[In the essay that follows, Abrams explores the hypothesis that in early productions of King Lear, the characters of Cordelia and Lear's Fool were played by the same actor. Abrams emphasizes the theatrical benefits of such "doubling," noting that Cordelia and the Fool both serve as Lear's "truth-tellers."]

Proposed near the turn of the past century, the hypothesis that the actor playing Cordelia doubled as the Fool in early productions of King Lear accords with our best knowledge of Shakespeare's theatrical practice and has rarely been contested. Strictly speaking, of course, the theory remains unprovable without external evidence; yet it rests on two fairly firm supports: that the two characters never meet on stage and that during Cordelia's absence the Fool takes over her function of telling Lear the painful truth about himself. In addition, such a theory strengthens various line readings, for example, the play on "nothing," Lear's description of the Fool as a "houseless poverty" after driving Cordelia from her home, "And my poor fool is hanged." But though critics have noted verbal ironies produced by double casting, the sustained theatrical impact of this device on spectators cognizant of the actor's role shift has yet to be explored. Only recently have critics advanced beyond a naive conception of double casting as a necessary evil in small Elizabethan acting troupes, recognizing the potential production values of this technique which enabled Shakespeare "to inform, comment on, and, perhaps, augment the events enacted."¹ In this essay I discuss the theatrical benefits of doubling the parts of Lear's two "truthtellers," showing how audience awareness of the actor's change heightens the play's pathos by inducing an ironic consciousness.

Past work on doubling in Lear focuses on Cordelia's and the Fool's relationship to the protagonist. Here, however, I concentrate less on their relation to Lear than on their common relation to Lear's third truthteller, his servant Kent, also in disguise for most of the play, hence presenting an analogy with the actor of Cordelia/Fool in his doubled role. If we accept the double casting hypothesis, two scenes can be defined as reunions: the actual reunion of kent and Cordelia in act 4, scene 7; but also, and less obviously, the Fool's great scene (I.iv) which reunites the actors formerly playing Cordelia (now the Fool) and Kent (now Caius) soon after their initial exit. Viewed as a pseudoreunion, act 1, scene 4, resolves expectations set up by the play's first scene, to which we turn.

Twice in parallel actions in act 1, scene 1, Kent is presented as the befriender of outcast children. Mildly in the case of Edmund slighted by the callous Gloucester, and then more boldly in Cordelia's case, he succors underdogs aggrieved by parental tyranny. Yet while Edmund thanks Kent for his kindness and promises to "study deserving," Cordelia neglects to do so.² Needless to say, no blame attaches to this omission; her hands are full at the moment of Kent's departure. Still, the opening scene's parallel fatherchild disturbances obviously function to establish a behavioral norm which Cordelia, for all that is right in her position, fails to satisfy. This failure is emphasized on her eventual return from France in act 4. Reunited with kent, she makes immediate amends fox her minor fault by expressing gratitude and a keen desire to repay service (IV.vii.1-3). But even earlier, if Cordelia returns recast as the Fool in act 1's pseudoreunion scene, s/he displays a sense of obligation. As the actor reenters, he ignores the king who has been calling for his fool and heads directly for Kent, his coxcomb extended in token of a greater payment.

Superficially, the Fool offers prepayment to hire Caius, who displays the folly of "taking one's part that's out of favor" (I.iv.94). Lear is currently out of Goneril's favor; therefore, Caius, volunteering to serve such a master, deserves to be costumed as a fool. But meanings proliferate in the Fool's first witticism. Having changed his appearance by shaving his beard (cf. Kent's "razed . . . likeness," 1.4), Kent himself is "out of his old "favor" (face), yet essentially unchanged, still recognizable as the same principled fool who earlier took Cordelia's part when she was "out of favor" (disliked). By the same token, Kent-as-Caius, volunteering to resume his old service, seeks to take his own part—that is, the part of a man out of favor, since Kent, banished from his former master's presence, is now out of Lear's favor. All these meanings can be signaled in performance. A brief pause and nod of recognition before slow, knowing delivery of the phrase "out of favor" would indicate that the Fool recognizes Caius as the man who previously took Cordelia's part, and the audience would then read the Fool's act of extending his coxcomb as a gesture of gratitude on his former mistress's behalf. Moreover, in a double cast performance, the grateful gesture would be read as proceeding not just from Cordelia's representative but from Cordelia-reincarnate to Kent-reincarnate. What we see (that the actor-Cordelia has returned) colors what we hear (that the Fool wants to "hire" Kent). As Cordelia-revenant, the Fool pays Kent not only for services to come ("hire") but for services already rendered.³

