Folly’s Audience Symbol Analysis

In The Praise of Folly, Folly’s audience of scholars symbolizes the readership of the author, Erasmus. Folly’s audience is largely a metaphorical one, even within the fictional bounds of the book. They deliver no lines, contribute nothing to the plot, and are only ever explicitly addressed at the very start of Folly’s eulogy. After that, the informal “you” which Folly uses to address them quickly transforms into a general address to her readership (i.e., “you,” the reader). As such, Folly’s audience has a rather straightforward, if albeit metafictional (self-referential) symbolic meaning. Just as Folly stands in symbolically for Erasmus—and the concept of folly, of course—so too does Folly’s audience stand in for Erasmus’s readership. The fictional staging of the work, in other words, wherein Folly gives a eulogy to a crowd of skeptical scholars, directly maps to the relationship between Erasmus and his own, real audience.