fops

     

The fop (also known as a fribble, popinjay, fashion-monger, or clotheshorse) is a stock character who appears from time to time in fiction. He is a person who makes a habit of fastiiously overdressing and putting on airs, aspiring to be viewed as an aristocrat (if he is not already one). A fop is also referred to as a 'beau', as in the Restoration comedies The Beaux' Stratagem (1707) by George Farquhar, The Beau Defeated (1700) by Mary Pix, or the (real-life and subsequently fictionalized) Regency character of Beau Brummell. In English, the word fop is older, but the meaning of an overdressed, frivolously fastidious man may not be; Shakespeare's King Lear contains the word, in the general sense of a fool, and before him, Thomas Nashe, in Summer's Last Will and Testament (1592, printed 1600): "the Idiot, our Playmaker. He, like a Fop & an Ass must be making himself a public laughing-stock." Osric in Hamlet has a great deal of the fop's affected manner, and much of the plot of Twelfth Night revolves around tricking the puritan Malvolio into dressing as a fop.

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