Ştefan Borbély

Babeş–Bolyai University, Cluj, Romania

 

 

The Court Jester: Anthropology and Power

 

The Court Jester: Anthropology and Power

 

 

Abstract: Within the Medieval social choreography, the court fool is difference itself, and there is no better way to understand the anxiety raised by the jester than to examine the pagan register of his deeds and gestures, which all send beyond Christianity. The paper examines the anthropological, pre-Christian roots of the court jester, which can be found in the archaic fertility rites. A “daimonic” figure, related to the positive energies of the underworld, the Medieval fool, conceived as the shadow double of the king, sends us back in time towards the long-forgotten rebirth-complexes which mark the emergence of cosmos from chaos.

Keywords: social imagination, the Medieval fool, the anti-king figure, fertility rites, the rebirth complex.

 

 

Starting with the Medieval times and continuing with the Renaissance up to the seventeenth century in some royal or feudal courts of Europe, the court jester played the comic role of a mock king, acting throughout the day as a shadow figure of the sovereign. His most common accessories were the mock scepter, – the bauble, or the marotte, as it has been called -, and the traditional fool’s dress, or habit de fou, composed by “a short tunic, belled hood and particoloured hose”[1]. Two more obvious or discrete adornments are the coxcomb, and eventually the long, sharp or hanging ass ears, which indicate, according to John Southworth (an opinion I am going to challenge), the symbolic influence of the Feast of Fools or of a former Roman tradition: “The eared hoods of some fourteenth and fifteenth-century psalter fools, along with their bells, baubles and marottes […] originated in the Feast of Fools and, more particularly, in the secular Sociétés Joyeuses of France, Germany and the Low Countries that had come into being under the Feasts’s influence and were to survive into the seventeenth century. In their adoption of the eared hood, they appear to have been in touch with a surviving tradition of the centunculus: the costume worn by Roman mimic fools which featured asses’s ears and a curiously shaped hood with falling peak that may have suggested a coxcomb.” [2]

The term “jester” comes from the Medieval French term gestour[3], which means an itinerant story-teller and entertainer, who chants his story accompanied by a specific musical instrument, which used to be the harp. The gestour was different from a traditional home based jester, or we may also say that he hadn’t been yet a jester, since he belonged to the much wider professional category of the menestrels, a term used by Chrétien de Troyes to define a singer or an entertainer at the royal feasts.[4] As John Southworth puts it, the “Anglo-Norman word derived from the Latin menestrellus, meaning «little servant», and had no cognate connection with music making or any other form of entertainment, but was rather an indication of status. To be a minstrel in the twelfth century was to be a minor court servant. That and no more.”[5]

We might therefore presume that the future court jester and the minstrel fool have slighltly different origins, although their comic role and playish function obviously interefere. The minstrel belongs to the wider social and professional group of the court entertainers, which include, among the others, the acrobats, mims, dice-players, actors (histriones), jugglers, rope dancers, illusionists and troubadours, while the court jester is usually a solitary figure, who lives a marginal life inside the manor or the castle, as solely determined by his unique role of anti-king or shadow sovereign. The chanting minstrel is the direct heir of the Greek aed or the German bard, which means that he does not have a fixed place to stay, but wanders from castle to castle to sell his songs and stories. As these are repeatedly adapted to fit the pride and vanity of the new host, the minstrel appears to be the distant relative of the ancient parasites, praised by Athenaios for their charming skills and perfect obedience to any social or individual expectation. The court jester is on the contrary a distant figure, playing mock rituals and proposing anti-rules, which make him living on the edge, as it happened several times in history that the sovereign was so displeased by his puns and ironies, that he sentenced him to immediate death.

If myth (extensively: chanting and story telling) is – as Ioan Petru Culianu has suggested[6] – an imaginary barrier between man and nothingness or death, the minstrel’s role as a social charmer is to keep illusions functioning, by proposing glamorous and vivid images of life instead of the dark call of the death. The court jester, on the contrary, plays with death each time when he makes a pun: he uses foolery as a technique of survival[7], in a political system in which he is a non-identity, a tricky position which allows him to function as a mock-mirror. As for his classical masquerade, composed by the bauble (or marotte) and the wafer, they are literally „false staff”, that is: fake and grotesque copies of the king’s royal sword and pomegranate. Alan Lutkus has remarked that the famous Falstaff’s name (from Shakespeare’s Henry IV and the Merry Wives of Windsor) suggests the „false staff” of the classical court jester, as seen in the performance of Will Kemp, „clown of Shakespeare’s company through 1599”[8], whose „prop weapon is actually an apprentice’s wooden sword, a literal «false staff», fit for an underclass clown and also a visual reminder that soldierly Falstaff parodies soldiers.”[9]

