...J. L. Styan William Willeford. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1969. xxii + 266 pp. $8.50. Copyright © 1970 by Duke University Press 1970 REVIEWS The Fool and His Scepter: A Study in Clowns and Jesters and Their Audience...

.... If the style of “Telem- achus” is “Narrative (youngas Joyce suggested to Stuart Gilbert,4 Buck is its tlan vital, its courtjester. He is a gifted clown. Indeed, with his “blithe broadly smiling face” and “eyes, from which he had suddenly withdrawn all shrewd sense, blinking with mad gaiety...

... still another sally at least, is disappointed with these lines which seemingly yield no wordplay. Some modern editors1 have therefore adopted the suggestion by Upton in 1746 which is cited as follows in the New Variorum Edition (p. 86) : “The Clown, agreeable to his character...

..., the heauing uppe of the eyes to heauen. . . . (Anatornie of Absurditie, I, 22) In the second prose scene, that between Wagner and the Clown (I, ivA), the evidence is even clearer. Wagner’s threat, “Well, I will cause two devils presently to fetch thee away-Baliol and Belcher!”6...

...Helen A. Kaufman Copyright © 1957 by Duke University Press 1957 TRAPPOLIN SUPPOSED A PRINCE AND MEASURE FOR MEASURE By HELENA. KAUFMAN It is a far cry from the Clown-Prince theme to Measure for Meas- ure-from Cokain’s farce Trappolin...

... is at hand to permit recon- struction of the processes whereby Oldcastle was metamorphosized- first into a highwayman and then into a clown. Oldcastle, executed in 1417 for open defiance of ecclesiastical dis- cipline and royal authority, was not openly characterized as a martyr until the time...

... of the audience, I.ii.27). At the end of the play the clowns raise tears of merriment (V.i.69). But in between there are tears, especially Helena’s, of genuine sorrow (II.ii.92-93, 1II.ii.158). More impor- tant, tears are seen as a quality of the moon, which governs the action of the play: the moon...

...; the two are Death and his Joker, dressed in black and in parti-color. Moreover, the clown speaks impertinently to the audience while surveying the house as if we were all in God’s formidable house of correction (1V.iii). So provocative an example of the depth and complexity of the fool’s role would...

.... Most interesting from the general scholarly point of view is the discovery Palmer has made in connection with the word “Pickelhering.” For he points out that NED gives the first citation of the word “pickelherring” in English with the meaning of “clown, fool” in a 1711 text, and he also...

... the play and Lear eventually dies, Beckett’s clowns never clear the stage, and Beckett replaces resolution with persistence. In doing so, he embraces Lear’s ethical commandment, a line he underscored in his copy of the play, even better than Lear itself: “I shall endure” (Van Hulle and Nixon 2013 : 27...

... with the word “Pickelhering.” For he points out that NED gives the first citation of the word “pickelherring” in English with the meaning of “clown, fool” in a 1711 text, and he also indicates that the word occurs in a fairly obscure context in Twelfth Night (I, v). If the word in Shakespeare...

.... Oberon, as Barber suggests, is like a garden god of the May games, while Puck, like the clowns of the folk pageants, enjoys folly subjectively even as he is amused by it objectively. The fairies are “embodiments of the May-game experience of eros.. and the wood near Athens spells...

..., largely through the “artist” Autolycus, who, as a manipu- lator of rustics, provides a commentary on her idea of art. The theme of language is reflected in the pastoral through two extremes: Perdita’s chaste regard for words, and the clown’s comic misuse of court lan- guage. In the “comedy...

... in black-a quaint, tight black dress, fashioned in years long past; with a pale, lean, livid face and a stare, from eyes without eyebrows, like that of some whitened old-world clown. In his hand he holds an object that strikes the spectator at first simply as some obscure, some...

... take a pride to gird at me.” When he mentions his “dagger of lath,” he seems to compare himself to the Vice, or Fool, of early comedy; and, like the Vice, he is a much more moving force in the plot than most of the stupidly funny clowns and country jakes of Elizabethan drama ;12...

... of Jannings’s roles make explic- it his affinity to the gestural and pantomimic practices that grew out of mystery cycles, street theater, and the carnival: a trapeze artist in Variitte‘ (E. Dupont, 1925) and the devil-trickster Mephisto in Faust (F. W. Murnau, 1926), not to mention the clown...

... the curds incident happen to any clown in the novel. What Auden neglected, as did Hartzenbusch with different results, is the fact that Cervantes sets the Don in situations that are always a mixture of curds and lions. It is right, generally, to think of the adventure of the windmills...

... MAKLOWE’S HERO AND LEANDER And few great lords in vertuous deeds shall joy, But be surpris’d with every garish toy; And still inrich the loftie servile clowne, Mlho with incroching guile keepes learning clowne...

... cer- tain scenes in the tragedies are designated as comic. Actually, from the discussion of the tragedies come the two best pieces of criticism in the book. In his discussion of the Clown in Cleopatra’s death scene and in his analysis of Menenius as a comic character, Professor...

... experiences as a lecturer, and discloses his difficulties as he writes book after book. It was Mrs. Fairbanks who urged him to be a humorist, not a clown, and who had the good sense to let him blow off steam when telegrams went astray, or when he felt, as he often did later, that associates...