The Massachusetts Review, Inc.

To the Point of Folly: Touchstone's Function in "As You like It"

Author(s): David Frail
Source: The Massachusetts Review, Vol. 22, No. 4 (Winter, 1981), pp. 695-717
Published by: The Massachusetts Review, Inc.
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/25089211
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 To the Point of Folly:
TOUCHSTONES FUNCTION IN AS YOU LIKE IT

DAVID FRAIL

SOME RECENT CRITICS OF SHAKESPEARE'S COMEDIES HAVE EM

phasized the plays' dissonant undertones and somber forebodings
of the later (and, it is implied, greater) tragedies and romances.
Since As You Like It is the next-to-last of the comedies, it is
particularly vulnerable to this meteorological approach, which
spots the dust particles about which the thunderheads form. Ralph
Berry, for example, finds that the "reality principle," not the
"festive principle," is Shakespeare's criterion by which to judge the
comedies. In this light, Berry sees As You Like It as a pastoral idyll,
but a "fairly perturbed" one, in which the characters keep finding
themselves reflected in one another and react to these mirrorings
with undue hostility?a latent tragic motif, to be fulfilled in, say,
Iago's hatred of Othello? (Berry doesn't specify a particular mas
terwork so much as detect a mood-swing in the canon.)1
Thomas McFarland goes further than Berry and finds the mood
swing within As You Like It itself. "The situation at the start," he
says, "could ... as well serve for a tragedy as for a comedy." The
play "labors to keep its comic balance" under the staggering
burden of the theme of Cain and Abel; while it manages to exhibit
"more humor" than the earlier pastoral comedies, it finally con
tains "much less happiness," as if it were too exhausted by such
weighty matter to do more than a perfunctory dance at its close.2
Now, we certainly may wonder with Berry why Rosalind chides
Phebe so harshly, but I think we do so only after the play. I find it
quite amusing to watch Rosalind explode so suddenly, so unaware
that she chastises her own cruelty to Orlando. And while McFar
land accurately sees the tragic potential in the opening, he doesn't
acknowledge the effect of the opening's texture, which holds that
potential so firmly in suspension that it could only be manifested if
the entire play were rewritten. As You Like It would simply no
longer be itself.

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 The Massachusetts Review

Such anti-romantic readings as Berry's and McFarland's do

make valuable contributions to our understanding of Shake
speare's plays, but we must beware their tendency to falsify our
experience of the comedies?especially As You Like It. In it ro
mance and anti-romance counterpoint each other effortlessly, bal
anced as neatly as the phrases of Touchstone's evaluation of court
and country. Like his speech, the play holds reason at the mercy of
pure desire?and catches desire in the forms of reason and rhetoric.
As You Like It demands a radical subjectivity from us: we are
"conjured" to "like as much of the play as please you" (Epilogue),
and if we wish to like it all, we must dismiss our urge to choose
reality over festivity, or vice versa. Critical judgement, as Touch
stone, says, is the forest's duty; ours is to let the forest do so, and thus
become wiser than we are 'ware. We should laugh as Stephen
Dedalus does, "to free his mind from his mind's bondage."3 The
criticism we commit after experiencing the play is possible only
when we have fallen back into that bondage from which the play
seeks to free us. We all are caught in Jaques' predicament, trying to
relate our encounter with "a fool!" and in the attempt transform
ing ourselves into?or, rather, recognizing ourselves as?the fool
ish humans we are.
Let us proceed with that transformation, then. We would do
better, I'd suggest, to focus on how As You Like It goes about
"un-meaning," rather than trying to say what some of its mean
ings are. At the least, we can figure out why there seems to be such a
dissonance between our experience of the play and what we make
of it afterwards; at most we will affirm Enid Welsford's claim that
"comedy is the expression of the spirit of the Fool."4 For I hope to
show here that the "kaleidoscopic" structure and language of As
You Like It force us into the vertiginous freedom of a radical
subjectivity, and that this kaleidoscopic nature is mirrored by?
even mirrored from?its Fool, Touchstone.
Surprisingly few have taken Shakespeare at his word and
regarded Touchstone as the touchstone of As You Like It. Even
Harold Jenkins, the play's best critic, calls Rosalind, not the fool,
"expert in those dark riddles which mean exactly what they say."5
Rosalind does embody the answers to those riddles, but she is
expert only in acting them out, not in articulating them; it is
Touchstone who, if he gives no answers, is expert at propounding
the questions. Rosalind acts out her play-within-a-play of the
paradoxes of identity and disguise, fidelity and cuckoldry, faith
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 To the Point of Folly

and cynical mockery on Touchstone's terms. (Certainly she does so

with such exuberance and vitality that we'd rather call her up on
the phone than Shakespeare.) Touchstone, tagged along into
Arden by Rosalind and Celia, seems to be a mildly diverting, even
intrusive "comfort to our travel" (1. iii. 129).
But this very sense of his intrusiveness, our very doubts about the
necessity of his presence, is precisely his most important quality,
and leads us to recognize his function. If Rosalind is the center of
the play, Touchstone is the counter-center essential to its structural
and textural relativity. We can let Jenkins sum up the play's
meaning as a paradox (one which holds for comedy in general):

. . . longing to escape to our enchanted world, we are constantly

brought up against reality. . .Yet in As You Like It ideals, thought
always on the point of dissolving, are forever recreating themselves.
They do not delude the eye of reason, yet faith in them is not
extinguished in spite of all that reason can do.6

But we must also recognize that Touchstone offers us a counter

meaning?an undoing of meaning?by snatching the play and us
up to that point where paradoxes themselves dissolve into folly.
To better understand how Touchstone goes about propounding
his riddle-dissolving riddles, I want to call on two very fine writers
on fools, Enid Welsford and William Willeford. I shall discuss
their studies at some length before turning to As You Like It, to
show how completely the Fool's "mere presence," as Welsford
claims, "dissolves events, evades issues, and throws doubt upon the
finality of fact," be it physical, social, psychological, or linguistic
fact.7
The conventional notion of the "wise fool," Willeford cautions
us, reveals the nature of the Fool only to conceal it. Duke Senior's
praise of Touchstone is typical:

He uses his folly like a stalking horse,

And under the presentation of that shoots his wit.
(5. iv. 106-7)

But the shrewd control that the Duke attributes to Touchstone is

actually his own: he unwittingly extracts the "wit" from the
"folly" and treats the latter as mere verbal disguise. We must
remember that the "whetstone of the wits" (1. ii. 53) is also the
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 The Massachusetts Review

"cutter-off of Nature's wit" (1. ii. 47-8). In fact, only by cutting it

off does a Fool whet wit, as Welsford asserts.

