Objective
I’m going to analyze the character of Feste. The way Shakespeare described him in relation to the other characters, and the meaning and role I think this particular character has in the play.
Introduction
Feste is a fool in the household of the Countess Olivia. We can deduce that he is not young, he could be middle aged or old, because he has first served Olivia’s father.
Throughout the play, Feste speaks with almost all the other characters of the play. The importance of this character resides in the words he exchanges with the rest of the characters and the songs he sings.
Feste
If we look up the word fool in a dictionary we see that it could mean lots of things. It means “a person who is gullible and easy to take advantage of”, “a person who lacks good judgment”, “a professional clown employed to entertain a king or nobleman in the middle ages” (foreignword.com). In Twelfth Night, “the clown is not the only fool who is subject to foolery” (antiessays.com). He, like other characters in the play, combines their wits and their foolish acts to invade other characters. The clown and the fools in this play are the ones who make the comedy work with his humor and wit. (antiessays.com).
Feste has chosen to work as a professional jester. He is not only wise, but he is an instrument. He operates most of the time as a truth-teller. He makes the others conscious that nothing is eternal, that the future is uncertain. (the Riverside Shakespeare). He plays this role of the truth-teller without consequences. He is able to mock the excesses of the nobility and receive no great response for it.
Feste is involved in both worlds, the world of the nobles and the world of the common people, but through his jokes and his wit, doing critical comments upon them.
Feste is not only more intelligent than what his profession requires, but he also has a special gift to look inside the characters in a way, he is sometimes able to predict things that would happen later in the play.
He is his own lord and cares little for Fortune (A. C. Bradley). Though he serves the household of Olivia, he is also seen in Orsino’s house, singing and entertaining him. He declares his freedom to be where he wants to be to Viola.
“Foolery, sir, does walk about the orb like the sun, it shines every where. I would be sorry, sir, but the fool should be as oft with your master as with my mistress”.(Twelfth Night, Act III, Scene I).
He is free and seems to fear nothing, regarding his position of jester. He is very independent. “In important respects he is, more than Shakespeare’s other fools, superior in mind to his superiors in rank”. (A. C. Bradley).
There is something that can make us diminish our sympathy toward Feste, that he shows no affection for everyone. (A. C. Bradley). We can see him mock of every single character in the play in a way or other, but we cannot see him showing pity or affection to everyone. But, at the same time, no one shows affection to him. They are able to praise his qualities as a singer or his wit, but they don’t show any kind of care for him. We cannot say that Olivia is unkind to him, but she doesn’t show love for him either. We can also find some kind of friendship or affection on the part of Maria, but again there is no affection in the tone of her words.
In a way I see Feste like a solitary character that enjoys his position as a jester among the nobility and the people that surrounds this nobility. No one is so free to say to the others what they think about them as him, and he likes it. In my opinion this is a situation of power because he can influence people that are higher in rank.
A very important declaration by Feste: “Better a witty fool than a foolish wit”(Twelfth Night, Act I, Scene V, Line 34). With this he expresses the idea that most of the noble men who are considered to be wits and intelligent, are fools; and he prefers to be considered a fool, which he actually is by profession, and having a really witty mind.
We see the intelligence of Feste in different ways. He is tells everyone about the nature of people and the difficulty of changing someone’s real behavior. If someone is bad, he will always be bad though he makes a good act. He expresses these ideas in a syllogism. (Twelfth Night, Act I, Scene V).
And we know that he is educated, because he knows Latin. “Cucullus non facit monachum”. (Twelfth Night, Act I, Scene V, Lines 53-54).
Feste and Olivia
Feste has been the jester of Olivia’s household for years, so he must know her for a long time, maybe since she was born. Knowing this, we could imagine that Feste has been present in most of her important moments. He could have been her tutor, because we can see that they talk to each other in a similar and familiar way. They seem to appeal to the other’s wit.
Olivia: Can you do it?
Clown: Dexterously, good madonna.
Olivia: Make your proof.
Clown: I must catechize you for it, madonna: good my mouse of virtue, answer me. (Twelfth Night, Act I, Scene V, Lines 57-61).
He is the one who tells Olivia that if she keeps on with the mourning for her brother’s death, life will pass without compassion. Beauty is not eternal and he says that someday soon she won’t be able to marry. That’s something she doesn’t want to hear.
Feste “prefers to view life from the wings , commenting on the passing show in his sadly melodious way”. (Mark Edmundson).
He expresses this idea in one of his songs: “Then come kiss me, sweet-and-twenty, // Youth’s a stuff will not endure”. (Twelfth Night, Act II, Scene III, Lines 51-52).
He uses his fooling to persuade Olivia that mourning her brother is a really foolish thing to do because if she knows he is in heaven and not in hell, there is no need to feel sorry because he clearly is in a better place.
Clown: I think his soul is in hell, madonna.
Olivia: I know his soul is in heaven, fool.
Clown: The more fool, madonna, to mourn for your brother’s soul being in heaven.(…). (Twelfth Night, Act I, Scene V, Lines 66-69).
