Shakespearean fool

The Shakespearean fool is a recurring character type in the works of William Shakespeare. They are usually clever peasants or commoners who use their wits to outdo people of higher social standing. In this sense, they are similar to the real fools, and jesters of the time, but their characteristics are greatly heightened for theatrical effect.
Fools have entertained a varied public from Roman through Medieval times. The fool perhaps reached its pre-Shakespearean heights as the jester in aristocratic courts across Europe. The jester played a dynamic and changing role in entertaining aristocratic households in a wide variety of ways: songs, music, storytelling, medieval satire, physical comedy and, to a lesser extent, juggling and acrobatics. Shakespeare not only borrowed from this multi-talented jester tradition, but contributed significantly to its rethinking. Whereas the court jester often regaled his audience with various skills aimed to amuse, Shakespeare's fool, consistent with Shakespeare's revolutionary ideas about theater, became a complex character who could highlight more important issues. Like Shakespeare's other characters, the fool began to speak outside of the narrow confines of exemplary morality. Shakespeare's fools address themes of love, psychic turmoil, personal identity, and many other innumerable themes that arise in Shakespeare, and in modern theater.
Shakespeare's earlier fools often seem to be written for the particular talents of Elizabethan actor William Kempe. After Kempe left the troupe, Shakespeare's comic characters changed dramatically. Kempe was known for his improvising, and Hamlet contains a complaint at improvisational clowning (Act 3, Scene 2). Perhaps central to the Bard's redrawing of the fool was the actor Robert Armin:
One scholar agrees that the clowning in Shakespeare's plays may have been intended as "an emotional vacation from the more serious business of the main action," in other words, comic relief. Clowning scenes in Shakespeare's tragedies mostly appear immediately after a truly horrific scene: the Gravediggers in Hamlet after Ophelia's suicide; the Porter in Macbeth just after the murder of the King; and as Cleopatra prepares herself for death in Antony and Cleopatra. Others argue that Shakespeare's clowning goes beyond just comic relief, instead making the horrific or deeply complex scenes more understandable and "true to the realities of living, then and now." Shifting the focus from the fictional world to the audience's reality helps convey "more effectively the theme of the dramas."
As Shakespeare's fools speak truth to the other characters, they also speak truth to the audience. For example, Feste, in Twelfth Night, reinforces the theme of love with his song in the second act to Sir Toby and Sir Andrew:
Shakespeare closes the play with Feste alone on the stage, singing directly to the audience "of man's inexorable progress from childhood's holiday realm ... into age, vice, disillusionment, and death. ... [This] pessimism is informed and sweetened, however, not only by the music to which it is set, but by the tolerance and acceptance of Feste himself."
The costumes worn by Shakespearean fools were fairly standardized at the Globe Theatre. Actors wore a ragged or patchwork coat. Often, bells hung along the skirt and on the elbows. They wore closed breeches with tights, with each leg a different colour. A monk-like hood covering the entire head was positioned as a cape, covering the shoulders and part of the chest. This hood was decorated with animal body parts, such as donkey's ears or the neck and head of a rooster. The animal theme was continued in the crest, which was worn as well.
Actors usually had props. They carried a short stick decorated with the doll head of a fool or puppet on the end. This was an official bauble or scepter, which had a pouch filled with air, sand, or peas attached as well. They wore a long petticoat of different colours, made of expensive materials such as velvet trimmed with yellow.