Viewing the Fool's payment of Kent as an expression of the recostumed Cordelia's gratitude to a former benefactor, the audience can now see deeper meaning in the coin of that payment: an article of the actor's latest apparel. In his exit lines of act 1, scene 4, Lear speaks of resuming "the shape" he has apparently "cast of f forever (11. 300-01). Shape, Maurice Charney reminds us, "is a theatrical term, meaning the whole make-up and appearance demanded by a specific role."⁴ Hence, Lear's final phrase recalls the beginning of the scene in which the casting off of shapes figures prominently on levels of both story and staging. Kent opens act 1, scene 4, by calling attention to his razed appearance. Audiences know that the actor does not grow a beard between performances but simply removes a false beard, and on the Fool's entry, which is also the actor-Cordelia's reentry, this knowledge is activated by parallelism, for if one of Lear's truthtellers returns minus a prop beard, the other presumably reenters stripped of the item of theatrical disguise which most readily turns a man into a woman, a long-haired wig.⁵ Indeed, because both have cast off their richer costumes, the Fool offers to dress Kent against the cold. Knowing what it is to feel cold himself (since he is played by the newly stripped actor-Cordelia), the Fool hands the shorn Kent, exposed for Cordelia's sake and in danger of "catchfing] cold shortly" (11. 95-96), his coxcomb.⁶ Of course, a fool's cap barely covers the wearer. But that in effect is the Fool's point, carried forward in rich wordplay on a snail's shell as a "house" to "put's head in" (I.v.24-27, also III.ii.25) and on a hovel as "a good head-piece" in a storm (III.ii.25-26)—that the art of our necessities is strange and can make vile things precious. By giving his coxcomb, the Fool asserts that, for taking the disinherited Cordelia's part and now Lear's part, Kent deserves at least a fool's minimal protection against the cold, a cap "to put's head in"; and he asserts this in a manner alluding to his own recent costume change.

One passage of Lear's much-studied clothing motif strongly foreshadows the actor-Cordelia's costume change. France protests to Lear, "This is most strange, / That she whom even but now was your best object . . .";

should in this trice of time
Commit a thing so monstrous to dismantle
So many folds of favor

(I.i.216-18)

—phrasing echoed by Cordelia in her exit lines when she indicts her "plighted" (Q: "pleated," heavily draped) sisters whose cunning time will "unfold" (I.i.280-81). The theme of stripping down will resonate, of course, both in dialogue (Poor Tom's change from court finery) and stage imagery (Lear's unbuttoning), first recurring, after Cordelia's exit, in Kent's return in the rough, durable clothing of a country servingman. yet if France's metaphorical description of the dismantled Cordelia is ever visually applicable to Cordelia herself, it must be in the actor-Cordelia's return as the unaccommodated Fool, for when next we meet Cordelia in propria persona she is dressed presumably as a queen or general and tries to make a change for the better in Kent's costume (IV.vii.7-8) as well as reoutfitting her father in fresh raiment. But in act 1, scene 4, the audience can appreciate the literal propriety of France's metaphor of a stripped Cordelia when the actor reappears as the ill-clad Fool. Moreover, the recostumed Cordelia's (Fool's) sympathetic gesture of sharing "her" clothing to protect the exposed Kent can then prefigure Lear's charity on the health when, cold and wet, he sympathetically bids the drenched Fool enter the hovel before him.

