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"Admirable Fooling" - The Role of the Fool in Shakespeare and Beyond
“Wit, if it be thy will, put me into good fooling!”
Sylvie Potje
What is a fool? Feste’s role in Twelfth Night, or What You Will is not only shaped by her function in the story, but by several centuries worth of real-world fools and the services they offered. This article examines how Feste's character aligns with and diverges from the historical examples of “the Fool”.
In Twelfth Night, or What You Will, the character Feste serves as the court fool of Olivia’s household, singing and performing to earn attention and money from other characters. Although she is a fool by occupation, Feste is paradoxically among the wisest characters in the play, she observes the actions of others and makes insightful commentary on the themes of the performance. Compared to other servants, like Malvolio and Valentina, Feste is treated with a great deal more freedom and permitted to speak candidly with the nobility she serves. Was the odd nature of this relationship Shakespeare’s own invention? Or did it come from his observations of how fools had been treated in the real world? This article offers both within-the-play and historical perspectives on the role of the fool.
Enid Welsford, a literary scholar in the early 20th century, examined many examples of fools and jesters throughout history in her 1935 book The Fool: His Social and Literary History. Through this compilation, which spans time and culture, she seeks to define—or at least characterize—the identity of the fool. One definition that she offers compares a fool to an amphibian, someone who is “equally at home in the world of reality and the world of imagination” (Welsford 12). Those who make up the audience of a fool get the chance to experience that imaginative perspective. Still, these patrons could find comfort, however, in knowing it’s all an act. Even as they speak uncomfortable truths, fools provide a “safety-valve for unruliness”, as Welsford describes (317). To possess a fool in one’s court is to have a designated and measured outlet for absurdity.
With the additional freedoms granted to them, fools had ample opportunity to roam beyond their place of work, performing to others and building up a repertoire of stories to recount back home. Welsford argues that there is an educational aspect to the fool’s role: to tell their patrons tales of “all sorts and conditions of men” and expand their understanding of people beyond their own social class (Welsford 13). Still, the fool must remain loyal to the nobility they are employed by. When Feste first appears in Twelfth Night, or What You Will, Maria chastises her for being gone for so long, travelling and working for other patrons like Duke Orsino. Welsford writes that there was a convention in English plays for the hero to meet a traveller “who converses with him in a jocular manner” (Welsford 25). Feste serves as this witty traveller in Twelfth Night, or What You Will, trading wordplay with Viola in the street and frequently alternating between Olivia and Orsino’s households. Historically and in Twelfth Night, or What You Will, fools were permitted to roam, in order to share their gifts and build their store of comedic material.
Felix Cole, in an article entitled “The Shakespearean Fool and its Modern Counterpart” highlights a particularly important facet of Shakespeare’s foolish characters: the social inversion they create. He says, “Shakespeare’s fools defy the social hierarchy by exploiting the very rules that enforce the class divide, paradoxically proving the power of those rules by breaking them” (Cole). Feste is a prime example of this inversion. In her first appearance of the play, she brashly accuses Olivia—her master and employer—of being a fool, justifying that “the more fool, Madonna, to mourn for your brother’s soul, being in heaven” (Shakespeare 1.5.22-23). In this pivotal moment of exposition between Feste and Olivia, Feste immediately turns social conventions on their head. Furthermore, when Feste disguises herself as the priest Sir Topas, she imitates a position of power over Malvolio that she could not typically attain. The fact that Malvolio believes the ruse so wholeheartedly is congruent with the play’s overall critique of servant-master relationships. In Cole’s words, “as long as there is a system of social stratification, the fool will make an appearance to make a mockery of it” (Cole).
Despite Feste being the only fool by occupation in the play, many other characters accuse each other of foolishness. In this production’s abridged script alone, characters direct the word “fool” at each other over a dozen times: Maria calls Andrea a fool, Feste calls Malvolio a fool, and Viola calls herself Olivia’s fool, to name a few. By loosely throwing around the term “fool” to describe many characters, Shakespeare seems to invite the audience to reconsider how
intelligence is attributed to certain groups. Viola, too, catches Orsino, Olivia, and Andrea off guard with her “masterly” speaking and poetic abilities that far exceed what is expected of a servant. Twelfth Night, or What You Will cannot be enjoyed—or even understood—without the audience letting go, to some degree, of assumptions they hold. Underlying expectations of gender, servitude, and intelligence must be re-examined in order to truly appreciate Twelfth Night, or What You Will. In the wise words of the Fool herself, “Nothing that is so is so.”
Who is a fool without an audience? In Twelfth Night, or What You Will, Feste has a wide audience: Olivia, Orsino, Sebastian, Viola, Toby, and Andrea all receive her jokes and compensate her generously for them. As Welsford puts it, “it takes two to make a joke … [The fool] is nothing apart from the companions who enjoy and encourage his antics” (Welsford 27). Toby and Maria are Feste’s closest companions in the play, encouraging her to put her talents towards pranking Malvolio. Even while mourning, Olivia takes Feste’s bait and permits her to “make [her] proof” and perform a joke (Shakespeare 1.5.17). Beyond the characters within the play, Feste also liaises with the real-life audience watching the play. Dr. Katrina Marchant describes Feste as “in parallel with the audience,” commenting on the plot just as much as she participates in it (Marchant 12:50-12:56). Welsford notes, however, that Feste “has no particularly profound remarks to make” in doing so (Welsford 252). A key way that Feste connects with her audience is through song, and both critics highlight the affective qualities of Feste’s music along with the thematic messages they carry. Fooling is performative; without an audience to present to, the fool is no longer a fool.
Cole, Felix. “The Shakespearean Fool and its Modern Counterpart — An Insight into Societal Rules”. The Cultural Me. thecultural.me/articles/the-shakespearean-fool-and-its-modern-counterpart-an-insight-into-societal-rules-157433. Accessed 1 October 2026.
Marchant, Katrina. “Shakespeare’s Fool: Robert Armin”. YouTube, uploaded by Read the Past, 30 September 2022, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Gs6JT0EWHA.
Shakespeare, William. Twelfth Night from The Folger Shakespeare. Edited by Barbara Mowat
and Paul Werstine, Folger Shakespeare Library, 2026.
Shakespeare, William. Twelfth Night. Adapted by Tim Welham, 2026.
Welsford, Enid. The Fool: His Social and Literary History. Faber and Faber, 1935.