ABSTRACT
‘Foolery, sir, does walk about the orb like the sun, it shines everywhere’.1 So says Feste, voiced, as we believe, by Robert Armin in the first performances of Twelfth Night. The words are Shakespeare’s, but Armin in his own writing seems to confirm both the geographical spread and the peripatetic nature of fooling. One interesting feature of Armin’s narration is a sense that the force of this kind of foolery often rested significantly in physical space. The interaction of the body of the natural fool with his environment, and the spectator’s vivid awareness of the concrete and social spaces of that environment, are important elements in the meaning and impact of fool-generated laughter. In recent decades anthropologists, social scientists and literary theorists have developed new interests in ideas of space and of place, building on the premise that ‘all behaviour is located in and constructed of space’.
