Professor of English, Katherine Duncan-Jones, discusses the real life characters and contemporaries of Shakespeare that inspired, shaped, and on occasion performed the various roles of the 'fool' in much of his work.
Shakespeare's fools, in sync with Shakespeare's revolutionary ideas about theatre, began to depart from a more simple representation of the traditional jester. Like other of his characters, Shakepeare's fool began to speak outside of the narrow confines of exemplary morality, to address themes of love, psychic turmoil, and the innumerable themes that arise in Shakespeare, and indeed, modern theatre.