The standard iconography represents him occasionally as a crouching death-image, holding the mirror of the underworld. The connection with the famous ars moriendi mimicry of the ancient Roman festivals and feasts – well-known examples are a vivid scene found in the Satyricon of Petronius, or the yearly ritual of Saturnalia – show that the court jester has been peceived as a stranger (xénos) or an outlaw coming from the underworld, which also explains the comic treatment of the figure, as comedy and grotesque were used here as means of exorcising the fear of death.

Many scholars dealing with the social and political status of the court jester have noticed that he had no lawful identity at all in the feudal medieval hierarchy. „In some of the earliest European records – John Southworth says – he is designated nebulo, a word expressive of clerical contempt, but which nevertheless conveys an accurate assessment of his social standings: he was seen as a paltry, worthless fellow, a nobody. It was not merely that his position in the feudal hierarchy was low: like the minstrels, he was altogether excluded from it.”[10] Rarely females and usually men, they “refuse identification of their place in time and space”[11], living in a realm of real or pretended folly, from where they can propose a grotesque mirror-world of the existence they are sharing, based on the very characteristics of a cultural, social and political anti-code, comprising inverted habits, topsy-turvy social behavior and paradoxical language techniques.

Court jesters use scatology as a means of communication, stirring laughter and contempt. As scatology is linked to a humble bodily function, the use of its symbols by the court fool becomes an anti-language, used to challenge the high, celestial rhetoric of Christianity. Other stereotypes of the jester are also determined by the anti-rhetoric of the body: jesters do not usually engage in marriage, although they can prove a notorious lack of decency in sex, openly challenging the quiet hypocrisy of the society. Sex behavior can become, for some jesters, even ostentatious and boisterous, evoking the figure of a grotesque Don Juan, but the essence of this playful sexual impenitence is that the jester practices “open” sex without ever having children. The strict archetype in this case might be Priapus, the sterile sex-god of the Romans, but as we shall soon see, the interpretation is far from being so simple. In fact, acting as the shadow double of the sovereign, the court jester transfers his whole procreation energy upon his master, and henceforth on the feud or the country he is living in. He is the essential part of a political fertility ritual, which explains his usual green dress and the anthropological meaning of some details of his accessories: the coxcomb, the asses’s ears and eventually the bauble and the wafer the court jester is usually eating.

As Erasmus has suggested in his Praise of Folly (Encomium Moriae, 1509), kings and fools are born, not made: Aut fatuum aut regem nasci oportere.[12] They are, as such, ontologically consecrated, which means that their power, expressed by magical wit and paradoxical logic, comes from the deep, and cannot be controlled by the humble understanding of the humans. On the contrary, sometimes the court fools and jesters give the impression that they magically control everything, even the king: “Although fools often refuse to discover, let alone join, the order of their surroundings, oftentimes they have unusual powers in these worlds. […] They merely give the appearance of exercising and unknown control over nature that does not follow the rules of cause and effect observed by human reason.”[13] The court jesters’ magnetic power is also explained by their anatomical peculiarities: being sometimes a dwarf, or having other annoying bodily marks, eating enormously or emptying barrels of wine, the court jester is perceived as a social “curiosity”, in the terms of Barbara M. Benedict: “English [but we might also say: European] culture portrays curiosity as a mark of a threatening ambition, an ambition that takes the form of a perceptible violation of species and categories: an ontological transgression that is registered empirically. Curiosity is seeing your way out of your place. It is looking beyond.”[14]

Thus, the court jester invites his audience to look into a mirror reflecting a different world from ours: the world of magic, of the not understandable, or even the underworld. The court jester invites his audience to be different, to go beyond their limits. The source of his power comes from the practice of confronting everybody with his shadow image, with his mock double. Within the Medieval social choreography, the court fool is the difference itself, and there is no better way to understand the anxiety raised by the jester than to examine the pagan register of his deeds and gesture, which all send beyond Christianity. On the other hand, by using a “low”, eventually scatological rhetoric proper to the underclass, the jester mocks social conveniences, and defies the church or political hierarchy. It is also useful to note that this irreverence doesn’t mean only derision, but also a peculiar counterculture irony: the jester is always prepared to show that the social etiquette is not more than a “false staff”, a convention. By doing this, he invites his audience to step outside their social habits and order: and where?: into the nothingness, the no man’s land. Accordingly, a good jester is the abyss itself: like Hermes, he takes the souls into the deep, into the non-existence.

