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Touchstone: Critic in Motley
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 March 2021
Extract
A spirit of self-mockery and light, ironical humor is best suited to satire on literary forms and fashions. One feels that Peele's OldWives Tale would have been immeasurably improved as parody had there been a motley fool lurking in the shadow of a great oak, waiting to guide us through the enchanted forest. One of the virtues of Shakespeare's As You Like It is that it has just such a wise fool. Jaques, in commending Touchstone to the Duke, gloats over his discovery, “He's as good at anything, and yet a fool” (v.iv.109). This is as far as Jaques may go in magnanimity. Earlier in the play, Rosalind hails the jester as “Nature's natural the cutter-off of Nature's wit” (I.ii.52). And Celia welcomes him with even less grace, for, says she, “always the dulness of the fool is the whetstone of the wits” (I.ii.58). Except for the Duke, whose penetrating comments on the witty fool are well known, the noble characters in the play seem to regard Touchstone as a natural or dull fool who sometimes serves to sharpen the wits of his betters.
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- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1953
References
1 Falstaff and Other Shakespearean Topics (New York, 1925), p. 75.
2 Variorum ed., As You Like It (Philadelphia, 1890), p. 309.
3 T. W. Baldwin (“Shakespeare'. Jester,” MLN, xxxix [1924], 447-455) presents convincing evidence for dating Armin's joining the Chamberlain's Men in 1600, after publication of his Quips Upon Questions.Chambers (Elis.Stage,II, 300) accepts the Quips as Armin's, bat somewhat inconsistently dates Annin's entry into Shakespeare's company 1599, because he describes himself on the title page as “Clonnico de CurtanioSnuffe,” in the first edition of Foolsupon Foots and in Quips Upon Questions, a fact which would only fit with the later dating.
4 “Über Shakespeare's Narren,” Jahrbuch der deutschen Shakespeare-Gesellschaft,IX (Weimar, 1874), 102.
5 Shakespeare Commentaries, trans. F. E. Bonnett (London, 1880), p. 403
6 As They Liked It (New York, 1947), Ch. vii, pp. 105-113.
7 When You SeeMe, You Know Me, ed. K. Elze (Dernau and London, 1874), pp. 21-22.
8 The Praise of Fotty, 9, trans. Hoyt H. Hudson (Princeton, 1941), p. 26.
9 Phatdnu, 251, trans. B. Jowett, in The Dialogues of Plato (New York, 1937), I, 253.
10 A. Brandl, ed. in Quellen des weltlichen Dramas in England vorShekespeare (Strassburg, 1898), p. 178.
11 Trans. E. H. Sugden, in The Complete Roman Drama, ed. G, E. Duckworth (New York, 1942), p. 170.
12 K. M. Lea, Italian Popular Comedy (Oxford, 1934), r, 167. Cf. W. Smith, The Commedia Dell 'Arte (New York, 1912), p. 14 n. Miss Smith quotes a zanni from Gl'amorosiinganni (I, xiii) in the following unromantic view of love: “This love has made you timid, from a brave man it has turned you into a coward, from a wise man into a fool, from sensible to silly, from a Spanish charger it has changed you into a mule, for from the hour you fell in love you have made nothing but trouble, singing your sonnet nonsense through the streets, your Petrarch in your fist.”
13 Lea, I, 204. Cf. Scenario Li Ritratti,II, trans. Lea, II, 565.
14 Ibid.,II, 405, 451-453. Cf. W. Smith, ‘Italian and Elizabethan Comedy,“ MP, v (1908), 7–8; O. J. Campbell, ”Love'sLabour‘s, Lost Re-studied,“ pp. 26-28, and ”The Two Gentlemenof Verna and Italian Comedy,“ pp. 49-63, both in Studies in Shakes peare, Milion and Donne (Univ, of Michigan Publications, Lang, and Lit, I). A tetter dated 13 Jan. 1578 from the Privy Council to the Lord Mayor requiring a permit for ”one Drousiano, an Italian, a commediante and his companye“ to play in London until the first week in Lent and an item in the Chamber Accounts for April 1577 are the only clear evidences that a Commedia troupe ever played in England. The external evidence that Shakespeare ever saw a performance of the Commedia is slight, but there is abundant proof from his plays that be knew such stock figures as pantalone, capitano, and zanni.
15 Miss Lea (I,186) distinguishes between the two: “A ‘burla’ ... is something between a ‘lazzo,‘ or comic turn, and a regular sub-plot, and should involve an action which ties a knot that must be cut or undone before the play can proceed.”