Before I stray too far from a discussion of theatrical dynamics toward larger interpretive questions, let me try to distinguish the insights of the study from those of the playhouse, noting the different ways in which meaning is generated on page and stage. A passage in a text possesses potentially infinite resonance; interpretation must allow for its capacity to play off of any other passage in the mind of a hypothetical reader. But a theatrical event, such as the doubling of Cordelia and the Fool, is at the mercy of onrushing events. Reentering in a period of confused stage action when it is unclear "who is who, who is being sent for, and who answers,"⁷ the recostumed actor-Cordelia sets off a shock of recognition. However, the tremors soon subside when fresher events such as the Fool's baiting of Lear and Lear's quarrel with Goneril compete for our attention. This is not to deny that spectators, tickled by suggestive dialogue, may flash back to the actor's role change at any moment. For instance (Stephen Booth's example, p. 164, n. 20), "If the actor who played Cordelia in I.i is a maid no longer—is now playing the Fool—then the Fool's exit speech, 'She that's a maid now, and laughs at my departure, / Shall not be a maid long, unless things be cut shorter' . . . reverberates in yet another extravagant direction." But very quickly the actor formerly playing Cordelia gains acceptance in his new role, so that by the end of a busy scene like act 1, scene 4, Lear's exit line about resuming his cast-off shape is presumably glossed by our recollection of the actor-Cordelia's role change rather than serving as a retrospective gloss on what we have already comfortably accepted.

But if the actor rapidly gains credibility in his new role, on another level the audience remains permanently shocked. When Cordelia returns transformed, the floodgates of bizarre possibility open, for nothing can be sacred in King Lear if Cordelia's person is not. Bradley's view of Lear's youngest daughter as "a thing enskied and sainted" could scarcely have survived a production in which Cordelia, leaving the stage with dignified forbearance in the first scene, comes back in an antic mode three scenes later. One knows that this silly chatterbox is not Cordelia, only her Fool; yet the feeling persists that it is Cordelia. Our two impressions vie for authenticity, like the teasing "natural perspective" of "is and is not" at the end of Twelfth Night. And more than shattering complacency, Cordelia's transformation conditions our expectations; it builds tension into the Fool's part from the beginning. Aware that the Fool's actor will eventually be needed to play a more important role, we sense that the character himself is living on borrowed time. Our first definite news of Cordelia's impending return comes in act 2 (II.ii.161 ff.); yet probably we guess we shall see her again even at her initial departure—an awareness that brings the Fool's exit speeches under morbid scrutiny. Although he is never seriously menaced onstage, the Fool's partings generally leave it uncertain whether this expendable character will return. For example, act 1 scene 4, features a running exit, while his exit lines in the next scene ominously conclude the act: "She that's a maid now, and laughs at my departure, / Shall not be a maid long, unless things be cut shorter" (I.v.45-46). If, as Booth recognized, the actor playing the Fool is himself "a maid no longer," then the double entendre in "unless things be cut shorter" underscores in a distressing manner the possibility of the actor changing back to Cordelia. The "thing" in danger of being cut shorter is both the Fool's traditionally outsized tool and his hour on the stage.⁸ Indeed, these two meanings harmonize, since, according to the infantile fantasy of woman as a castrated man, the Fool's phallic truncation implies the curtailment of his present dramatic incarnation. Castration anxieties recur throughout the Fool's speeches, reminding us of his secret sharing in the identity of a character of opposite gender. If the Fool's "thing" is cut shorter, then the actor's stage life as a man will also come to an end. He will become a maid again, resuming Cordelia's cast-off shape.

Other passages play off our awareness that the Fool's character is unstable since his actor will be needed to play Cordelia again. The song on the heath, echoed from Feste, suggests that Lear's Fool is not specific to this time and place but floats through the King's Men's repertory—an impression heightened by Shakespeare's failure to provide a history for the Fool who mysteriously originates in Cordelia, so that her act 1 departure robs him of vital substance, causing him to pine away.⁹ Then too, the Fool's odd scene-closing prophecy of Merlin prophesying ratifies our impression of his doubleness, since, as well as sharing his being with Cordelia, Lear's Fool exists both in the audience's present (hence confidently alluding to the historical Merlin) and in a distant past before Merlin was heard of.¹⁰ And finally, of course, the exit line most powerfully intensified by our awareness of double casting is the Fool's actual last line of the play, "And I'll go to bed at noon" as a riposte to Lear's "We'll go to supper i'th' morning (III.vi. 82-83). By now the Fool's function has been drastically reduced by Lear's revival of conscience and by Poor Tom's usurpation of the Fool's place in Lear's counsel. So "I'll go to bed at noon" signals the disappearance we have long awaited, to which many dramatic signs are now pointing. In the recent Olivier television production of King Lear, the director, Michael Elliott, cut Kent's final remark which cues the Fool's exit ("Come, help to bear thy master. / Thou must not stay behind"), and the audience was then shown the shivering Fool stranded in the hovel. Everyone grasped that the Fool's end was at hand. But in a production doubling the roles of the Fool and Cordelia, the Fool's jeopardy need not be telegraphed in this obvious manner. The audience's awareness that Cordelia is returning to resume her cast-off role already creates an air of crisis in the Fool's part. Anticipating Cordelia's return, we read dark meaning into "And I'll go to bed at noon" at the moment of the line's delivery.