The Fool does not lead a revolt against the Law physical, social,
moral, he lures us into a region of the spirit where, as Lamb would
put it, the writ does not run.8

The "wisdom" to be found in this region of "the spirit" is neither

conventionally wise nor spiritual. Willeford more appropriately
describes the Fool's luring as "a kind of play... in which the final
ignorance of our natures is brought to expression."9 Wisdom and
folly, then, are synonymous here. If we are to preserve the phrase
"wise fool," we must treat it with the respect due to paradoxes, and
acknowledge its synergetic powers: its significance is greater and
qualitatively different than the sum of its parts. If we can locate the
phrase's accuracy, it lies at the point of semantic fusion of the two
words into an oxymoron.
If such a thing as "semantic fusion" occurs, that is. Since we are
speaking of a "writ-free" region of experience, we might just as
accurately call our experience of paradox a semantic ???/fusion, a
scattering of ordinary meaning into an aporia.10 "Oxymoron,"
"paradox," with this uncharacterizable "point" contained within
them, are the best terms in which to describe the nature of the Fool,
though we must remain aware that it is the nature of folly to take us
beyond such terms. We can rest somewhat comfortably with
"oxymoron" and "paradox," however; for just as the Fool dis
solves our habitual modes of thought, perception, and behavior, so
a paradox exposes those modes as illusions by running us up
against their limits. W. V. O. Quine has described how one
paradox, expressed in G?del's Theorem, reveals that the concept of
proof in mathematics is founded upon only an assumption of
certainty. Not even numbers are made of iron. Other paradoxes,
according to Quine, have driven logicians to construct "a hier
archy of truth locutions," in which statements have a relative
degree of truth?a paradox in itself.11 The Fool has an analogous
effect, driving us to describe a "writ-free" region in writing, and to
relish the irony rather than despair over it.
The Fool derives his power of dissolution-through-paradox
from his playing out, and playing upon, those contradictions
within ourselves with which we rest complacently or simply
ignore. Welsford and Willeford work with different pairs of con

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 To the Point of Folly

ceptual oppositions, but both show how the Fool engages us in a

perpetual see-saw game with these oppositions.
Welsford describes this "certain inner contradiction" in fairly
general terms.12 We have a sense of ourselves as compounds of
"Nature," or the biological, and "Leviathan," the network of the
mental and social through which we civilize ourselves. When we
encounter a Fool, he tips both ends of our see-saw selves, as it were.
We perceive him as "Nature's natural" (1. ii. 47), and recognize our
own "naturalness" without the shame "Leviathan" imposes on us
to preserve social order. At the same time, we also perceive him
through the eyes of our "Leviathan" selves, and

.. .we laugh also because we are normal enough to know how very
unnatural it is to be as natural as all that.13

"Normal" here means the rationality of our "Leviathan" selves.

Welsford makes clear, however, that we all sense that "Nature" is as
normal as the systems we build. When those logical and civil
constructs threaten to crush the "original personality" within us,
she says, the "natural" Fool leads us to escape and to feel "a birth of
new joy and freedom."14
Despite Welsford's recognition of the mutual doubleness of Fool
and human, she tends to treat the Fool as merely the "natural," or
as an Ariel-like spiritual creature. By translating Welsford's gen
eral terms into the language of psychology, William Willeford
offers a more complex and useful analysis of Fool and human. He
defines the inner contradiction as the division of consciousness
into the conscious, rational ego and the irrational unconscious.
We necessarily, though mistakenly, assume that the conscious is
all. But the "totality of the self" is a vast Gestalt composed of the
unconscious, the rhythms of the body, "tuned-out" responses to
external stimuli, all of which have "a dynamism and meaning that
exceed our grasp... but that belong to the self nonetheless. "15 The
Fool symbolizes this "essential self-division" of the self, a "viola
tion of the human image," yet whole himself.16 For Willeford,
then, the Fool is not merely a "natural"; he embraces both Nature
and Leviathan and yet is neither. Here we return to the Fool's place
at the "point" of paradox: to Willeford, the Fool sits on the
boundary between the unconscious part of the Gestalt and the
conscious center, flickering back and forth across this line like a
giddy electron. Willeford goes on to analogize from his model of
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 The Massachusetts Review

boundary and center to describe how the Fool inhabits the point
(or gap) at which several fundamental antinomies meet: Leviathan
and Nature, wisdom and folly, order and chaos, form and form
lessness, meaning and meaningless, stasis and change, reality and
illusion.
What happens when we encounter a Fool? How does he lead us
to this point? According to Willeford, he frees us from our ordinary
modes of thought, behavior, and speech by imprisoning us in
them:

Any fool we see is demarcated from what we assume to be a

non-foolish background... We see this fool here only by disregard
ing that fool or those fools there, including the fools that we are.17

That is, in order to recognize a Fool at all, we must employ our

rational powers of perception and cognition. But that fool within
us, whom we push to the boundaries of our consciousness so we
can see that Fool without, escapes us and leaps to the center of our
attention, projected on to "that" Fool. We face our own folly, and
only if we deny that it's our own. The Fool compels our "imme
diate and total" recognition of him, as Willeford aptly puts it.18
Only after our encounter can we recognize that folly as ours.
Since much of our encounter with a Fool consists of jokes, we
would expect that his language has the same effect as his presence.
And so it does. The significance of Foolsprach lies not so much in
the "translations" into sense and wisdom that we make as in our
experiencing "the shattering of our customary forms of ignorance
(i.e., normal speech)."19 Willeford describes three ways in which a
FooTs jokes lead us to their point, at which sense and nonsense
meet:

.. .when we 'get the point,' it strikes us as intelligent enough to seem

unintelligent; it impinges upon meaning at least enough to be felt as
a violation of meaning. The point of a joke may lie in a hidden
meaning, and this, as it comes to light, may be what strikes us as
funny. But the point may also lie in the fact that the joke issues into
nonsense with only a few strips and tatters of sense or that it seems to
have a sense that one cannot get at; one gets stuck in one's inability to
deal with it meaningfully at all.20

