A worthy
fool! Motley’s the only wear.
-Jaques
As You Like It Act II,
scene vii Line 35
Well friends, we came quite close to the ‘All the world’s a
stage…’ line. One page off. Maybe next time. In the meantime, however, we’ve
tapped into something worth looking at. This is Jaques, the sort of philosopher
guy of Duke Senior’s bunch (in fact Jaques is the guy with the ‘All the
worlds…’ line later on in the scene) and he’s talking about a run in he had
recently with a fool, a motley fool. Now this brings up a few things to talk
about.
For starters, apparently this is the source of the name that
two brothers came up with to form the Virginia based financial services
company, the Motley Fool. Does this mean these guys are Shakespeare buffs? I
dunno. But they did seem to know enough to know that most of Shakespeare’s
fools are the smartest people and that they manage to come up with the most
intelligent things to say. So perhaps these guys knew that and were telling the
world that they were anything but fools.
Which brings us to the second point, Shakespeare’s use of
fools. He’s got one in this play, Touchstone (though I can’t figure out if
that’s who Jaques is referring to or not), and he’s got a pretty famous one in
King Lear who’s just called Fool, without any other name. And as I said, these
fools, especially Lear’s Fool, speak mostly truths, so that neither of them is
really much of a fool. Now what’s up with that? Is Will trying to tell us that
we’re all the fools?
And then this brings me to my final observation or thought.
What was the deal with these fools in reality. I mean, did kings or rich
noblemen actually have guys dressed in funny outfits whose job it was to hang
around and act stupid so as to entertain them? I know there was a lot of other
stuff going on back then that was pretty weird and that we know to be true. But
having some guy sitting around in some colorful getup acting like an idiot
whenever the king wanted him to? That is very strange. Isn’t it?
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