Preface
Acknowledgements
A Note on References
Chapter One:
1.1. Introduction
1.2. A Philosophy of Folly?
1.3. Shakespearean Fools
Chapter Two: Humanism and Shakespearean Folly
2.1. Introduction
2.2. Stultitia’s Metamorphosis
2.3. Dialectics and Utopian Enlightenment
2.4. Playing the Fool in Utopia
2.5. Playing and Mocking
2.6. Essaying Folly
2.7. Identity Critique
Chapter Three: Opening the Silenus: The Fool’s Truth
3.1. Introduction
3.2. Theology and the Silenus
3.3. Silenic Style
3.4. The Casket Test
3.5. Self-Serving Mercy
3.6. Epilogue
Chapter Four: Jesting at the Court of History
4.1. Introduction
4.2. Degeneracy
4.3. Deformities
4.4. Echoes of Folly
4.5. Telling the Truth through Lies
4.6. Cretan Historians
4.7. The Use and Abuse of History
Chapter Five: Love’s Fools
5.1. Introduction
5.2. Inhuman Allegories
5.3. Temporality and Allegory
5.4. True, False, Other: The Logic of Folly
5.5. Love’s ‘Strange Capers’
5.6. The World Turned Upside-Down
5.7. Modalities of Melancholy
5.8. What a Fool Honesty is
5.9. Losing Eden
Chapter Six: Folly and Aesthetic Judgement
6.1. Pitiful ambition in the fool
6.2. Your sovereignty of reason
6.3. Here’s fine revolution
6.4. Your fat king and your lean beggar
6.5. Terrible Eloquence
6.6. Reason in Madness
6.7. The excellent foppery of man
6.8. A 0 without a Figure
6.9. This prophecy Merlin shall make
6.10. Let us deal justly
6.11. Thy life’s a miracle
Epilogue: Sapere aude?
Biography
Sam Gilchrist Hall is a Teacher of English at the British Council, Hungary, and a Visiting Instructor at the University of Debrecen.　
