Is Feste an actual fool the the play Twelfth Night?
Feste is a jester in the Shakespeare comedy Twelfth Night or: What You Will. He is attached to the household of the Countess Olivia. Apparently he has been there for quite a while, as he was a “fool that the Lady Olivia’s father took much delight in” (2.4). Although Olivia’s father just died within the last year, it is possible that Feste approaches or has reached middle age, though he still has the wit to carry off good fooling as he needs to, and the voice to sing lustily or plangently as the occasion demands. Not only that, he seems to leave Olivia’s house and return at his pleasure, rather too freely for a servant. (At the very least he is doing some free-lance entertaining over at the house of Duke Orsino (2.4).) His peripatetic habits get him into trouble with Lady Olivia: when we first see him (1.5), he must talk his way out of being turned out — a grim fate in those days — for being absent, as it were, without leave. He succeeds, and once back in his lady’s good graces, he weav
