There are two sorts of fool: natural and artificial.
Natural fools are like Dogberry in Much Ado and Audrey in As You Like It. They are simple and their comedy is unwitting. Probably they are plump, disorderly, comic in appearance. They might look dim, chew grass, or generally appear mockable. We laugh at them, at their mistakes and misunderstandings, though they will often be honest and sympathetic characters.
Artificial fools are like Touchstone in As You Like It or Feste in Twelfth Night. They are clever and their comedy is complicated. They are employed to play the fool and wear the motley costume that signifies their position. They look comedic, but their motley signals a biting wit, not a dull one. They tell the truth but we might not always thank them for it.
Falstaff’s line—I am not only witty in myself but the cause that is wit in other men—catches something of this dichotomy. The natural fool is inherently amusing: it is their appearance, personality, education, and manner that makes us laugh. The artificial fool is amusing because of their act: it is their inventions, word play, and jokes that tickle our fancy.
Falstaff, of course, is both a fat natural fool, mocked so by Hal and the others, and an unbeatable artificial fool, who can turn every situation to a jest. In the same scene he is a physical clown and an intellectual one. In the festive play where he acts as Henry IV he brings the two types of fooling together perfectly. He is so vast a character that he encompasses both sorts of fool and much more besides.
Rosalind collapses the distinction, but in a different manner. She is honest, like Audrey, giving Phoebe the rather blunt romantic advice, “you are not for all markets.” But look at that advice again: it is also witty. She wears her own version of a fool’s motley, which allows her to speak to Orlando with the kind of indirect honesty a fool is permitted with his master, but she is also pastorally simple in her romantic advice: “Men have died from time to time but not for love.”
Like Falstaff, Rosalind is too complicated a character to be thought of as a type. She is neither an artificial or a natural fool, nor is she both, but she contains all of this and more. Whether she is in her holiday humour or not, Rosalind outwits ever other character with her depth of simplicity and intelligence.
Jacques believes that his satirical moralising would be the most effective form of foolery
Invest me in my motley; give me leave
To speak my mind, and I will through and through
Cleanse the foul body of the infected world,
If they will patiently receive my medicine.
But it is he who is cleansed at the end. He is the one left out of the resolution. Rosalind brings in Hymen, everyone marries the one they want, and Jacques sees that there is no place for his cynical fooling. He cannot reconcile himself to the ways of the world: he is too cynical for that.
To see no pastime I. What you would have
I'll stay to know at your abandon’d cave.
The fool must be able to deal with the world as it is. Jacques cannot do this, he is too satirical to accept the world, too moral to accept the moral inversion of festivity. He has leave to speak his mind, but unlike Rosalind he is utterly unpersuasive.