Cordelia returns in act 4 scene 4, accompanied by her retainers. Lear has been sighted, and Cordelia shows selfless concern for her father's welfare but fails as yet to reunite with her loved ones. Her next scene, however, features both reunion and cognitio. Cordelia enters speaking with Kent and is presently joined by Lear, brought in sleeping. Thus, act 4, scene 7, is a retake of the actors' reunion scene (I.iv), which brought Kent, Lear, and the actor-Cordelia together as a trio "out of favor"; the major antagonists of the play's opening are finally reconciled in their own persons. The two scenes (I.iv and IV.vii) are linked by significant echoes; we have already noted the parallelism of the Fool hiring Kent with a coxcomb and Cordelia "paying" gratitude for service. Similarly, in her first words of act 4, scene 7, Cordelia's short time remaining is foreshadowed in an ironic mode made familiar by the ever-departing Fool:

Cordelia: O thou good Kent, how shall I live and work
To match thy goodness? My life will be too short
And every measure fail me.
Kent: To be acknowledged, madam, is o'erpaid.

(IV.vii. 1-4)

Cordelia begins where her alter ego left off; she takes up the Fool's refrain of curtailment ("unless things be cut shorter," "And I'll go to bed at noon"), announcing her tragic fate in the same way that the Fool's prophecies announced his early departure. Then too, Cordelia introduces the subject of clothing—the Fool's topic ("coxcomb"), along with payment for hire, in his first exchange with Kent. "Be better suited," she begs Kent, "These weeds are memories of those worser hours. / I prithee put them off (11. 6-8). Her request goes unheeded and is the more curious in that, in all probability, we would never have noticed Kent's "failure" to change back to his former costume had not Shakespeare reminded us.¹¹ It appears, then, that Shakespeare is prodding us with various echoes to remember act 1's blurred reunion the better to appreciate act 4's satisfying resolution.

By firmly reestablishing Cordelia in her role before bringing in Lear, Shakespeare operates from the surest of theatrical instincts, safeguarding the tenderness of his great recognition scene. Identity already seems confused elsewhere in act 4, scene 7: Stanley Cavell shows that Lear probably takes the doctor accompanying Cordelia for the king of France,¹² and one tender moment is played perilously close to comedy (Lear [to Cordelia]: "You are a spirit, I know. Where did you die?"). A delicate balance could be upset if, even for a moment, Lear, wincing to make out his daughter ("Methinks I should know you"), was suspected of glimpsing her physical resemblance to the Fool. To clear a space for the returning Cordelia, then, the memories of Cordelia's "worser hours" in the Fool's role must be effaced. But once Lear has recognized Cordelia, the Fool may slip back in. "I am a very foolish fond old man" (1. 60), Lear confesses, preparing to enunciate what he fears is the derisible theory that the angelic lady standing before him is his favorite daughter. And again on exiting he tells Cordelia, "You must bear with me. / Pray you now, forget and forgive. I am old and foolish" (11. 83-84). There is no likelihood here that Lear is thinking of his Fool, but Shakespeare no longer minds if we recall the Fool. "I am old and foolish" is what John Meagher, in connection with another line ("And my poor fool is hanged"), calls an "unrecognizing recognition,"¹³ and as such it constitutes Lear's tribute to his most patient schoolmaster, acknowledging that the Fool's great lesson ("Dost thou call me fool, boy?") has finally penetrated. Thus, the scene that began with Cordelia repaying Kent appropriately ends (at least in the Folio version; Quarto follows Lear's and Cordelia's exit with a dozen lines of dialogue, presumably deleted in revision) with Lear's indirect payment of tribute to the Fool's wisdom. Already deeply moving if addressed only to Cordelia, Lear's admission of folly gains poignancy if directed also to the actor formerly playing the Fool's role. For then, in the mode of an "unrecognizing recognition," Lear attests that he himself is willing to undergo the low transformation he forced on his daughter. As the actor-Cordelia was obliged to play the Fool, so Lear as a "child-changed father" (IV.vii. 17) is prepared to repay in kind: to be cast down, indeed, re-cast in the selfsame role he forced on his beloved.

