1 ‘This cold night will turn us all to fools and madmen’: Feste, Lear’s Fool and the border between ‘idiocy’ and mental illness Alice Equestri, University of Sussex [Archived version of Alice Equestri, ‘This cold night will turn us all into fools and madmen’: Shakespeare’s Witty Fools and the Border between Idiocy and Mental Illness’, Cahiers Élisabéthains, 99 (2019), pp. 23-32.] Abstract ‘Folly’ is often used as an umbrella term for renaissance representations both of ‘idiocy’ and madness, although early modern legislation and medicine described crucial differences between the two conditions. Shakespeare sometimes stages their liminality by having fools interact with lunatics, as in Twelfth Night and in King Lear. By drawing in particular from socio-legal and scientific ideas of the early modern period, the present article considers some of these interactions to discuss the ways in which fools as intellectually disabled individuals are separated from madmen as mentally ill, while also assessing how occasionally ‘idiocy’ borders into madness. Keywords William Shakespeare, fools, intellectual disability, idiocy, madness, border The word ‘folly’ is often used as an umbrella term to describe early modern manifestations of two related yet inherently different non-normative conditions of the human mind: natural folly and madness. The tendency of much criticism has thus been to blur the difference between fools and madmen, with Michel Foucault’s Madness and Civilisation (1964) being perhaps the most classical example of such an attitude to conflation. 1 Yet, when in Cymbeline Imogen remarks that ‘fools are not mad folks’ (2.3, Folio) 2 she seems to draw attention to an ontological separation between the two types of ‘folly’, a separation which, in fact, the English law had been advocating since the thirteenth century with the act called Prerogativa Regis, where idiocy indicated a permanent impairment from birth, while lunacy was a post- traumatic illness manifesting itself in fits. A ‘lunatic’ could have moments of lucidity or heal, while an ‘idiot’ 3 or ‘natural fool’ could never recover. Such a distinction was legally important, as authorities needed to evaluate which individuals needed temporary or permanent custody and whether their property should perpetually go to the King, as was the prescription with idiots. 4 Even medicine seemed to call for a differentiation, in that madness and idiocy were associated with different humours: lunacy was caused by excess choler or melancholy, 5 idiocy by excess phlegm. 6 The terms ‘idiocy’ and ‘lunacy’ reveal a seemingly proto-modern separation between ‘intellectual disability’ and ‘mental illness’, to use terms of modern psychology. 7 Both conditions are and were ‘disabling’, where ‘disability’ indicates ‘the social process’ that turns a physical defect ‘into a negative by creating barriers to access’. 8 Seeing early modern folly through the presentist lens of disability studies shows that ‘difference’ can be described