Shakespearean fool
In this sense, they are similar to the real fools, and jesters of the time, but their characteristics are greatly heightened for theatrical effect.
The jester played a dynamic and changing role in entertaining aristocratic households in a wide variety of ways: songs, music, storytelling, medieval satire, physical comedy and, to a lesser extent, juggling and acrobatics.
Shakespeare's earlier fools often seem to be written for the particular talents of Elizabethan actor William Kempe.
[citation needed] One scholar agrees that the clowning in Shakespeare's plays may have been intended as "an emotional vacation from the more serious business of the main action," in other words, comic relief.
Others argue that Shakespeare's clowning goes beyond just comic relief, instead making the horrific or deeply complex scenes more understandable and "true to the realities of living, then and now.
"[6] Shifting the focus from the fictional world to the audience's reality helps convey "more effectively the theme of the dramas.
For example, Feste, in Twelfth Night, reinforces the theme of love with his song in the second act to Sir Toby and Sir Andrew: Shakespeare closes the play with Feste alone on the stage, singing directly to the audience "of man's inexorable progress from childhood's holiday realm ... into age, vice, disillusionment, and death.
The Fool provides wit in this bleak play and unlike some of Shakespeare's clowns who seem unfunny to us today because their topical jokes no longer make sense, the Fool in King Lear ridicules Lear's actions and situation in such a way that audiences understand the point of his jokes.
He has no illusions and does not seek consolation in the existence of natural or supernatural order, which provides for the punishment of evil and the reward of good.
This hood was decorated with animal body parts, such as donkey's ears or the neck and head of a rooster.
They wore a long petticoat of different colours, made of expensive materials such as velvet trimmed with yellow.
