In this essay I am going to show how the character of Feste in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night (Or What You Will) performs the fool neurotype, and how this neurotype gives him the social position and power to bring audience attention to the gap between gender identity and gender performativity that many the characters in Feste’s world are defined by.
A neurotype is a form of neurodivergence, and Shakespeare’s Fool, as Melinda Marks & Bradley J. Irish write, in “Shakespeare, Neurological Identity, and Early Modern Neurodiversity Studies: A Neurological Approach to ‘Character’ can be identified as “a kind of early modern neurotype, insofar as foolishness and folly are associated with a stereotypical set of cognitive, emotional, and sensory practices” (Marks, Irish, 8). Feste makes his living as a Fool, and has a specific way of speaking, presenting, and bypassing social norms that allows him to fulfill the obligations of his role successfully.
For example, when we first meet Feste he demonstrates how differently he operates in society to Orsino.
FOOL Marry, sir, they praise me and make an ass of me.
Now my foes tell me plainly I am an ass; so that by
my foes, sir, I profit in the knowledge of myself, and
by my friends I am abused. So that, conclusions to
be as kisses, if your four negatives make your two
affirmatives, why then the worse for my friends and
the better for my foes. (Shakespeare, Twelfth Night, 1.1. 15-21)
We see how Feste learns from his “foes”, and does strive to please his friends. He is both praised and made an “ass” of. In Orsino’s world, Orsino must strive to please his friends, or lose his reputation, and would certainly not allow his foes to speak into his life in any way. Orsino stays in one position, and strives to keep that position, where Feste moves between friends and foes, and neither keeps him in one place, or one regard for himself. In this way, Feste is bypassing social expectations extremely and successfully enough to be set apart and excused as the professional Fool he is.
As the Fool, Feste’s “social status is never really in danger” (Marks, Irish, 16), so he is given the privilege to question the things no one else is allowed to question in society, such as class and gender binaries. In Brooklyn D. Robinson’s book “Playing the Fool: Feste and Twelfth Night”, they write that Feste’s freedom and power are intrinsically connected. Because he is “both romantically and situationally free, not bound by class, gender or sexuality.” (Robinson, 15), Feste’s character allows space for the characters to rethink their roles in society Twelfth Night. Or, to become aware of what Judith Butler discusses in her book Bodies That Matter, the “gap” between who we are, and how we try to perform our assigned roles; or, in Jonathan Culler’s analysis of Butler’s work in his book A Short Introduction to Literary Theory: “an assignment which we never quite carry out according to expectation, so that we never quite inhabit the gender norms or ideals we are compelled to approximate. In that gap, in the different ways of carrying out the gender’s ‘assignment’, lie possibilities for resistance and change.”(Culler, 105) Feste, embodying the Fool neurotype, allows him to also embody this “gap” as a character, that can walk into all these different environments: among the aristocracy, the servants quarters, and even be in the same room as lovers, to highlight the ways they all in their own way are also struggling with the “gap” as well.
We see Feste bluntly point out Orsino’s obligation to his class and gender, and how he is barely meeting those expectations, in Act 2, Scene 4:
Now the melancholy god protect thee and the
tailor make thy doublet of changeable taffeta, for thy
mind is a very opal. I would have men of such
constancy put to sea, that their business might be
everything and their intent everywhere, for that’s it
that always makes a good voyage of nothing.
Farewell. (Shakespeare, Twelfth Night, 2.4. 80-85)
The “tailor” here seems metaphoric of those binaries that dress people in the behaviors and privileges of their role in society. For Orsino it is of an aristocratic, heteronormative cisgender male. The “changeable taffeta” speaks to the wealth and excess of his lifestyle, but the inconsistency he wears this life style, and with the mind being “a very opal” shows how this inconsistency is weakness, fickleness, and beauty, traits associated with the stereotypical expectation of a female. Feste shows how Orsino’s inability to fulfill these requirements of his assigned gender and class are placing him in a “good voyage of nothing”, which is a void, which is a gap, the gap that Butler discusses between who we are, and what we are subjected to.
One reason Feste’s role is important in embodying the “gap”(Butler), is because the characters around Feste denying the dissonance between gender identity and gender performativity are doing so because that dissonance is deemed as madness in the play. Yet Feste, within the acknowledged role of Fool, can make the characters face madness in many different ways, while he remains unscathed. For example in Act 5, Scene 1, when Feste surprises Olivia with a letter from Malvolio, Olivia asks Feste if he is mad, and he can easily deny madness because of distance from the situation.
OLIVIA Open ’t and read it.
FOOL Look then to be well edified, when the Fool
delivers the madman. He reads. By the Lord,
madam—
OLIVIA How now, art thou mad?
FOOL No, madam, I do but read madness. An your
Ladyship will have it as it ought to be, you must
allow vox. (Shakespeare, Twelfth Night, 5.1. 303-310)
We see how Feste is also questioning ideas of who is mad, when he contrasts himself with Malvolio, who has been recategorized as the madman: “the fool delivers the madman”. But then he later goes on to say that anyone in Malvolio’s condition being shut away in darkness for no good reason, would read as mad. By being outside of a society that prescribes madness means he can “deliver” it in the form of a letter that creates a madness to the general situation, and makes the characters forced to look madness in the face, and question it. Only someone operating as the Fool neurotype could set up a situation where the characters are forced to face madness, and once they have faced it in Malvolio’s situation it immediately opens up the way for the characters to question every other kind of immovable category they navigate around in their daily lives, if not a madman—class, gender, and who they are allowed to love.
The space between how we perform our given roles and our deeper sense of identity is a trap for the characters of Twelfth Night that Feste brings our attention to. Our attention to it can feel like the fourth wall is being broken, because it is a direct address to how we are living our own lives. This gap is determined as a trap that defines the characters’ lives, personalities and motivations, and also greatly contributes to the play’s humour and dramatics. The binaries being accidentally broken down due to misleading identities within relationships is what the entire play is built on. If we did not have Feste to lead us through this maze, we may not ever see the importance and necessity of the Fool neurotype, above all other roles, in a society so rigidly bound by fear of divergence.
Through Feste’s position in society as the Fool neurotype, he is able to bring awareness to those around him of the madness within the binaries they have been assigned, and not just the madness of those roles but the failure of each character to fulfill those roles, a failure which they perceive as madness. For example, Orsino’s failure to be a steady and masculine leader, and the failing of Maria’s plot to make a madman out of Malvolio. But instead, we should welcome madness as a void of possibility, a gap where there is room for “resistance and change” (Butler). Feste is the moral voice, showing us how we are defined by our failings, and how these failings are really just evidence of the larger system of binaries that have always failed us.
Works Cited
Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex.” New York: Routledge, 1993
Culler, Jonathan. Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction. 2nd ed., Oxford University Press, 2011
Melinda Marks & Bradley J. Irish (27 Dec 2024): Shakespeare, Neurological
Identity, and Early Modern Neurodiversity Studies: A Neurological Approach to ‘Character’, Shakespeare, DOI: 10.1080/17450918.2024.2444937
Robinson, Brooklyn D., “Playing the Fool: Feste and Twelfth Night” (2016). Scripps Senior Theses. Paper 865.http://scholarship.claremont.edu/scripps_theses/865
Sprockets and Springes 