‘Folly’ is often used as an umbrella term for Renaissance representations both of ‘idiocy’ and madness, although early modern legislation and medicine described crucial differences between the two conditions. Shakespeare sometimes stages their liminality by having fools interact with lunatics, as in Twelfth Night and in King Lear. By drawing in particular from socio-legal and scientific ideas of the early modern period, the present article considers some of these interactions to discuss the ways in which fools as intellectually disabled individuals are separated from madmen as mentally ill, while also assessing how occasionally ‘idiocy’ borders into madness.

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In this article I analyse how Shakespeare uses early modern paradigms of intellectual disability to construct the identity of Touchstone, the fool of As You Like It. Although Touchstone is no real fool but simply performs like one, his actions and mocking reflections on the characters he faces expose how Shakespeare was very well acquainted with socio-legal and even medical definitions of natural folly in his time. A reading of the character as a natural fool according to specific paradigms of the period further reveals how Touchstone enacts an expanded 'complex embodiment' of disability.

The article considers some examples from the often overlooked genre of Elizabethan verse translations of Italian novellas, concentrating in particular on the poems where the flow of the narration is interrupted by interpolated speeches, namely letters. I consider how epistolary correspondence in these stories often brings about violent outcomes, how the rhetoric of letters can complicate the reader’s interpretation and how the poets describe the material actions of writing and reading. Paratextual epistolary material is also analysed to determine the authors’ purpose.

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