Touchstone, we should note, is especially full of this last kind of

joke, the hidden sense of which we instantly grasp and laugh at

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 To the Point of Folly

but which requires the most delicate dissection to expose its logic
(or pseudo-logic). Perhaps this is why so little has been written on
his function in As You Like It; to explain a line like "Nay, I shall
ne'er be ware of mine own wit / till I break my shins against it" (2.
iv. 56-7), much less place it in context, can make one feel like an
overly rational sort of fool.
Touchstone is also full of the first kind of joke, portentously
intoned riddles which, as Jenkins says, "mean exactly what they
say":

The heathen philosopher, when he had a desire to eat a grape,

would open his lips when he put it into his mouth, meaning thereby
that grapes were made to eat and lips to open. (5. i. 31-4)

Of course we say that here Touchstone does in fact utter a profound

comic truth: we are actual beings in an actual world. We must
admit, however, that we formulate this statement after the fact of
utterance, and as if to rescue our short-circuited expectations;
Touchstone inflates us and then deflates us, and we re-inflate the
deflation. We get stuck in the paradox of uttering abstractions that
insist on the physicality of the world.
Once we have extracted this profound truth, as equally pro
found doubt presents itself: Is that all there is? Lips and grapes?
Touchstone has provoked us into awareness of what William
Lynch calls the "double longing" that makes comedy possible. On
the one hand, we want the "maximum beauty and insight" of full,
pure meaning (a perfected Leviathan); on the other hand, we also
want the experience of "pure, unalloyed, concrete objects" (a per
fected Nature).21 As Father Lynch proposes:

We want the unlimited and the dream, and we also want the earth.
. . . The ideal solution would be that the world should 'signify'
without becoming less actual in so doing.22

When we laugh?before we start rationalizing?we confront the

comic, "ugly and strong," through which, Lynch argues, we
achieve the "pure cognition" which satisfies our double longing.23
Lynch denies the Fool this comic function. I don't, since I define
the comic not as satisfaction of these desires, but as the rendering
irrelevant of such double binds. The Fool's comic power is his
ability to get us so stuck in contradictions that the forms burst

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 The Massachusetts Review

open, if only for a moment. We have discussed some of the mental,

social, and linguistic oppositions that the Fool dissolves, and may
now sum them up as the Fool does, in his physical appearance.
Mikhail Bakhtin has brilliantly defined the grotesque as a mode of
imagination and expression which celebrates change and renewal
by fusing the death of one form and the birth of another into a
single image.24 The Fool is just such a grotesque figure, ugly and
strong; the point between fragmentation and wholeness at which
he sits is that grotesque point of transition. As Willeford says, the
Fool is the image of possibility: the possibility of order, meaning,
physical there-ness, of "ripeness" in all senses. Paradoxically,
though, from hour to hour he rots and rots, stuck at the point of
change. Yet if he never can fulfill any of his possibilities, he can
unfix us from our rigid "fulfillments."
This sense of grotesque potential leads us to encounter the Fool
with what Welsford describes as

... that strange twofold consciousness which makes each one of us

realize... that he is a mere bubble of temporary existence threatened
each moment with extinction, and yet be quite unable to shake off
the sensation of his being a stable entity existing eternal and
invulnerable at the very centre of the flux of history, a kind of
punctum indiffer ens, or point of rest.25

Here, in this see-sawing twofold consciousness, is the essence of the

comic. Most theorists have argued that this essence is the "vital
balance," the "pure sense of life," the "joy of life invincible," the
"living," or the "ugly and strong. . . actual."26 But Welsford and
Willeford's emphasis on doubleness and contradiction, and Bakh
tin's emphasis on the grotesque's celebration of transition, remind
us that death and dead forms are as essential to comedy as vitality.
We can know this experience of pure life and joy only after we are
re-imprisoned in those "dead" forms of "normality." The "pure
sense of life" can manifest itself only in impure forms.
It is the fusion into diffusive paradox, then, our resolution of one
contradiction into another and yet another, that is the comic. And
it is the Fool who leads us into this state of mental and physical
freedom, that state of possibility. We immediately fall out of this
state, but the possibility remains that we will immediately re-enter
it by way of the Fool. And so his "show," as Willeford calls it,
flickers us back and forth between present-mindedness and laugh

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 To the Point of Folly

ter, the security of paradox and its dizzying release, until we believe
we can stand on an abyss?and laugh at the folly of such a belief.
Let us now apply this theory of the phenomenology of folly to
Touchstone and watch how he cuts off the wit of As You Like It.
In three crucial scenes he acts as "detached commentator upon the
action,"27 as Welsford describes the Fool's use of his license in
drama, and carries the play to the point of folly.
As we noted above, Touchstone always seems to intrude upon
the action of the play. It is as if he stands on the boundary of the
stage and tries to claim its center whenever he can. Each time he
succeeds, he involves the other characters (and the audience) in a
"show" which diffuses the conventions of the preceding scene into
"mangled forms" like those with which his brain is said to be
crammed (2. vii. 42). Yet by convincing us that the matter at hand is
a mere bubble of convention, Touchstone also reveals the punc
tum indifferens from which such conventions are generated:
desire.
In Act 1, Scene ii, Touchstone literally intrudes on Celia and
Rosalind to deliver a message and cuts off their argument over
Nature's and Fortune's gifts. His presence suspends the women's
discussion in ambiguity: has Fortune exploited Nature's purest
creation, her "natural," to defeat wit, the one gift of Nature which
enables humankind to defeat Fortune? Or has Nature herself sent
in Touchstone to strengthen her one weapon against Fortune,
whetting wit with dullness? Just as Celia and Rosalind find it
difficult to keep their philosophical categories distinct, so we find
them fusing together in Touchstone's presence. For if he is
Nature's weapon as whetstone, he "sharpens" wit by leading it
into folly. And if his mere entrance pushes the women's argument
to the verge of contradiction, Touchstone's own proof of the
paradoxical nature of oaths and honor leads us through all contra
dictions to the point of folly.
This process begins as soon as Celia asks him, "Were you made
the messenger?" and Touchstone replies, "No, by mine honor, but
I was bid to come for you" (1. ii. 57-9). He apparently condradicts
himself, and so forswears that honor; after all, someone who comes
for you is a messenger. But from another point of view, Touch
stone's contradiction confirms his honor. He asserts that he is a
courtier forced to do a lowly messenger's job. By merely implying
this in the polite, judicious rhetoric of a courtier, he "proves" that
he is one. His ability to contradict himself?the diplomat making
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 The Massachusetts Review

a "fine distinction"?proves that he hasn't contradicted himself.

