Jester definition: court fools, wise fools and the jester archetype

A jester is a professional fool: an entertainer kept by a royal court or a great household to amuse it with jokes, songs, mimicry and tricks. Merriam-Webster defines this kind of fool as a retainer “formerly kept in great households to provide casual entertainment,” commonly dressed “in motley with cap, bells, and bauble.” The job came with a license: the fool could mock the powerful and tell them the truth, as long as it sounded like a joke.

Touchstone, the court fool in Shakespeare's As You Like It (c. 1599), shows the license at work, and its limit. He tells a story that makes a fool of a knight the duke is fond of, and Celia warns him he'll “be whipped for taxation one of these days.” His answer: “The more pity, that fools may not speak wisely what wise men do foolishly.” The joke lets him say it, and the whip marks how far a joke can reach.

That is the jester in history and in literature. The Jester of the twelve-archetype model is a third thing: a personality built around play, with no court and no master. This page keeps the three apart, then shows how to write a jester.

Where the word jester comes from

Jester comes from Middle English gestour, a “reciter of romances, minstrel, entertainer,” from a verb meaning to recite romances. Merriam-Webster dates the word to the 15th century. It meant a storyteller before it meant a comedian.

The costume is what most people picture: bright clothes in a motley pattern, a cap with bells and a mock scepter, called a bauble or a marotte. The cap and the scepter mirrored the king's own crown and scepter, so the fool's outfit was itself a joke about power. In fiction the costume is optional. The license is what makes a jester.

Court jesters in history

Courts kept professional fools for centuries, sometimes called licensed fools. Henry VIII employed a jester named Will Sommers. Triboulet served two kings of France, Louis XII and Francis I, and James VI and I kept Archibald Armstrong. Not every fool was a performer: Thomas More's household fool, Henry Patenson, was described as a “natural” fool, one whose folly was taken to be real rather than played. By the 18th century court jesters had died out except in Russia, Spain and Germany. In France the tradition ended with the monarchy, in the Revolution.

Folly as a cover for truth had a famous book behind it. Erasmus wrote In Praise of Folly in Latin in 1509, while staying at More's house in London, and it was printed in 1511. Folly herself narrates, as a goddess praising her own power, and the satire takes in princes, scholars and the church. The Latin title, Moriae Encomium, puns on More's name.

On the English stage, Shakespeare's fools are tied to one actor. Around 1600 Robert Armin became the leading comic actor of Shakespeare's company after Will Kempe left. Armin was the company's expert on jesting and wrote Foole upon Foole (1600), about natural fools, some of whom he knew. He is thought to have played the licensed fools Shakespeare wrote after Kempe's departure, and Feste was almost certainly written for him.

Shakespeare's wise fools

Shakespeare's fools are mostly clever commoners who outwit their social betters. The best of them know exactly how much truth a joke will carry, and what happens when it carries too much.

Touchstone: wit behind a stalking-horse

Jaques, the play's melancholy lord, meets Touchstone in the forest and envies him the one thing a fool has that a lord doesn't: a charter to mock anyone. “Motley's the only wear,” he decides. By the last act the Duke has seen the method: “He uses his folly like a stalking-horse, and under the presentation of that he shoots his wit.” A stalking-horse was the cover a hunter hid behind to get close to game. The joke is the cover. The truth is the shot.

Feste: the fool who works for a living

Feste, in Twelfth Night (c. 1601), is a professional. He moves between two households, sings for coins and, in his first scene, proves his mistress a fool for mourning a brother whose soul she believes is in heaven.

Olivia's line is the license in one sentence: an “allowed” fool can rail all day and it isn't slander. Viola's is the craft: playing the fool well takes more wit than playing the lord. Feste also shows the jester's edge. He helps torment the steward Malvolio, who sneered at him in the first act, and at the end throws it back: “And thus the whirligig of time brings in his revenges.” Malvolio's exit line, “I'll be revenged on the whole pack of you,” is the bill for the joke.

Lear's Fool: truth under the whip

The Fool in King Lear (c. 1606) never gets a name. He arrives after Lear has divided his kingdom between the two daughters who flattered him and banished the one who wouldn't, and nearly every joke he makes is about that mistake.

That last speech is the jester's whole position. The truth, a lie and silence can all be punished, so he chooses the truth and makes it rhyme. The license is real but thin. In the same scene Lear warns him, “Take heed, sirrah, the whip,” and the Fool knows which dog gets beaten: “Truth's a dog must to kennel; he must be whipped out.” He also loves the daughter Lear exiled: since Cordelia left for France, a knight reports, “the fool hath much pined away.”