Along with his two descriptions of himself as "foolish" in act 4, scene 7, Lear uses the noun "fool" three times near the end of the play, twice metaphorically ("great stage of fools," "natural fool of fortune") and the third time either metaphorically or in distant allusion to the absent Fool himself ("And my poor fool is hanged"). No one but Lear uses the word or a derivative in the latter part of the play, and all five of Lear's later uses are probing, compared to his earlier literal-minded usage of "fool" in direct address, response, and immediate reference to the Fool himself.¹⁴ The shift from other characters' control of the word fool's metaphorical extensions before Cordelia's return (e.g., Goneril's four applications of "fool" to Albany in IV.ii) to Lear's exclusive later control is revealing. Verbal distribution studies of individual Shakespearean plays such as S. L. Bethell's study of Othello, documenting the gradual transfer of the language of deviltry from Iago to Othello, reveal subterranean character resemblances.¹⁵ Similarly, Lear's shifting "fool" references suggest how deeply the Fool has marked his master. Though initially associated with, and in a sense emanating from, Cordelia, the Fool is finally absorbed back, not into Cordelia, but into Lear himself, who not only cherishes his companion's memory but strangely perpetuates his being. Lear's commemoration of the Fool is touching. The Fool's offstage pining convinces us of his genuine affection for Cordelia, but we question his feeling for Lear. We recall, for instance, that the Fool would have remained contentedly in Goneril's house if not driven thence, and we wonder why he continues to nag after Lear shows repentance. Yet despite our ambivalence, Lear asks no questions but returns pure for impure (or uncertain) love. Whereas in the opening scene he insisted that Cordelia provide verbal assurance of her love, he gives her alter ego the benefit of the doubt and finally reveals a revived paternal instinct by keeping the Fool alive with elegiac allusions after his mysterious disappearance.

In addition to evidencing moral growth, Lear's absorption of the Fool points to larger shifts in the play's ontological or representational premises. The king's relation to his Fool as a false other, a projection of conscience, is paradigmatic of his many ambiguous object-relations throughout the drama. Several critics comment on this aspect of Lear; for instance, Richard Fly discusses Lear's relation to his hundred knights on analogy with Talbot's shadow-substance bond with his army in 1 Henry VI, observing that "in a manner that possibly defeats analysis much of King Lear exists as reflecting shadows of Lear's central experience."¹⁶ However, these studies ignore the irony whereby Shakespeare's adaptation of the action to Lear's inner life follows from Lear's own early insistence that his daughters mirror his self-love. Again, the Fool's status is focal. "[A] screen on which Shakespeare flashes . . . readings from the psychic life of his protagonist,"¹⁷ and by tradition a motley imitation of royalty, Lear's Fool becomes precisely what he calls Lear, "Lear's shadow" (I.iv.221), destined to be reabsorbed by his master—hence, going to sleep at noon like a shadow—when Lear has learned all that the Fool can teach. Indeed, Lear himself defines the Fool's pedagogic method vis-à-vis their overlapping identities. Just before the Fool's first appearance, Lear tells his Knight (the only one of the shadowy hundred we meet), "Thou but rememb'rest me of mine own conception" (I.iv.64). The remark's real thrust carries beyond its immediate circumstance, however; rather, it serves to introduce the Fool, who, as Lear's externalized conscience, can influence his master only by reminding him of what he already knows. Thus, the Fool lives the life of an echo, unlike Cordelia, who refuses to reflect in flattery her father's conception of how much love she owes him. But if Cordelia's initial refusal to be reduced to a mere reflector of Lear's self-love results in the advent of her mirrory or shadowlike alter ego, whose function is precisely to "rememb[er Lear] of [his] own conception," then the situation changes on her return to England. In act 1 Cordelia is stubbornly independent; yet in act 4 she returns compliant, Lear's satellite, never again recovering her former integrity. To put the case for this change provocatively, we may say that, on her return, Cordelia's role is remodeled on the part her actor has been playing ever since she went to France.