Now of course Touchstone isn't a courtier, but a Fool. As Wille
ford says, our recognition of him as such is "immediate and total,"
and we can perceive him only as a Fool trying to be something else.
We all reply to him as Celia does: "Where learned you that oath,
fool?" (1. ii. 60; my emphasis).
But while his dullness whets our wits by challenging us to pierce
through an obvious deception, it has also led us to drop our
guards. He has exposed a contradiction which isn't a contradic
tion. Although we quickly dismiss his word-play and call him
"fool," we proceed to accept the very contradiction we dismiss. For
Touchstone's explanation of where he learned that mere "oath"
depends on an oath: namely, the conventions of logical discourse.
No argument can proceed unless all parties accept its premises;
these premises, then, are "oaths," sworn statements about the
nature of reality. Touchstone, then, uses oaths to prove logically
the illusory nature of oaths. Furthermore, since honor depends on
one's keeping oaths, it follows that honor, too, is illusory.
If this description of Touchstone's methods is a bit dizzying, it is
because Touchstone's method is to dizzy us into accepting his
fallacies as valid?or to make us wonder if his truths are fallacious.
Or both. To proceed: although we deny that he is a courtier, we
allow him to engage us in the gentlemanly art of the duel:

Ros. Ay, marry, now unmuzzle your wisdom.

Touch. Stand you both forth now ... (1. ii. 68-9)

We have mocked him as dull, yet gleefully accept the premise that
he is intelligent enough to formulate an argument. Who is the
fool? He who proposes the fallacy that "If you swear by that that is
not, you are not forsworn" (1. ii. 73-4), or we who not only accept
this premise, but believe that such a cheaply made tool as the
syllogism enables us to arrive at truth?
An oath is always a syllogism; one always swears by something.
For example, when I swear to rescue the princess, I implicitly or
explicitly swear by mine honor. I also assume that this conditional
is true; therefore, it necessarily follows that I will rescue the prin
cess. But all that I've done, really, is to will my intention to save her
into a necessity. I intend to kill the dragon?but will I? If I fail, my
fellow knights won't question the folly of assuming that wishes
can be transformed into necessities. They'll simply assume that my

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 To the Point of Folly
conditional was false, that I had no honor, and thus preserve the
convention so that Sir Next-Knight can sally forth.
Touchstone, however, explodes the conventions of oath-taking
and argument by using nothing but fallacies to prove, or appar
ently prove, his case. For one thing, his premise ignores the point
of oath-taking entirely. One wants to make his intentions come
true, not figure out a way to preserve one's honor while evading the
responsibilities of honor. And as for logic, consider how Touch
stone leads up to his premise:

Touch. Stroke your chins, and swear by your beards that I am a

knave.
Cel. By our beards, if we had them, thou art.
Touch. By my knavery, if I had it, then I were ... ( 1. ii. 69-72)

He knows full well, with a cunning beyond the merely human,

that Rosalind and Celia will accept his consequent as true?indeed
he is a knave; but he has manipulated them into accepting a false
conditional?obviously they have no beards. They have accepted
Touchstone's premise and sworn "by that that is not." Of course,
this also means that they are not forsworn, which leaves open the
possibility that Touchstone is a knave. But he turns this possibility
against them by reducing it to a tautology: "If I had knavery, then I
would be a knave." But since they are arguing according to Touch
stone's premise, he does not have knavery. Therefore, his dishon
orably swearing by that that is not, his knavery, proves that he is
honorable. Celia's assertion that he is a knave is false, since she
swore by her imaginary beard. Furthermore, his hypothetical
knight, who swore by honor which he didn't have, didn't dishonor
himself by praising the pancakes and damning the mustard. So
Touchstone has logically proven an obvious falsehood, knavishly
asserted his honor, shown his knight to be both honorable and
knavish?and, according to his premise, nobody, including his
opponents, is forsworn.
Further still, another paradox presents itself. If Touchstone has
exposed the folly of oaths, he has done so by hoodwinking us into
accepting his judgment that the knight mis-tasted the pancakes
and mustard?and the taste of knights and fools is subjective
indeed. Touchstone swears that the knight was wrong?but does
he sWear here, too, by that that is not? Rosalind and Celia, and we,
have no way to verify this oath; yet we all trust a Fool's proof that

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 The Massachusetts Review

there is no basis for proof, a Fool's promise which undermines the

very nature of promises. We have shown how Touchstone reveals
that an oath is a syllogism, and a syllogism a kind of oath; so logic,
Touchstone reveals here, is a mode of rhetoric. Honor and argu
ment are both mere bubbles of language, a film of immeasurable
thinness "containing" nothing more substantial than the air out of
which words are made. Yet something, in a sense, "inhabits" those
bubbles. Touchstone does reveal the punctum indifferens which
causes us to blow them: the desire to harmonize one's perceptions,
one's taste of pancakes and mustard, with those of one's fellows.
Rhetoric is a mode of logic. Each of us makes implicit and explicit
promises in order to maintain his place in the social order, and in
doing so concedes that his senses might not tell the truth. For if we
insist that we're right, we risk losing our portion of pancakes and
mustard. We constantly and tacitly swear by that that is not in
order to preserve the Leviathan which insures that Nature's var
ious hungers will be satisfied. Our "great heap of knowledge," like
Touchstone's, is an inverted pyramid, stacked on the point of our
desire to eat.28
It may be objected that I have extracted this wisdom from
Touchstone's own great heap, and contradict my own thesis about
"wise fools." Yes, I have?to write about it all, one has to. Our
experience of his argument in l.ii is probably like this: knowing
that Touchstone wants to show that he is a courtier, we await a
clever proof from this "dull" fool, confident that he will make fools
of Rosalind and Celia. But Touchstone shifts his ground so
quickly that perhaps even an Elizabethan audience grounded in
the conventions of logic and rhetoric would have trouble follow
ing it on first hearing. In Willeford's terms, it "impinges on
meaning at least enough to be felt as a violation of meaning."29 It
also impinges on nonsense just enough to feel like a violation of
meaninglessness. We feel as if that fool within us understands
Touchstone (as he should, since, according to Willeford's notion
of projection, that fool within confronts us in the figure of Touch
stone). We "ourselves," however, can't quite grasp the point; the
sense remains a potential sense. The point grasps us, and we are
caught up into folly.
We remain thus caught up throughout the argument, until
suddenly an easily graspable meaning shoots forth. This occurs
when Touchstone reveals that his hypothetical knight is appar
ently an actual person who, the fool plainly declares, had no honor
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 To the Point of Folly

