3.2.34-38). As Goldsmith says, Hamlet "cautions the clown against improvising his lines and usurping more than belongs to his part. The clown's jigs and buffoonery were often independent from the rest of a play" (41). It is tempting to hear Shakespeare's voice in Hamlet's words. Around the time Hamlet was written, Shakespeare's company underwent a shift from the use of clowns to fools (1599) just as Hamlet reprimands the efforts of the clowns in his play.
Although the terms "clown" and "fool" have often been used synonymously, it is important to clarify that for Shakespeare there was a difference. The clown was originally "a clumsy country bumpkin" (Goldsmith 40). He used a form of speech sometimes referred to as "Cotswold speech" (40), through which his country roots were evident. The clown was often included in a play, but was not absolutely necessary to its theme. On the other hand, the fool was integral to the theme even though he was detached from the main action of the play (41). Thus the gravediggers in Hamlet are clowns, while Feste in Twelfth Night and the Fool in King Lear are fools.
A minor character might also perform the function of the clown independently of his plot function:
Sometimes [the clown] was a mere rustic, and very often no more than a shrewd and witty domestic [. . .]. Any low character in a play served to amuse the audience with his sallies of coarse buffoonery, and thus became the 'clown' of the piece. (Douce 498)Thus, the servants Peter and Potpan in Romeo and Juliet function as clowns. James Bednarz suggests that the clown worked to "establish a contrary perspective to the play's main plot" and encourage in the playgoer a degree of amused detachment (279). Despite their detachment from the themes of the play, clowns may actually highlight the most important themes through their apparently extraneous comedy. Both the clown and the fool added elements of amusement for Renaissance playgoers. It is important to understand the distinction between clowns and fools in order to examine their utility on the Renaissance stage. However, formulating one agreeable classification scheme is difficult due to the myriad ways one can examine each of them. Therefore, the classifications set forth in this project should be used with the understanding that there is not one true way of subdividing the categories of clowns and fools. My goal is to aid in presenting the information such that one can decide for oneself how to consider the classification and complexities of these figures of Renaissance drama.
-- Victoria Abboud, 2001