Abstract
No less dramatist than William Shakespeare employed the buffoon, the idiot to add zest or ribaldry for a certain group of his audience, or for the advancement of other technical schemes in his masterpieces. Throughout literature, the idiot, the feeble-minded has been characterized usually as an object of derision or magnified to the proportions of a horrible monster. From the succession of foolish court jesters, feigned or otherwise, of France and Britain down through the centuries to the present-day rural bumpkin, there is a universal recognition of the existence of human beings of various conspicuous degrees of inferior mental power. Many communities and nations have pondered upon and dealt with, in divers ways, this problem of their feebleminded citizens whether of Falstaffian stature or of the Gael's "God's Little White Fools."