to begin with. One could argue that the point of Touchstone's

argument is not to diffuse conventional modes of thought, but to
shoot this wise satirical bolt shot from under the stalking horse of
folly. But compare his satire to other characters' invective against
social corruption?say, Orlando's praise of Adam for preserving
"the constant service of the antique world" (2. iv. 57), Duke
Senior's praise of life in Arden (2. i. 1-17), or Jaques' wish to
"cleanse the foul body of th'infected world" (2. vii. 60). The folly
full context out of which Touchstone's bolt flies makes that bolt
seem too improvisatory, fortuitous, even uncanny to be so pur
posefully controlled as the satire of the non-fools. Furthermore, the
non-fools would replace one iron network of laws with another,
while Touchstone's very mode of speaking mangles the forms in
which such beams and girders are cast. His aim isn't to reform the
world, but to claim a place in it?the whole place, in fact. He wants
to occupy our attention, not merely as courtier, but as king. And so
he does, ruling the center of the stage and our consciousness. Yet
his leap to the center d?places the very world and mind he would
rule, substituting his no-place of folly. When he does momentarily
enter the world of sense and satire, we suddenly realize what
Touchstone is up to, and we drive him back to the boundary of
consciousness, silencing him, like Celia, with the threat of whip
ping him with the instruments of Leviathan.
More important than this insult is the way that Touchstone's
argument mirrors, funhouse-fashion, the scene preceding it, in
which Celia cheers up Rosalind with arguments and oaths. Their
mind-play is not about knights' breakfast, however, but about
love.

Cel. Herein I see thou lov'st me not with the full weight that I love
thee. // my uncle, thy banished father, had banished thy uncle, the
Duke my father, so thou hadst been still with me, I could have taught
my love to take thy father for mine. So wouldst thou, if the truth of
thy love to me were so righteously tempered as mine is to thee.
(1. ii. 7-13)
... for what my father hath taken away from thy father perforce, I
will render thee again in affection. By mine honor, I will, and when I
break that oath, let me turn monster. Therefore, my sweet Rose, my
dear Rose, be merry. (1. ii. 18-22)
(my emphasis)

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 The Massachusetts Review

Like Touchstone, Celia swears by that that is not, the hypothetical

case that she would love Rosalind were she in her position. She
concludes with an oath sworn on her honor, from which it "neces
sarily" follows that Rosalind agree with her?not on the grounds
of logic, but of her desire for Rosalind's happiness. Like Touch
stone's, Celia's argument is pseudo-logical, exploiting the syllo
gism's persuasive force. Unlike Touchstone, she finally urges her
opponent to agree on the grounds of charity (the fool's pseudo
logic ends with a self-interested insult).
Rosalind, and we, easily accept Celia's oath?but enter Touch
stone soon after, and such oaths and honor are exposed as illusions.
In fact, Touchstone's exposure throws back at us what we dismiss
out of charity when judging Rosalind and Celia: the fallacious
nature of this reasoning, and its generation by a desire to reach a
consensus. We allow Celia and Rosalind their logical errors, if we
notice them at all, since they commit them in the name of love.
Touchstone enters and reveals that reasoning itself is a fallacy
committed in the name of love (even if, like Touchstone, we
commit such love out of self-interest in our self-preservation). It's
wonderful to watch the two young women resolve such a difficult
situation so easily, and with such a fragile thing as adolescent love.
Perhaps it's more wonderful to watch Touchstone ironically
expose the fragility not only of their resolution, but of all such
resolutions. In so doing, he shows us that such a mere bubble is
also the punctum indifferens at the heart of all human relation
ships, the self-interested charity which transforms briars into burrs
of "holiday foolery" (1. iii. 14).
Thus Touchstone intrudes upon the main action of the play
and, by diffusing both that action and our ability to judge it,
enables us to clarify our judgments. He does so again in Act 3,
Scene iii, when he tries to attach himself to the action in Arden by
courting and marrying Audrey. Once again he diffuses the action
of the previous scene, in which Ganymede, Rosalind and Orlando
agree to "cure" Orlando's love-sickness through a mock-courtship.
And once again Touchstone's diffusion reveals the desire which
underlies and generates our conventional forms of expression:

As the ox hath his bow, sir, the horse his curb, and the falcon his
bells, so man hath his desires; and as pigeons bill, so wedlock would
be nibbling. (3. iii. 76-9)

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 To the Point of Folly

Touchstone unexpectedly transposes desire and marriage in this

double analogy, and in doing so sounds the keynote of As You
Like It. Desires are "natural," "animal" forces, yet they also "curb"
one in that they force one to act out certain forms. That is, desire
"in itself" may have no shape, but we only know it as specifically
formed urges. In this sense one's desires "curb" one's polymor
phous energies, even if one seems to uncurb or unleash them when
one expresses them or fulfills them. Marriage is the highest, most
elaborate form of sexual desire (certainly in Shakespearean
comedy). Yet marriage, even if it is a bubble of artifice, is blown out
of desire. So, if desire domesticates us, wedlock drives us out to (and
provides) pasture to nibble and nourish. If Touchstone's transpo
sition confuses the natural and the artifical, he forces us to see that
desire and marriage are fused. His lines may be as inarticulate as
pigeons' billing, but like the birds' song, they signify a joyful
resignation to the "curb" of love (Touchstone's patent insincerity
appropriately enough, only serves to heighten the joy in his
delivery).
Just before Touchstone's courtship scene, Rosalind and Orlan
do have managed just such a fusion of desire and form, though not
in animal imagery. Orlando accepts Ganymede's offer to "cure"
him of his love when he realizes that the proposed mock-courtship
will preserve his "madness," rather than restore him to the sanity of
lack-love. As Ganymede, Rosalind will cure her love for Orlando
by mocking him without penalty. Just as Rosalind and Celia agree
out of love to transform their sadness into self-consciously devised
"sports" (1. ii. 23)?including falling in love?so Orlando and
Rosalind self-consciously transform their desire into the sport of
courtship. Their wooing will be a game, an illusion.
Orlando, of course, is unaware just how far the sport goes. While
he thinks that he is fooling a shepherd boy into thinking that the
youngster is saving him from love, he doesn't realize that he's
pretending that Rosalind is Rosalind. What Orlando thinks is
illusion is true. He doesn't realize that when he swears to be rid of
his love "by the faith of my love" (3. ii. 418), he wins in sport what
he wants in life (here, for once, someone in the play swears by that
that is?the consequent, not the conditional, is obviously false).
Enter Touchstone and Audrey, who virtually rewrite Rosalind's
and Orlando's scene the way that Touchstone "re-reads" Orlan
do's love poem as a filthy ditty (3. ii. 100-14), and Rosalind
"re-reads" Phebe's love poem as "meaning me a beast" (4. iii. 50).
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 The Massachusetts Review