16 At the risk of appearing to elaborate the obvious, we should note that, highly compressed though it is, Touchstone's speech shows all the characteristics of the burlesque panegyric. It belongs to the same genre as Erasmus' MoriaeEncomium and Swift's A Digression Concerning Madness. The speech uses what Worcester (The ArtofSatire, Cambridge, Masa. 1940, p. 80) calls the irony of inversion, a device by which the reader is made to convert apparent praise into blame.
17 S. Rowley, When YouSee Me, pp. 48-49
18 G Hübsch, ed., in Erlanger BeilragezurenglischenPhilologie, xv (Erlangen, 1893).
19 Touchstone's affectation of learning used to overawe Corin and William (v.i.44) servos also as parody on the schoolbook logic and rhetoric of his time. By his playful use of enthymeme (r.ii.81), full syllogism (III.iii.91), comic sorites (III.ii.41), and chop logic, the fool shows Msfamiliarity with such contemporary works as Wilson'sThe Rule of Reason (1531) or Blundeville'sThe Art of Logicke (1399).
20 This diminishing or debasing of a thing or a person is known to the rhetorician as meiosis, or the disabler (Puttenham, Bk. III, Ch. xvii). Miss RosemondTuve (Elizabethan and Melaphyrical Imagery, Chicago, 1947, p. 206), notes the “tempering or astringent effect” of such a figure and its ironical implications.
21 “Über Shakespeare's Narren,” pp. 104-105.
22 Whether Touchstone's parody on the courtly manner of quarreling specifically lampoons VincentioSaviolo'sHoner and honorable Quarrels (1595) or another work. The Book of Honor and Arms (1590), does not greatly matter. Through the fool, Shakespeare
23 Nicomachean Ethics, Bk. iv, Ch. xiii, trans. J. E. C. Weildrm (London, 1892).
24 Shakespeare may have found Touchstone's maxim in Germbergius, Carminum Pro- verbialium (London, 1583), as T. W. Baldwin suggests. However, the parados is almost an exact translation of a passage from the 14th-century Latin Solomon-Marcolf dialogues (ed. Walter Benary, Heidelberg, 1914, p. 24) : “Talisdicituresse sapiens qui ipse habet se pro Stulto.”
25 Cf. Feliche, in I Antomio and Mellido, ll. 1054-58 (III.ii), ed. W. W. Greg (Malone Society Reprints, Oxford, 1922), on the fantastic, perfumed gull Castilio: “Honest musk- cod, twill not be so stitched together; take that, and that (striking him], and belie no Ladies loue: sweare no more by Iesu: this Madam, that Ladie; hence goe, forswears the presence, trauaile three years to bury this bastinado: auoide, puffe paste, auoide.”
26 Scene commentators have mistaken the jaundiced views of the malcontent Jaques for Shakespeare's own mature reflections on life. More astute critics remember that Shake speare seldom speaks through the characters in his plays but that be sometimes lends a spurious dignity to rogues and scoundrels by breathing fine poetry into their speeches.
27 Marston, The Scourge of Villanie, ed. G. B. Harrison (Bodley Head Quartos, No. XIII, London, 1925), pp. 125-126.
28 Horo Shakespeare Purged Jonson A Problem Solved (Cambridge, 1928), p. 5. Gray gives his case away when, at the end of his essay (p. 34), he abandons his earlier position and says that “Jaques stands, not for Jonson, but for Jonsonian ‘Humour’.”
29 SatyreII, ll. 157-160, ed. A. B. Grosart, in The Poeme of John Morsion (Manchester, 1879).
30 O. J. Campbell, “Jaques,” Huntington Library Bull., No. 8 (Oct. 1935), pp. 100, 102.
31 An Humorous Day's Mirth, ed. D. Nichol Smith (Malone Society Reprints, Oxford, 1938) ll. 925-940.
32 The Allegory of Love.(Oxford, 1948), pp. 172, 173.
33 Cf F. S. Boas, Shakspere and his predecessors (New York, 1896), pp. 339 f. for a contrary opinion: “Touchstone's wit takes always and with every one a caustic turn…. Thus while, like Feste, he has to do with each of the characters in turn, he notes their special disposition, not to chime in with it, or to gently hint a cure for its defects, but to throw it up in all its worst lights.”
34 Comic Characters of Shakespeare. (London, 1946), p. 36.