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With hey, ho, the wind and the rain. Every aspect of Shakespeare’s work has been thoroughly picked over, including the weather in it. Still, I can’t help wondering how his plays might have been different had the weather in England been better. To cite one small example, there is the clown Feste’s melancholy song that ends Twelfth Night, with its wistful refrain, “For the rain it raineth every day.” Where else but in Britain does it rain every day, or seemingly so? How might the song have been different had Shakepeare been a Hollywood screenwriter sitting by the pool with his laptop searching for a metaphor to capture Feste’s mood? Looking back on his sadly inconsequential life, Feste seems to suggest that it is not just his own life but life itself that is of no consequence -- a tale told by an idiot, as Shakespeare writes elsewhere. Does any of it make any difference in the long run?
Feste is a court jester by trade, his job being to play the fool with sly wit. To play the fool is not the same thing as being one – a distinction Shakespeare is always careful to make. As Viola observes in Twelfth Night, Feste “is wise enough to play the fool, and to do that well craves a kind of wit.” His position gives him unusual license to speak his mind, but with the proviso that he must never be taken seriously. Like the Old Testament prophets, he speaks the truth to power, yet does so with impunity, something the prophets were rarely able to manage. Oscar Wilde, himself a notable wit in his day, once remarked, “If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they'll kill you.”
The Old Testament prophets were also known to play the fool on occasion. Jeremiah, the archetypal prophet of doom, went about in a dirty loincloth to dramatize the arrogance of God’s people before they were carried off into captivity in Babylon. Ezekiel ate barley cakes cooked over cow dung to signal that the Jews would soon be eating their bread defiled among the Gentiles. The prophet Hosea married a prostitute to dramatize Israel’s unfaithfulness. The prophets deliberately brought scorn upon themselves rather than be ignored.
The Christian saints picked up where the Old Testament prophets left off. The pattern was set by the desert fathers, who took St. Paul at his word when he said “we are fools for Christ’s sake.” The patron saint of holy fools was Simeon Salos, who subsisted on lentils for nearly 30 years in the wilderness before arriving in the Syrian town of Emesha dragging a dead dog tied to his waist by a rope. He snuffed out candles during worship services, threw nuts at the priests and ate sausages on Good Friday. He performed many good deeds as well but always in secret. The yurodivy, or holy fools, of the Russian Orthodox Church, followed a similar pattern until the authorities lost patience with them, and they were suppressed under Peter the Great.
The mythologist Joseph Campbell declared the holy fool to be the most dangerous cultural archetype because of the threat posed to the established order. By their sometimes bizarre words and actions, these divine messengers demonstrate what Jesus meant when he said his kingdom was not of this world. However, he did not mean that the kingdom of God was somewhere else. Granted, it is not the world we know; it is the world as God created it, right here, right now, right under our very noses. This is what the holy fools of the world are trying to call our attention to. They tell the truth, and it sounds like utter madness. The first shall be last, and the last shall be first. Turn the other cheek. Love your enemies. Take no thought for the morrow. This is God’s world, and he is claiming the whole thing for himself. In words that the clown Feste might appreciate, Jesus told the crowds in the Sermon on the Mount that the Lord “makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust.”
Matthew 5:45
1 Corinthians 4:10
Matthew 5:45
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