Of course, when asserting such metaphysical contents, one may not forget that the court jester is a ritualized figure within the mediaeval order. His only reason is comedy itself: he exists solely within the grotesque ritual of the royal or feudal court, and has no other relevance outside the laughter. As we have already mentioned, the strangest characteristics of the jester is his non-identity within the court. The – otherwise: scrupulous feudal rules – do not register him with a well-defined social or political identity. He is the perfect outsider, and therefore can be killed without remorse or consequences. Although he might upset many people – and, as we now, the mediaeval fierce is always boiling -, rare noblemen pull sword in order to spill his blood, as killing a “non-identity” is not encoded as a heroic gesture.

The relative isolation endows the court jester with a practically unlimited liberty: a freedom which men and women encapsulated in the system cannot afford to themselves. The jester is the liberty common feudal subjects – and even the sovereign or the king – cannot reach or experience, but only express as a frustration. As a consequence, the court jester was usually used, or handled, as a social compensation tool: he was put to express wishes otherwise repressed by the habits of the court, or he himself expressed rather controversial subjects concerning politics, power or doctrine, which were altogether not tolerated.

As a purely ritualized figure, the power of the court jester is primarily grounded by his unlimited liberty. On a second level, he is the double of the king, acting from a privileged position. On the third, he is the counter-cultural alter, as Bakhtin has perceived laughter in his social and political theory of the carnival: “All these forms of protocol and ritual based on laughter and consecrated by tradition […] were sharply distinct from the official, ecclesiastical, feudal and political cult forms and ceremonials.”[15]

The classical, Christian and medieval repression of laughter does not by itself entirely explain the marginality a court jester embodies within the feudal system. Barry Sanders has dedicated an entire book to “laughter as subversive history” (Sudden Glory, Beacon Press, 1995), and demonstrated that “early Christian writers took a dim view of laughter”[16]. For instance, “the Cappadocian father Basil, for all intents and purposes, outlaws laughter of any kind. As he admonishes in On the Perfection of the Life of Solitaries (Epistle 22), «The Christian ought in all things to become superior to the righteousness existing under the law, and neither swear nor lie. He ought not to speak evil, to do violence, to fight. He ought not to indulge in jesting; he ought not to laugh nor even to suffer laugh-makers».”[17] According to Hugh of Saint Victor (Ecclesiastien homilae, 12^th century): “Joy may be good or evil, depending on its source, but laughter is in every respect evil.”[18] So, since the good fathers of the medieval times keep saying that “laughter makes a mockery of heaven”[19], shifting into derision even God and the afterlife, why did medieval kings and chieftains keep jesters within their courts, as doing this they might fear reprimands from the Church?

Another set of logical questions comes from the official, negative perception of the laughter in early modern Europe. If laughter, as theologians say, is evil, it must necessary come from the Devil, and as such it has to be excommunicated. This simplified perception, which nevertheless expressed the truth of the canon, suggests that by keeping a jester within his court, the feudal chieftain or king acts as if inviting Devil to be an empirical part of everyday life, which is actually not true. It is therefore interesting to note that jesting was not generally perceived in the medieval times as originating from the Devil; some anxious theologians might have expressed such a fear, but it didn’t belong to the main cultural code of that time. The jester’s garments and accessories hadn’t been devilish, and his humor and wit, although they could have been sarcastic, were not perceived as nightmarish or coming from the Devil. On the contrary, people felt good after a witty pun or magic wordplay issued by the jester; the jester’s grotesque was a – so to say – “nurturant”, seminal energy, which makes everybody to grow.

In the classical theories concerning the social function of the ritual, the laughter and carnivalesque are related to the more general function of the mythical trickster. Both the trickster and the carnival suggest plenitude: a sense of completeness that cannot be found in everyday life. As Paul Radin has remarked in his seminal work on the Trickster, “the symbol which Trickster embodies is not a static one. It contains within itself the promise of differentiation, the promise of god and man.”[20] The function of the trickster “embodies the vague memories of an archaic and primordial past, where there as yet existed no clear-cut differentiation between the divine and the non-divine. For this period, Trickster is the symbol. His hunger, his sex, his wandering, these appertain neither to the gods nor to man. They belong to another realm, materially and spiritually, and that is why neither the gods nor the man know precisely what to do with them.”[21]

