‘This cold night will turn us all to fools and madmen’: Feste, Lear’s Fool and the border between ‘idiocy’ and mental illness

Abstract

‘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.

'Known and Feeling Sorrows': Disabled Knowledge and King Lear

“…He knows what it means to be silenced even though you speak, to be destitute even when kept by a king, and to live (or die) at the mercy of others' amusement or contempt. 9 Edgar initially knows disability only from the outside, the 'proof and precedent' of the wandering madmen he plans to imitate. But his counterfeiting literally exposes him to the reality of disability.…”