Every revision by the fool-couple strips the disguises beneath the

disguises of Rosalind and Orlando to reveal that punctum indif
ferens of desire. With their witty debate on time, and their time
consuming arrangements of their "sport," Rosalind and Orlando
prolong their courtship and so preserve and heighten their desire.
They would foreplay forever. Touchstone travels to a counterpace:
he tries to conflate the whole ritual into one brief scene, from
wooing, winning, and wedding right through to the cheating (he
even engages the priest before he engages the bride). It's as if he
takes the idea of carpe diem literally, counting it "but time lost to
hear such a foolish song" (5. iv. 39) as the one the pages sing?or
the one that Rosalind and Orlando act out. His hurry exposes the
folly of the lovers' elaboration and delay; if love is here one day and
all's gone the next, then don't waste time singing about time, don't
hold off fulfilling desire by describing it. Touchstone's rush
through each step of the way catches up marriage into a Bergson
ian flow of duration, ripening and rotting in one instant. If the
fool-couple's speed seems grotesque, in Bakhtin's sense of fused
forms, then so by comparison do the elegant measures of Rosalind
and Orlando.
Even fools, though, can't roll their strength and sweetness into
one ball. Their desires inevitably manifest themselves in the forms
of courtship, but in such degraded form that they are diffused. As if in
imitation of Rosalind, Touchstone tries to follow the shepherd's
fashion and put on a "simple feature" (3. iii. 3). But he can only be
a Fool. When he tries to be something else, he comes close to being
nothing at all, as Audrey unwittingly reveals: "Your features, Lord
warrant us! What features?" (Orlando, too, has none of the
"marks" of the lover (3. ii. 362).
This inauspicious opening sets the pattern of this pattern
breaking rite. As Willeford observes, a Fool is often either "not
enough there" or "too much there,"30 and just so Touchstone's
wooing see-saws from botch to botch. He tries using the lover's
rhetoric of the pastoral idyll to address an impenetrable (in all
senses) mistress. He doesn't compliment this mistress with this
rhetoric, but insults her. Worst of all, his elegance doesn't conceal,
but reveals, that his aim isn't marriage but seduction.
His statements about love and marriage similarly see-saw. He
treats honesty and beauty, sluttishness and foulness, as two pairs of
inseparably fused qualities, never admitting the possibility that a
woman could be foul and honest or beautiful and sluttish. In the

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 To the Point of Folly

same way he couples courtship with fidelity, and marriage with

"horns," excluding the middle of a constant marriage. Just as his
motley breaks apart the colors of his clothes, so Touchstone breaks
up love into a crazy quilt of its qualities.
The crucial dip of the see-saw comes with Touchstone's play on
a famous and fundamental idea:

Touch. I would the gods had made thee political.

Aud. I do not know what poetical is. Is is honest in word and deed?
Is it a true thing?
Touch. No, truly; for the truest poetry is the most feigning, and
lovers are given to poetry, and what they swear in poetry may be said
as lovers they do feign. (3. iii. 15-21)
To see how Touchstone diffuses this idea, we should place it in
historical context. Robert Jordan explains that the Renaissance
humanists believed that poetry is "literally untrue," since the poet
had to speak in

... such terms as only the initiated could understand... the obscurity
of the surface and the need to penetrate it enhanced the value of the
hidden truths and preserved them from vulgarization.31

To paraphrase Dante, the more beautiful the lie, the more beauti
ful the truth. This poetics goes back at least to St. Augustine's
explanation of the Bible's obscurities. As Robert Kellogg and
Oliver Steele point out, it informed the sonneteers' insistence that
they worshipped the ideal woman in their praise of their beloveds'
less spiritual qualities.32 The more elaborate the confession of love,
the more intense was the love confessed; the more one "feigned" in
verse, the more one "fained" in life. Orlando understands this
principle when he eloquently insists that "neither rhyme nor
reason" (3. ii. 389) can express his love. His rhyme adequately
expresses his love by denying its own adequacy. Now, Orlando
could be lying. After all, the eloquent surface of language conceals
one's passion even as it expresses it. We must infer the nature of the
depths from the nature of the surface. Poetry, then, is an inten
tional illusion through which we must penetrate, if we can, to the
truth.
In one sense, Touchstone's poetry is relatively easy to crack,
since the Fool himself breaks up its illusory surface to reveal the