Apart from the fears of the good old fathers, that laughter is entirely evil, the medieval cultural code also encompassed a positive laughter, associated with plenitude and fertility. Psychologically, this imaginary compensation turned into a practically unlimited permissiveness: the fools or the jesters were allowed to act and talk as nobody dared to do at a medieval court, enjoying and active and subversive support from the audience. Nevertheless, it is also generally accepted that despite the hidden solidarity expressed by the audience, the court jester remained a typically solitary figure within the court, like a man who was isolated by the very essence of his laughter. He was not symbolically integrated, but kept apart, as a person living inside his circle. The court jester – even if he enjoyed the praise of his master – remained a distant, marginal figure inside the feudal court, sharing the symbolic solitude of the king – and of nobody else’s – he was shadowing. Rare jesters remained in function after the death of their masters: symbolically, or even effectively, they ceased to exist with the death of their sovereign, as the new one usually came with his own fool.

It was so because the court jester also played the role of a circumstantial scapegoat. He could be punished, or even killed sometimes, instead of the king, as a ritualized substitute. One of his major role is to assume the faults and mistakes of the king, and to suffer for a guilt which is not his own, specifically. As a guilty alter of the king, he also functions as a ritualized institution of lustration: by assuming the king or the chieftain’s guilt, the court jester is the perfect “poison container”, who attracts pollution but never pollutes by himself. This one-sided logic is actually very interesting for the ritual of jesting, because it contradicts the general mythological assumption that the polluted double of the chief remains contagious for the entire social body he is living in. Serving as a virtual scapegoat, living on the edge of sacrifice and being politically a “nobody”, the court jester functions in the medieval system as an of containment, playing the original role of the hybris – or place of containment – in the ancient Greek society. Apart from the later moral connotations, which made the term classic, Pausanias has revealed that the hybris was originally a stone, erected in the center of the agora, where the citizens of Athens came in order to be judged for their real or imaginary mistakes. Since the outcome of the legal procedure was dialectic and open, the accused stood on the hybris, or central stone, sharing the legal status of the extraterritoriality: if they were sentenced, the negative energy they were emanating did not affect the whole social body, as malign irradiation was “contained” by the legal status of the stone. If they were released after the trial, they could reenter the society without any prejudice, as it was supposed that the negative energy they acquired during their blame did not affect their person. Extraterritorial places were everywhere in medieval Europe, especially in towns and crossroads, but they were no any more symbolic stones, but primitive, rough cages, containing convicts. People came, blamed them savagely and expressed their contempt by throwing at the convicts garbage or even human waste. By doing this they didn’t merely express their moral despise, but they repeated the ancient ritual of scapegoating, expressed by a ritualized transfer of bad energy: throwing dirt onto the scapegoat, ancient people believed that they get rid of the pollution gathered in their houses, regressing to a new sacred beginning.

One conclusion of this presentation is that medieval laughter, embodied by the function of the court jester, did not only fit entertainment in those times, but principally served as a ritual of repeated, sacral renewal. To sustain such an argument, we can take up Victor Turner’s theory of “liminality”, or mythological “gap”. According to Turner, societies – even the archaic ones – renew themselves by passing through a “gap” which means the transit of a no man’s land, associated with a metaphysical terror. Victor Turner’s theory of ritualized regression is slightly different from Mircea Eliade’s classical perception of a society going back to an “illo tempore” in order to re-gain the resurrected energies of the cosmogony. Victor Turner suggests that by immersing in the “gap”, a society is never sure that destruction will be followed by rebirth. The consequence of such an uncertainty is the metaphysical terror, associated with the wish to have an “alter”, a sort of spare energy, which can help society to re-articulate itself. This “alter”, or metaphysical help is the jester. You may ask: why not the king himself, whose main function is to sustain the energy balance of his folks? Because the very identity between the king and the sacred energies of his subjects: when these energies reach destruction, the king himself is destructed, and needs an outer help to re-gain his life and power. Therefore, one of the privileged puns of the court jesters is to play the “nanny” of the king: to caress him, to feed him, like a beloved child. Spectacular irreverence has always been part of this ritual of re-birth, but as we see the symbolic significance is much deeper than the simple play.

The second conclusive thesis of this presentation is that the main accessories of the court jester – the usual green dress, the bauble, the wafer, the asses’s ears and the bells adorning the falling tassels of his hat – all belong to the archaic register of the fertility rites. Do not forget the coxcomb, as the cock sings at the morning gates of the light, announcing the Sun’s ascent from the underworld.

Notes

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