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In his learned study King Lear and the Gods, William R. Elton writes that "The Renaissance secularization of folly increasingly transformed it from a context of sinfulness to one of imprudence." 2 If Elton had taken into account the sermons and moral handbooks of Tudor England, he would have been compelled to make some important exceptions. He should also have noted the older emphasis in the works of the most celebrated writers of the age, including Shakespeare, Sidney, Spenser, Donne, Herbert, and Milton.
The transition which Elton speaks of was extensive and significant, of course. It is best illustrated by comparing Sebastian Brant's Ship of Fools (1494) with Erasmus' Praise of Folly (1511, 1517). The former marks the end of the medieval representation of folly as sinful rejection of God's grace and truth ; the latter marks the beginning of the humanist representation of folly as cap-and-bells stupidity.
Nevertheless, there is a substantial remnant of Scriptural morality in the Moriae Encomium. The last part of Erasmus' text rests largely on the wisdom / folly antithesis which underlies much of the gospels and which is definitively enunciated in St. Paul's first letter to the Corinthians :
The language of the cross may be illogical to those not on the way to salvation, but those of us who are on the way see it as God's power to save. As scripture says, I shall destroy the wisdom of the wise and bring to nothing all the learning of the learned ... Do you not see how God has shown up the foolishness of human wisdom ? (1 Cor 1:18-21).
The theme recurs powerfully in King Lear, undoubtedly because Shakespeare was as susceptible as the other great humanists of the Renaissance to the influence of Erasmus' brilliant satire and because as a child of his generation he had been trained not only to explore an important text and evaluate it, but also to make it a part of his cultural inventory from which to draw the original topoi imaginatively refashioned but still recognizable. Intertextuality of this kind is easily detectable in The Praise of Folly, not only in Erasmus' numerous quotations from the Bible but also in his substantial appropriations from Plato's Phaedrus and Symposium. 3
The presence...