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 The Massachusetts Review

desire beneath, or within. The truth that his "feigning" hides,

however, is not the sonneteer's "faining" for the ideal, but physical
lust. His whole courtship is a lie pure and simple, as he himself
emphasizes by prefixing "truly" to line after line. Yet he also
speaks truly; none of us doubt that he wishes Audrey were merely
feigning her "honesty." Audrey herself is both unpoetical and
poetical. When Touchstone feigns that she is beautiful ("No, truly,
unless thou wert hardfavored"), she insists that she is hard-favored.
Yet she is poetical, if unwittingly so, in that she accepts the illusion
of Touchstone's "faining"; she can't penetrate that illusion and see
what he is truly after. Finally, though, Touchstone drops all his
feigning and fains plainly: "Well, praised be the gods for thy
foulness! Sluttishness may come hereafter" (3. iii. 38-9).
The fools, then, expose the "feigning" of Rosalind and Orlan
do's feigned courtship. They degrade the lovers' self-conscious
construction of an illusion which enhances the hidden truth of
their "faining," transforming eloquence into a sham poetry which
exposes a sham "faining," lust. Yet Touchstone shows us how
desire generates the rhetoric of courtship, the illusory surface
within which desire is fulfilled. Even if the surface is illusion, if
language is a tissue of lies, desire fulfills itself, and so makes the lies
true. Like Ovid, Touchstone is capricious yet honest?not chaste,
but candid about his capriciousness (well, inadvertently candid).
He frees us to see professions of love as lies, and the lust beneath as
noble, and to dismiss this inversion with a fit of laughter.
It is ironically appropriate that Jaques disrupts and dissolves the
fool-couple's wedding ceremony. Jaques assumes that Touchstone
wants to get married, and mocks the fool's ignobility in getting
married "under a bush like a beggar" (3. iii. 81). The cynic merely
dislikes the categories of existence; he can't destroy them. Jaques
wants Touchstone to "re-form" and be decently married. In his
mockery, as Touchstone's aside makes clear, Jaques misses the
fool's de-forming point entirely. Desire is beyond the categories of
beggar and noble, bush and church, and Jaques can't glimpse
beyond them, and beyond ideals and cynicism, to that desire
informing them all. This rational man is the most foolish guest at
the fool's wedding.
In both Act 1, Scene ii and Act 3, Scene iii, we have seen
Touchstone diffuse the resolutions of the preceding scenes into
parodie, joyful nonsense by breaking up the social, logical, and
linguistic conventions through which such resolutions are
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 To the Point of Folly
achieved. We have also seen how Touchstone's diffusions also offer
us?or that Fool within each of us?a revelation of the impulse of
desire underlying those conventions, which drives us to both gen
erate and violate such forms. In each scene preceding Touch
stone's, a pair of non-foolish characters charitably agree on the
nature of their situation and apparently deny its reality. By assent
ing to such illusions, however, Rosalind and Celia and Rosalind
and Orlando shape reality "as they like it." Such is the "liberty" (1.
iii. 136) of the Forest of Arden: it is the place where "desire, set deep
within the eye," in the words of Wallace Stevens, can perceive by its
own lights.33 If the "eye of reason" is not deluded in Arden, as
Jenkins says, it is because its function is taken over by that deeper
sight; wit in Arden is cut off and freed to play.
If we take the Dukedom as the "center" and Arden as the
"boundary," we can say that this latter realm of folly claims the
center of our attention just as the Fool does. Ironically, and hap
pily, enough, this occurs because the usurping Duke Frederick
interprets reality as he likes it, banishing Rosalind as a traitor, and,
significantly, pronouncing his daughter Celia "a fool" (1. iii. 84).
We may call the Duke an overly tyrannical ego, whose only way of
maintaining an illegitimate rule over the self is to banish vital, if
not so rational, elements of that self, such as charitable daughters,
their friends, and their Fools. The Duke's willful attempt to shape
reality fails, of course, as Celia reshapes reality as she likes it: "Now
go in we content / To liberty, and not to banishment" (1. iii.
135-6). And so folly displaces rationality, tagging one Fool along
and leaving a greater fool behind.
It's not fair to say that reason is utterly banished from Arden. As
we know from watching Touchstone in action the poor faculty is
exploited by desire in the service of folly. But if reason is exposed as
a rhetorical mode, it is also celebrated as such. Appropriately
enough, Touchstone delivers the eulogy, in his praise of "the only
peacemaker" (5. iv. 102), the virtuous "If." We have noted how
non-fools use obviously fallacious syllogisms, with veridically
false "Ifs," to persuade each other of virtual, loving truths. This is
precisely the plot of Touchstone's parable of the seven stages of a
lie.
That is, almost precisely. Touchstone characteristically inverts
and parodies this process of consensus-making. His "If" begins not
as a peacemaker, but as a troublemaker. Like Duke Frederick with
Rosalind and Celia, Touchstone insists on imposing, not propos
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 The Massachusetts Review

ing, his interpretation of reality upon another: "I did dislike the cut
of a certain courtier's beard" (5. iv. 69-70). This courtier proceeds
from this completely subjective premise, and he and Touchstone
build their seven-link chain of enthymemes:

He sent me word, if I said his beard was not cut well, he was in
mind it was: this is called the Retort Courteous. If I sent him word
again it was not well cut... (5. iv. 71-4)
The question of the truth value of their judgments never figures in
the quarrel. (We'll never know if the courtier's beard was well cut
or not.) The splendid conclusion of this debate is that the two avoid
the Lie Direct, and the inevitable duel, by agreeing to drop this
unstated question of truth and falsity entirely. Touchstone and the
courtier agree, it seems, out of cowardice, not daring to do more
than measure swords. When Touchstone goes "by the book" (5. iv.
90), for the pedant Jaques' benefit, he makes it clear that the
question dissolves in the agreement that "If you said so," then it
follows that "I said so" purely out of a desire to make peace, swear
brothers, and preserve the social order. By veridical standards, such
a proposition is a Lie Direct?but veridical standards don't apply,
for that "If" suspends them and substitutes virtual ones. Neither
party cares if he actually said "so," he simply wants to agree.
Compared to Jaques' lugubrious lock-stepping of man through
his Seven Ages of discomfort, pain, and decay, Touchstone's life of
the Lie is by far the more preferable description of how we all are
"merely players" (2. vii. 140). According to Touchstone, merely
playing with fictions is the one thing necessary to human freedom,
harmony, and joy. His Fool's argument persuades us of the truth of
Stevens' "Nudity at the Capital" (quoted here in full):

But nakedness, woolen massa, concerns an innermost atom;

If that remains concealed, what does the bottom matter.

Stevens' wry epigram on the impossibility?and irrelevance?of

revealing that innermost atom of truth is the truth celebrated by As
You Like It. The entire play is finally one vast Fool-show, a mere
bubble of a marriage song, which feeds us with questioning until
we ask "If truth hold true contents" (5. iv. 130). By the time we
reach this point in the play, we have learned not to doubt accord