Let me step back to explore this proposition in a broader perspective. As often noted, events in Lear seem to occur in mocking fulfillment of Lear's fantasies. This is true not only of the appearance and disappearance of emanated "subcharacters" like Poor Tom and the Fool, but of the sudden blowing up of the storm and the behavior of otherwise realistically conceived major characters. The same pattern constantly repeats itself. First, a fantasy strikes Lear, then it is realized in the narrative, so that the event appears to owe its dramatic occurrence to Lear's anticipation of it. Take the way in which Lear's sorrow "holp the heavens to rain" (III.vii.62). If, in the self-characterizing phrase of Kent's anonymous Gentleman-interlocutor, Lear is a man "minded like the weather" (III.i.2), then by the same token the weather is minded like Lear; it owes its disorder, on an artistic level, to pathetic fallacy and, on a magical level, to the sacred bond uniting king and kingdom. But that bond has been severed—at least Lear himself fears it has been—so that what happens is inexplicable to him. "I'll not weep," he maintains (II.iv.278), and an instant later, pat on cue, nature weeps for him; stage directions call for sounds of "Storm and tempest. " The whole sequence leaves him suspicious; "What is the cause of thunder?" (III.vi.146) is the first question he asks his "philosopher," Poor Tom. It is as though the character-Lear cannot rest complacently in the audience's overview of the storm as an instance of pathetic fallacy but, committed to the reality of the play-world, must wrestle with the paradox that these events nonetheless seem theatrically contrived.¹⁸ Thus, the storm simultaneously shakes Lear's solipsism, making him feel small, and reinforces it by encouraging the delusion that he is the cruel gods' cynosure, that the weather centers on him. "They told me I was everything," he complains about his daughters, "'Tis a lie"; "When the thunder would not peace at my bidding; there I found 'em, there I smelt 'em out" (IV.vi.101-04). Yet the lie that he is everything contains a truth dramatically supported by the thunder's responsiveness to his bidding. Even when, exposed to violent nature on the heath, he ought to be learning the lesson of his own insignificance, Lear enjoys the illusion of solipsistic centrality, imagining that he matters enough for the gods to find and punish.

Other events follow Lear's fantasies; for example, Goneril's and Regan's murderous competition for Edmund's sexual favors gathers momentum soon after Lear's most cynical pronouncements on women's lust. But Lear's main fantasy-come-to-life is the returning Cordelia, who materializes in a form consistent with his desires and hovers dreamlike over her "scarce awake" father as he gradually regains consciousness (IV.vii.51). A virtual personification of filial love, Cordelia on her return seems faded in verisimilitude, more idealized than before, much in the way that an initially assertive Desdemona, purged of attributes in the course of Othello, becomes the ideal sacrificial victim by shedding her particularity.¹⁹ No new pressure to conform comes from Lear, who moderates his early insistence on obedience, prefers to kneel before his wronged daughter, and begs forgiveness. But Shakespeare remembers and grants Lear's original, now unstated desire for absolute love. Whereas initially Cordelia, refusing to flatter, stood alone on principle, the returned Cordelia, echoing Christ, defines herself entirely in relation to her father ("O dear father. / It is thy business that I go about," IV.iv.23-24). Led off to prison, she no longer cares to puncture Lear's pleasant fantasy of their quasi-connubial withdrawal ("We too alone will sing") by reminding him, merely for truth's sake, that she did not marry like her sisters to love her father all.

