ABSTRACT
Hamlet as self-appointed impresario is scathing about clowns who spin out a comic routine to bask in audience laughter at the expense of the rest of players, who need to carry on with business of play. Shakespeare’s clowns are frequently the fulcrum of a multi-layered joke. On one level, they are the butt of jokes about their obtuseness and foolishly inflated sense of importance. On another, they provide a distorted reflection of characters of main plot, inevitably of elite status, parodying their vanities and obsessions. Shakespeare too repackages Feste’s song about the wind and rain and has the Fool sing it in King Lear. If Twelfth Night is a study in folly, King Lear probes the most radical connotations of the term. It portrays a world swept up in a maelstrom of madness. The British comedian Peter Cook lauded the cabaret of Weimar Republic as the greatest satire of twentieth century, given its success in preventing the rise of Hitler.