Then he vanishes. His last line is “And I'll go to bed at noon,” in the third act, as Lear's own madness takes over his part, and the play never says what became of him. In the final scene Lear, over the dead Cordelia, cries, “And my poor fool is hang'd!” He most likely means Cordelia, since “fool” was also a word of tenderness. It is hard not to hear the Fool in it too.

Yorick: the jester remembered

Hamlet (c. 1600) has a jester who never speaks: he is a skull. The gravedigger says it has lain in the earth three-and-twenty years: “This same skull, sir, was Yorick's skull, the King's jester.” Hamlet, the sharpest wit in the play, holds what is left of the man who carried him: “He hath borne me on his back a thousand times.”

Jester vs trickster, clown and fool

The line that matters most is between jester and trickster. A jester's power is borrowed. It depends on a master who can laugh, and it ends when the master stops laughing. A trickster's power is their own. Puck serves Oberon but treats the errand as a game, Loki answers to no one for long, and a trickster's mischief can break an old order open. Carl Jung counted the trickster among his archetypes, and Christopher Vogler made it a story role in The Writer's Journey. The character archetypes guide covers both. The Jester among the twelve archetypes is a third thing again: a personality, not a job.

The Jester among the 12 archetypes

The twelve archetypes most writing guides use come from marketing, not from literary criticism. Margaret Mark and Carol S. Pearson set them out for brands in The Hero and the Outlaw (2001), reworking a model for personal growth that Pearson had published a decade earlier. In that model the Jester wants to enjoy the moment and fears boredom, and its flaw is frivolity, the joke as a way to dodge pain and duty. What a Jester gives a story is perspective: the joke that shows a situation from a side no one else will look at. The archetype needs no court and no cap. Mercutio, in Romeo and Juliet (c. 1595), is pure Jester, and he jokes through his own death scene.

The pun on “grave” is the archetype at its best and worst: brave, funny and refusing to feel it. Then the mask slips, and his curse on both families is the play's verdict on the feud. Shakespeare earns that moment by letting Mercutio joke through everything before it. Modern Jesters include Fred and George Weasley, Hawkeye Pierce in M*A*S*H and Chandler Bing. The Joker is the dark inversion: the jester's license with no master and no limit.

How to write a jester

1. Decide who grants the license

   A court jester's freedom comes from a master who can take it back. In a modern story the master might be a boss, a parent, a ship's captain or a whole friend group. Decide who can stop the jokes, and what would make them do it.

2. Aim the jokes at something true

   Lear's Fool has one subject: the king's mistake. Give your jester a target the story cares about, and the jokes start doing plot work.

3. Make the truth cost something

   The Fool is threatened with the whip. Feste's prank earns him an enemy for life. If the jester's honesty is free, it is only decoration.

4. Give them a want of their own

   Feste wants paying. Lear's Fool wants the king to see his mistake, and pines for the daughter he lost. A jester with no want is comic relief, not a character, and the character profile template has a field for it.

5. Let the mask slip once

   Write one scene where the jester isn't joking, and put it where it costs the most: Mercutio's curse, the Fool pining for Cordelia.

6. Plan the exit

   Lear's Fool disappears when the king's madness takes over his role. Mercutio's death is where the play stops being funny. Decide what the story loses when the laughter stops.

The first joke is for the room. The second is for the queen: it names the man blocking the toll without accusing him of anything. Then look at what Tam gets for it, a purse and a warning. The license holds, and the reader can see exactly how thin it is. If you want a premise to put him in, one of the fantasy writing prompts begins with a dying king who names his jester regent.

Mistakes with jester characters

• Comic relief only. The jester pops in for a laugh and leaves. Without a want or a stake, they are a sound effect.
• Telling the reader it was funny. “Everyone laughed” in narration is a promise the page didn't keep. Put the joke in the dialogue or cut it. The guide to writing dialogue covers timing and subtext.
• The author's mouthpiece. A jester who delivers the writer's opinions and is never wrong stops being a character. Let your fool misjudge someone at least once.
• The sad clown as a surprise. The jester who is secretly in pain is a well-worn trope. It still works if it is set up early and costs the jester something in a scene, not just a confession.
• Jokes from the wrong century. In historical fiction, a joke that needs a modern reference breaks the period. Wordplay, riddles and songs travel better.

Jokes are the hardest lines to judge in your own draft, because you already know the punchline. Keep a short list of the jester's best lines with the chapter each one lands in, so a joke spent in chapter 3 doesn't come back in chapter 19, and give the chapter to a reader who doesn't know the punchlines.

You can also ask the Strokes Assistant to review the chapters the jester appears in and list each joke with its target. A joke with no target is usually the first one to cut.