Feste and Orsino
Feste ridicules Orsino’s melancholic nature and deflates the pretense of the duke’s true love for Olivia. Orsino contracts Feste to sing a song about innocent love, to establish himself as a heartbroken lover.(Steve Fiala) But what Feste gives him is a description of how changing are his feelings, emotions and thoughts. Feste compares Orsino’s mind with an opal “thy mind is a very opal” (Twelfth Night, Act II, Scene IV. Line 75), and points out that the duke’s clothes are made of a type of silk that changes its color depending on the angle where it is looked from.
And he also compares the Duke’s emotions with the sea, which is constantly moving and changing. The jester also tells the duke that the love he feels for Olivia could not be as intense as he proclaims to be because they have had very little contact. This thought will put the fool in a clear position; he is a man that reasons things out, he is not romantic and does not believe in the idea of love at first sight, something very acceptable in Elizabethan times. (Some ideas taken from Steve Fiala).
Feste and Viola
I think that one of the most important sentences regarding the fool is spoken when he has a conversation with Viola. She is an intelligent young woman, but she cannot escape from the witty comments of Feste. After their talk she says: “This fellow is wise enough to play the fool” (New Cambridge Shakespeare). In my own opinion Viola notices that the fool is a fool because he wanted to do that, he chose that and she knows he is the wisest person she has met, and because of that he can play the fool and say what he really thinks, which indeed will end up being the truth the others don’t want to hear.
Viola also relates the things a good clown has to have, and Feste has them. (New Swan Shakespeare).
In the encounter of Viola and Feste we see that Feste is able to predict in a way the future relation between Viola and Orsino. He remarks that she has no beard. Beard could be used with the meaning of man (Steve Fiala), so we can see that he/she loves Orsino: “I am almost sick of one”. She is sick of one beard, referring to the beard of Orsino, whom she is in love with.
Feste and Maria
Feste makes also a connection between Maria and the marriage she has with Sir Toby Belch, when he says “If Sir Toby would leave drinking thou wert as witty a piece of Eve’s flesh as any in Illyria”. As I have mentioned before, Feste seems a kind of anticipatory figure that tells us in some way what’s going to happen later.
Feste and Malvolio
Malvolio is somehow the antitheses of Feste. He is serious and is not interested in any of the word plays of the jester and the songs. In Act I, Scene V, we see the opinion Malvolio has of Feste:
“I marvel your ladyship takes delight in such a barren rascal”.
Feste is not involved in the trick that Maria, Sir Toby and Sir Andrew prepare for Malvolio. He only participates at the end, when he plays the role of Sir Topas. Then it is possible that Feste takes his revenge on Malvolio for the way he treats him, because Malvolio said that Feste lost a competition of wits with another fool: “I saw him put down the other day with an ordinary fool, that has no more brain than a stone”. (Twelfth Night, Act I, Scene V, Lines 82-84).
In that scene Malvolio thinks he is speaking with a real priest. There is a moment when the fool tells Malvolio to watch out what he says because the priest is still there. “Advise you what you say; the minister is here”. Malvolio believes this, because the clown plays the role of the priest in a very convincing way, he changes his voice.
Feste’s last song
In this song Feste relates the different states of the human being in a very pessimistic way. We know that he is talking in general, not giving us his own opinion because he is the fool, not one of the characters involved in the main plot. But, this song can be compared to the comedy itself. Like life, comedies must come to an end. And with the sentence “we’ll strive to please you every day” can be applied to the fact that the play would be represented in the theatre again, he would return there. (Anne Barton, The Riverside Shakespeare).
Conclusion
Feste is the character that makes all the other situations possible, because he tells them the truth of their situations and he is able to see what is going to happen though in an indirect way. If it wasn’t for Feste this comedy wouldn’t be as humorous as it is, though this is a very intellectual fool, which entertains as a professional job.
Certainly, Twelfth Night wouldn’t be the same without this particular character.
Resources
- Shakespeare, William. The Complete Works of William Shakespeare. Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions, 1996.
- Shakespeare, William, Twelfth Night. United States: Houghton Mifflin Company (The Riverside Shakespeare), 1974. (Anne Barton).
- <http://www.nytimes.com/books/oo/04/02/bookend/bookend.html> , 13 mayo 2007, Mark Edmundson.
- Antiessays.com , Free essays, Twelfth Night, 12 mayo 2007,
<www.antiessays.com>, Path: Twelfth Night.
- Ayjw.org, Feste the Fool, 12 mayo 2007, <http://ayjw.org/articles.php?id=694606>
- Shakespeare, William, Twelfth Night. Great Britain: University Press, Cambridge (The New Cambridge Shakespeare), 1984 – 1995
- A Selection of Critical Essays edited by D. J. Palmer. Great Britain: The Anchor Press LTD, Tiptree, Essex. A. C. Bradley: Feste the Jester, 1972.
- Shakespeare, William, Twelfth Night. Hong Kong: Commonwealth Printing Press Ltd (New Swan Shakespeare), edited by Bernard Lott, M.A., 1959 – 1976.
Academic Year 2006/2007
© a.r.e.a. / Dr. Vicente Forés López
© Laura Rumí Pérez
Universidad de Valencia Press
