Abstract
The first comprehensive history of the court fool, by Karl Friedrich Flögel, was published in 1789 and has served as a model for the genre ever since. Indeed, it is still in print today in a variety of editions, the latest published in 2018; it is also available online. The work is heavily anecdotal, packed with jolly tales of unusual people in a history of the grotesque and the comic since earliest times, as its sub-title declares. Dorinda Outram’s fascinating short book has a narrower focus but a wider ambition. Her study of four court jesters or fools in eighteenth-century German courts explores questions about Enlightenment, the nature of German courts and the culture of cruelty that seems to have characterized them, and the reasons why court fools disappeared around the time that Flögel was writing.
The four fools whose lives Outram examines are as remarkable as any. The first is Johann Paul Gundling who served at the austere and unintellectual Berlin court of Frederick William I. The second is Gundling’s successor at Berlin, Salomon Jacob Morgenstern. Joseph Fröhlich, Outram’s third subject, was engaged at the courts of Augustus II and Augustus III of Saxony-Poland. Finally, Peter Prosch, the last court fool, was an itinerant fool at various middle and south German courts in the second half of the eighteenth century.
All played the classic role of the fool: entertainer, cheeky critic of authority, licensed to contradict the ruler and make fun of court society. They were dependent on the goodwill of the ruler and the various lords and ladies at court yet exempt from many of the conventions of courtly conduct. While they could be cruel in their mockery, they were themselves often the victims of cruelty meted out by their masters. Outram’s account of these four lives is excellent: instructive and entertaining in each case.
Outram is interested, more generally, in the role of the fools at court, their place in the Enlightenment, and in the reasons why they disappeared in the late eighteenth century. Her approach to these questions reflects a distinctive view of the Enlightenment. She disagrees strongly with Anthony Pagden, who believes that the Enlightenment is the ‘basis of modern liberalism’ (p. 119). This runs contrary, she suggests, to the views of Kant and others who saw that Enlightenment had a paradoxical nature that embraced the irrational as well as the rational. Pagden’s view, Outram argues, also makes it impossible for us to understand court fools or indeed a past which does not simply comprise elements of what we are familiar with in our own lives.
The implications of this line of argument become clear in Outram’s thoughts of the ‘death’ of the fool, in which she sees a parallel with the ‘death’ of the Hanswurst character on the stage in the German-speaking lands. The Hanswurst was a crude, disruptive, vulgar character, given to excessive eating and drinking, and uncontrollable loud laughter. He was popular with audiences throughout the eighteenth century (just as his predecessors Jan Bouschet and Pickelhering had been in the seventeenth century), not least because one of his functions was to communicate with them, lampooning the other characters on the stage and underlining the absurdity of the action.
Theatre reformers such as Gottsched thought the Hanswurst ought to be banished; but other commentators from Lessing to August Wilhelm Schlegel defended him. The disagreement explains why Hanswurst survived for so long, but not why he did eventually die. Here Outram discerns the impact of Enlightenment taxonomy, the desire to classify and order, characteristic of so much scientific endeavour in the late eighteenth century. Ordering and classification of humans in society fostered a tendency to want to eliminate misfits and disrupters. Hence the Hanswurst had to disappear, though he and other fools enjoyed revivals in the drama of the early decades of the nineteenth century. The fool, by contrast, became redundant from the 1790s, but not before he had played a key role in the development of the Enlightenment.
In court society, even in Enlightened court society, the fool played a role like that played by Hanswurst on the stage. He was licensed to challenge both the ruler and the aristocracy at court. Morgenstern was even encouraged to challenge the administrators and the academics who had taught them, notably in a public debate, presided over by the king, with Johann Jakob Moser of Frankfurt an der Oder. Outram suggests the fools played a key role in debating Enlightenment ideas: they must therefore be regarded as contributors to the debate at court. That did not of course prevent both ruler and court reinforcing their sense of self and status by despising the fool and treating him cruelly.
What ultimately killed off the fool, Outram concludes, was the changing function of the court itself. The German courts survived longer than others in Europe as centres of government. Towards the end of the eighteenth century, however, court and government began to diverge. This seemed to coincide with gradual shifts in perceptions of humour which turned against both the crudity of the Hanswurst and the impertinence of the fool. By the early nineteenth century, moreover, liberal-minded commentators looked back with disdain on the gross cruelty that still characterized the entertainments of many German courts in the eighteenth century.
Not all loose ends are tied up, but Outram leaves the reader with a plethora of questions and arresting insights into the many paradoxes of the ‘age of reason’. Her challenges to Pagden, but also to Foucault and Habermas, among others, encourage us to think again about many still influential assumptions about the European Enlightenment.