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 To the Point of Folly

ing to reason but to dismiss reason and transform doubt into the
wonder of faith (5. iv. 138-9).
Over and over again through the play this question of truth's
contents, both its substance and its satisfactions, is rendered irrele
vant. The dance and spectacle of the closing triple marriage is the
final diffusion. It is appropriate that Hymen so abruptly appear to
insist that she "make conclusion to these most strange events" (5.
iv. 126-27). The goddess who presides over the shaping of our desire
for love is herself compelled by her desire to perform her office (and
she herself is a "shape" of desire, a fiction). And she who bars
confusion does so not by clearing up the illusions of Rosalind's
appearance, but by unwittingly preserving them (once again the
arbitrary interpreter of reality is made to look willful and foolish).
Rosalind's punning "cure" of Orlando's madness preserves it
beyond the courtship into the marriage itself, as he lives on never
knowing that his "if"-Rosalind was his "true" Rosalind.
Thus the play, as if it were a Fool, concludes balanced on the
point of possibility, the point at which desire takes the form of
marriage. One might conclude that the play does return from folly
to normality. After all, Hymen does bar the confusion, the merry
company is about to return to the Dukedom, and we at least are
undeceived by Rosalind's cure. We should, however, recall Nor
throp Frye's observation that comedies end happily because they
conclude the action at the point where the potential for a good
marriage and just society, not the accomplished fact, is affirmed.34
The moment of the wedding is also the point of folly: we guests are
freed from having to consider the couple's future in the light of
reason.
As for our freedom from confusion over Rosalind, Shakesp
slyly shows us how deluded our clarity is. We spectators are
Orlando, who lives "by thinking" (5. ii. 20), that is, by imag
that Ganymede is Rosalind. He never realizes that this
conscious fiction-making is also plain life. And so has our "t
ing" been unwitting living: just as Rosalind dispels Orland
illusions only to replace it with another, so Shakespeare diff
his dramatic illusion into life, and suggests that life is yet anot
dramatic illusion. For the moment the play closes it opens ag
"Rosalind" steps on stage to deliver an Epilogue, in which "
reveals that this woman who played a sheperd boy is herself pl
by a boy?and who is "he" played by? We have sat outside the pl

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 The Massachusetts Review

rational spectators enjoying our self-conscious, self-controlled

"thinking" of this pack of fools, and now we discover that we, too,
have been caught up into the Fool-show of As You Like It. The
play moves from Dukedom to "Ducdame"; when we leave the
theater, do we return to our own Dukedom, or to a "Ducdame"?
Does it matter? By leading us to this point, the play has performed
the Fool's essential function: to "break down the distinction both
between wisdom and folly, and between life and art."35

NOTES
1. Shakespeare's Comedies: Explorations in Form (Princeton: Princeton U.
Press, 1972), p. 14 and 21, and 175-195.
2. Shakespeare's Pastoral Comedy (Chapel Hill, N.C.: U. of North Carolina
Press, 1972), pp. 98ff.
3. James Joyce, Ulysses (New York: Random House, 1961), p. 312.
4. The Fool: His Social and Literary History (Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith,
1966), p. 324. "Kaleidoscopic" is her term for the structure of As You Like It. I try
to elaborate her brilliant one-word description.
5. As You Like It, in Shakespeare: Modern Essays in Criticism, ed. Leonard F.
Dean (New York: Oxford U. Press, 1957), p. 132.1 am much indebted to Jenkins'
discussion of the play's joyful subjectivity. Berry, p. 187ff., also names Touch
stone "the standard" by which to judge the play, but defines that standard
differently than I do.
6. Jenkins, p. 132.
7. Welsford, p. 324.
8. Welsford, p. 323.
9. The Fool and His Scepter: A Study in Clowns and Jesters and Their
Audience (Evanston, 111.: Northwestern U. Press, 1969), p. 50.
10. J. Hillis Miller's "The Critic as Host," in De construction and Criticism, ed.
Harold Bloom (New York: Seabury Press, 1979), came to my attention too late to
inform my essay, but it is clear that Touchstone's power to de-center the play, and
to suspend critical discussion between opposed terms such as "fusion" and
"diffusion," makes the fool a precursor of deconstructive critics such as Miller.
Inspired by Jacques Derrida's argument that language is a chain of tropes rather
than a univocal set of meanings "carried by a single referential grammar" (Miller,
p. 222), Miller urges us to acknowledge the "uncanny antithetical relation" (221)
between conceptual oppositions, word pairs, and meanings within single words.
By seeking out such relations in literary works, we should come to recognize the
"undecidability" of the meaning of the work's meaning: "... the critic can never
show decisively whether or not it is capable of being definitively interpreted"
(248). To use Miller's own metaphor, Touchstone inhabits the "host" text like a
parasite and, like the deconstructive critic, leads us to the point where we question
which is host and which parasite until the opposition breaks down in
"undecidability"?or folly.
11. "Paradox," in Scientific American 4 (April 1962), pp. 84-96.
12. Welsford, p. 322.
13. Welsford, p. 322.
14. Welsford, p. 323.
15. Willeford, p. 173.
16. Willeford, p. 23.

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 To the Point of Folly

17. Willeford, p. 31.

18. Willeford, p. 31.
19. Willeford, p. 29.
20. Willeford, p. 51.
21. Christ and Apollo: The Dimensions of the Literary Imagination (New
York: Sheed and Ward, 1960), p. 15.
22. Lynch, p. 19.
23. Lynch, p. 106.
24. Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene Iswolsky (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT
Press, 1968), pp. 24-33.
25. Welsford, p. 325.
26. "Vital balance" and "the pure sense of life" are Susanne K. Langer's terms,
in Feeling and Form (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1953), pp. 330 and 327;
"the joy of life invincible" is Joseph Campbell's, in Hero with a Thousand Faces
(New York and Cleveland: World Publishing, 1956), p. 28; "the living" is Henri
Bergson's, in "Laughter," in Comedy ed. Wylie Sypher (Garden City, N.Y.:
Anchor Editions, 1963 passim', "the ugly and strong... actual" is Lynch's, p. 106.
27. Welsford, p. 325.
28. I am indebted here to Donald Howard's citation of Hannah Arendt's
discussion of Nietzsche's thesis that promises are the foundation of the social order
in Howard's introduction to his edition of Twentieth Century Interpretations of
Gawain and the Green Knight (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1967).
29. Willeford, p. 51.
30. Willeford, p. 26.
31. Chaucer and the Shape of Creation: The Aesthetic Possibilities of Inor
ganic Structure (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard U. Press, 1967), p. 7.
32. D. W. Robertson discusses St. Augustine's theory of figurative expression
and its influence through to the Renaissance in A Preface to Chaucer: Studies in
Medieval Perspectives (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton U. Press, 1962), pp. 52-64.
Kellogg and Steele's discussion of the sonneteers' aesthetic of elaboration and
idealization is contained in their introduction to the Amoretti in their edition of
The Faery Queene: Books I and II (Indianapolis and New York: Bobbs-Merrill,
1965), pp. 450-454.
33. "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven," in The Palm at the End of the
Mind: Selected Poems and a Play, ed. Holly Stevens (New York: Random House,
1972), p. 332.
34. Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton U. Press,
1957), pp. 169-70.
35. Welsford, p. 27.

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