The Fool has played an important role throughout much of the course of literature and the arts. Whether it is Falstaff serving as a foil for the more serious side of the young prince Henry, who has his own partying to do before he has to take on the more serious role of governing England (Shakespeare), or whether it is Al Czervik, the outrageous jester who somehow has found his way onto the golf course of Bushwood Country Club in the film Caddyshack, the Fool points out many of the elements of human nature that otherwise might remain safely under the rug (Caddyshack). Folly is that corrective element of human behavior that reminds us of our own flaws and failings and insists that we refuse to take ourselves absolutely seriously. In Brant’s “The Ship of Fools” and Erasmus’ Praise of Folly, the idea of folly and the fool receives treatment that shows that, in widely different times in human history, it is still necessary to give the Fool and Folly their proper places in our world concepts.
In Erasmus’ Praise of Folly, the author presents this idea as a woman holding forth and telling the audience of her many virtues. In the opening letter, Erasmus is writing to a colleague about the fact that the academic is the only one whose profession apparently outlaws consideration of the foolish, and so he takes as his subject in this series of polemics by Folly the ways that she can better humanity, and the elements of her true nature (Erasmus). It is interesting that Folly appears her as a woman, until one remembers that wisdom also is often personified as a woman – not least by the Greeks as Athene – and that folly, in Erasmus’ estimation, carries a great deal of wisdom. Some of the initial statements Folly uses to justify her own greatness come off as perhaps a bit misguided, as she says that her parentage (Plutus and Youth) and her birthplace and upbringing (the Fortunate Isles, with Ignorance and Drunkenness raising her) justify her as a great person. Her attendants are not any more promising (Self-Love, Forgetfulness, Pleasure, Intemperance, Madness and Sleep, among others), although she then points out that she clearly has great power in the world, as people rely on Folly to find their own happiness. However, when it comes to conversations about the actual benefits that Folly can provide, things become a little more serious. Since being prudent requires buying what the world is selling (and remember that Erasmus was around centuries before Bernie Sanders went out around saying the same thing), Folly argues that without her being around, life would be impossible to bear because of the overweening shame (Erasmus). Because Folly emerges as a type of lubricant – but also as a source of common sense – she appears to have a more valuable role than some of the crusty academics with whom Erasmus spent so much of his life might have acknowledged.
Writing sixty years before Erasmus, Sebastian Brant developed The Ship of Fools as a way to look at some of the vices of his time. Instead of viewing Folly as a helpful corrective to some of the lies of his era, though, Brant used his book to criticize the most common vices of his era, through a quite exhaustive catalogue of 112 different satirical sketches. The idea of the ship of fools is his way to represent folly, rather than personifying it as a woman. Brant also took advantage of this to turn his satirical weapons against the Church, so there are some areas of overlap between his work and that of Erasmus. Given that printed works were still fairly new when Brant’s work comes out (complete with woodcut illustrations). Because the court jester was allowed to say whatever he wanted without any fear of reprisal, Brant brings his critiques in full force in this collection of sketches (Brant).
In general, satire can be a powerful force, and Folly can be an important corrective within society. One of the early satirical essays, Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal,” shocked many of its readers who thought that his suggestion that the children of the poor in Ireland be purchased from their parents, raised and then sold at a year of age for slaughter, was a serious one. Many of them failed to read all the way to the end, where he simply suggested that his ideas were not essentially different in their outcome than those who in England spent so much time assiduously overlooking the plight of the poor (Swift). Ultimately, both Erasmus and Brant use representations of Folly that would become common in literature and other forms of the arts, as the idea of the Fool and the Jester would not go away by any means. Instead, as institutions continue to take themselves too seriously – and go about their business of oppression with a sense of entitlement – the Fool is needed more than ever today.
Works Cited
Brant, Sebastian. The Ship of Fools. Course reading.
Caddyshack. Dir. Harold Ramis. Perf. Chevy Chase, Rodney Dangerfield, Bill
Murray. Orion Pictures, 1980. Film.
Erasmus, Desiderius. In Praise of Folly. Course reading.
Shakespeare, William. Henry V. n.d. Web. 23 April 2016.
Swift, Jonathan. “A Modest Proposal.” n.d. Web. 23 April 2016.
