Morphing Moonlight: Gender, masks and carnival mayhem- The ...

oundaries: his costume revealed his ambiguous nature, as it too was
‘splintered like Harlequin’s motley, being divided into two solid patches of
color’ (Jones 1984: 10). For Bakhtin clowns were ‘on the borderline
between life and art, in a peculiar mid-zone as it were; they were neither
eccentrics nor dolts, neither were they comic actors’ (Bakhtin 1984: 8).
But this borderland has its darker side, where an excess of ambiguity and
violation of limits could easily fall into madness. Madness in the Commedia
was generally feigned and temporary, like the madness of Shakespeare’s
Hamlet, it had a more duplicitous character and was used to get out of scrapes
or alter circumstances to the benefit of the apparently mad character (Jones
1984: 18). This madness gradually metamorphosed as the Commedia and the
clown adapted to changing times, cultures and social milieus. As Bakhtin
indicated: ‘The theme of madness is inherent in all grotesque forms because
madness makes men look at the world with different eyes, not dimmed by
‘normal’, that is by commonplace ideas and judgements’ (Bakhtin 1984: 39).
The Commedia was a markedly grotesque form with an imagination and
inventiveness that respected no laws or boundaries and where nonsense was a
province to be explored with delight (Jones 1984: 18). Bawdy sexuality and
obscenity alongside sexual ambiguity formed a part of the Commedia’s
double-natured aspects. Bakhtin equates the body which is present in Carnival
to that of the body in Commedia: it is a grotesque body, one ‘not separated
from the world by clearly defined boundaries, it is blended with the world,
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