More a creature of her father's desires than her independent spirited act 1 prototype, the returning Cordelia paradoxically gains pathos by taking on a tinge of insubstantiality, even as the Fool gained pathos by our anticipating the actor's eventual abandonment of the Fool's role. Cordelia's prophetic comment to Kent, "My life will be too short," barely noticeable in the text registers with strange force on an audience theatrically rehearsed in watching the Fool's prophecies of a foreshortened life ripen to fulfillment. Alert for clues as to the direction the plot will take, "Oh no," we say in effect, "first the Fool; now her!" Indeed, the theatrical logic behind the killing off of Cordelia extends the logic of bringing her back in a form responsive to her father's wishes. For if Shakespeare fulfills Lear's unstated lingering desire for absolute love, he also recalls and fulfills Lear's unrealized parental threat to revoke his daughter's being. At the height of his anger, Lear intemperately spoke of reabsorbing the child who displeased him ("Better thou / Hadst not been born than not t'have pleased me better") in terms barely more civilized than "The barbarous Scythian, / Or he that makes his generations messes / To gorge his appetite" (I.i.116-18). This imagery recurs in the Fool's childlike obsession with being eaten (e.g., I.iv.206-08), which proves prophetically accurate; the fate of reabsorption into Lear, from whom he emanated as a voice of conscience, overtakes him in his noontime or midplay retirement when he goes to bed like Lear's shadow. But after the Fool's final exit, the threat of ingestion or reabsorption, from which Shakespeare spun out her surrogate's fate, is visited on Cordelia herself. Returning briefly, Cordelia vanishes again as though, from the time she reappeared to her half-sleeping father, she were only Lear's dream, "Too flattering-sweet to be substantial" (Romeo and Juliet, II.i.141). Thus, despite retracting his curse (or more precisely, superseding it with a blessing), Lear must at last endure the indecent horror of a parent outliving his own child. Initially reducing his daughters to flattering mirrors of his own vanity, he must ultimately stand alone, experiencing the pain of being "everything." Cordelia becomes unreal again, incapable of misting a looking glass, of sending forth new projections of her now-canceled being, as Lear pronounces over her corpse the words that bid simultaneous farewell to both his daughter and her double: "And my poor fool is hanged."

Theatrical doubling, as we have studied it in Lear, is more than an expedient permitting a small acting company to stage a large play, and finally even more than a means of commenting on the similar functions of two temperamentally dissimilar characters. By upstaging Cordelia's and the Fool's actions at key moments through the mobility of the double cast actor, Shakespeare exposes Lear's largely impenitent solipsism, his desire to be "everything," which entails other people becoming less real than himself. In a fine essay on the play, E. A. J. Honigmann writes of the overarching realness of King Lear's titanic protagonist vis-à-vis a host of necessarily dwarfed side characters:

Lear seems to have a genetic relationship with almost everyone else. . . . Thus Cordelia, Kent and the Fool sympathise and obscurely communicate with one another, and in a sense melt into one another: Kent not only talks of Lear as one whom he has "lov'd as my father" . . . as the Fool calls him "nuncle," but we hear that since Cordelia's going into France, "the Fool hath much pined away". . . that Kent and Cordelia are secretly in touch and admire each other, and finally that Cordelia and the Fool have become one in Lear's mind ("And my poor fool is hang'd"). All three, Cordelia, Kent and the Fool, exist separately and yet partake of one another's identity, and all three are refracted images of Lear, or of his better nature.²⁰

Honigmann then discusses the characters who reflect Lear's selfish nature but never mentions double casting which, along with the plot devices he does mention, controls an audience's impression that side characters "melt into one another" or "are secretly in touch [with] each other," finally disposing these characters to incorporation in the king. Viewing a double cast performance of Lear, an audience witnesses the dramatic illusion decomposing and reforming in rhythms intensifying our grasp of the action. Of course, other Shakespearean plays also feature double casting, and one wonders whether, in those plays too, illusions break up and reform in characteristic ways. In an interpretive era like the present when performance-centered criticism is flourishing, research into "Shakespeare's art of doubling," as Giorgio Melchiori has recently called it, offers a fascinating field for conjecture, potentially valuable both to theatrical and textual studies.

Notes

¹ Stephen Booth, King Lear, Macbeth, Indefinition, and Tragedy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), p. 134. Booth's illuminating essay, "Speculations on Doubling in Shakespeare's Plays" (App. 2, pp. 127-55), questions the "hard scholarship" of such studies as that of William A. Ringler, Jr. ("The Number of Actors in Shakespeare's Early Plays," The Seventeenth-Century Stage, ed. Gerald Eades Bentley [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968], pp. 110-34), sagely noting that "even the hard evidence on Renaissance doubling practices is soft." For specific discussion of Cordelia and the Fool, see Booth, pp. 33-34, 129, 134-46, 153-54, 163-64. Giorgio Melchiori ("Peter, Balthazar, and Shakespeare's Art of Doubling," Modern Language Review [1983], pp. 777-92) discusses "doubling by function" in Romeo and Juliet, a concept clearly relevant to Cordelia and the Fool.

