The Fool in As You Like It by William Shakespeare The Fool is one of the first character archetypes that every student of literature learns to analyze. Despite his seemingly light or even pointless chatter, the fool usually manages to say some pretty important things. Upon further study, the student may perceive that it is because of his tendency towards stupidity that the fool is given permission to express even offensive truths about other characters. What happens, though, when one fool meets another? Fools are not accustomed to suffer the ingenuity of others; this experience of being confronted with a sort of mirror is generally reserved for characters who must undergo some change to advance the plot. Touchstone and Jaques manage to break this rule and simply by coexisting they appear to compete. Both fulfill some of our expectations of the fool, but neither manages to fill the role completely. Which of the two comes closer is a question worthy of debate. In her book The Fool: His Social and Literary History, Enid Welsford devotes a chapter to "The Court-Fool in Elizabethan Drama" and briefly discusses As You Like It specifically. At one point she describes fools as ".. . partly inside and partly outside the action of the drama". (244). This idea is applicable to Touchstone and Jaques, but in a slightly different way than she intended. He was describing characters placed by circumstance in that liminal state, characters with no desire to move anywhere from their middle ground. Furthermore, it describes the differences between Touchstone and Jaques, both in appearance and attitude. Most importantly, Touchstone “…exposes affectation; but he is capable of... criticism, and his judgments are r...... middle of paper...... invading his territory. Jaques is some kind of madman in some kind of court, but Touchstone's presence brings a glimpse of the rest of the world - a real madman from a real court - which shatters Jaques before he has a chance to throw a single stone. at Touchstone. Jaques's attempts to find a place for himself, therefore, simply read as a strange, lost man grimacing into a glass. There is no way Jaques can overcome Touchstone's inherent liminality: where Touchstone slides seamlessly from one world to another, in and out of the action, Jaques simply jumps back and forth jerkily like someone walking on hot coals. It never lands anywhere long enough to really establish itself. It's for this reason that Touchstone fills every aspect of the madman's role more skillfully than Jaques, right up until the bitter end, when Jaques takes the traditional madman's ending and stands alone..