The double casting hypothesis's first proponents are Alois Brandi, Shakspere (Berlin: Hoffman, 1894), p. 179, and Wilfred Perrett, The Story of King Lear (Berlin: Mayer & Muller, 1904). Thomas Stroup ("Cordelia and the Fool," Shakespeare Quarterly, 12 [1961], 127-32) makes some interesting points (e.g., Lear's reduction of Cordelia to a "houseless poverty" is his), but his article suffers from a strong textual bias masking as theatrical consciousness. Noting that the Fool appears 357 lines after Cordelia's first exit and that Cordelia reappears 356 lines after the Fool's final exit, Stroup argues, "Time [sic] is exactly meted out for some reason, probably for the change in costume and make-up" (p. 127). Even setting aside the possibility of an interlude between acts 3 and 4, the stage business surrounding Gloucester's blinding takes longer than the relatively uneventful action separating Cordelia's exit and the Fool's first entry; also, the costume change can be effected in a matter of moments, as Booth shows; it hardly requires the "exact measure" of some twenty minutes of performance time. Even less plausible, in my view, is H. L. Anshutz's argument that the character Cordelia herself, not just the actor playing her, returns disguised as the Fool, "Cordelia and the Fool," Research Studies (Washington State University), 32 (1964), 240-60.

²King Lear, I.i.28, 30; all Shakespearean citations are from The Complete Works, gen. ed. Alfred Harbage (Baltimore: Penguin, 1969). For a discussion of changes in the Fool's part in the apparent F revision of Q Lear, cf. John Kerrigan, "Revision, Adaptation, and the Fool in King Lear," in The Division of the Kingdoms: Shakespeare's Two Versions of King Lear, ed. Gary Taylor and Michael Warren (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), pp. 195-245. Kerrigan's essay, though excellent, fails to take up the question of double casting. Several F changes (the reattribution of "Lear's shadow," the inclusion of "And I'll go to sleep at noon," the deletion of the dialogue following Lear's and Cordelia's exit in IV.vii), discussed in my text, offer enrichment of the ironies associated with double casting; that would not mean, however, that the stage production reflected in the Q version separated the two roles. In the same volume Beth Goldring argues cogently that at I.i.162 Cordelia (rather than Cornwall) intervenes with Albany to prevent Lear's violence against Kent, "Cor.'s Rescue of Kent," Division, pp. 143-51; Cordelia's gesture does not change the fact, however, that the ceremony of thanking Kent remains unfulfilled.

³ Hence the ambiguities of the Fool's gesture line up with Lear's overdetermined act of hiring Kent, which cues the Fool's entry. "There's earnest of thy service" (I.iv.88-89), Lear tells Caius, meaning that he definitely plans to hire him (removing the earlier condition of "If I like thee no worse after dinner") and simultaneously paying him for service already rendered in tripping Oswald. Compare Caius's double hiring by Lear and the Fool to the Fool's own double employment by Lear and Cordelia.

⁴ Maurice Charney, "'We Put Fresh Garments on Him': Nakedness and Clothes in King Lear," in Some Facets of King Lear: Essays in Prismatic Criticism, ed. Rosalie L. Colie and F. T. Flahiff (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1974), p. 80.

⁵ No reference to Cordelia's or the Fool's relative hair lengths occurs in KL; for the routine strategem of a girl cutting her hair to look like a boy, see however TGV, II.vii.42-44. For the motif of "undressing the part" in KL, cf. James Black, "King Lear: Art Upside-Down," Shakespeare Survey, 33 (1980), 35-42, esp. 36-37. Regarding actual costume, there would perhaps not have been much change in length from Cordelia's robes to the Fool's petticoat, taken by Lear for the long robe of a man of justice in the hovel (cf. Leslie Hotson, Shakespeare's Motley [1952; rpt. New York: Haskell House, 1971], pp. 69-70).

⁶ The usual gloss for "catch cold shortly," cited in the Variorum and Arden Lear, gives "be turned out of doors and be exposed to the inclemency of the weather." However, this meaning is read back into the line by editors familiar with Lear's and the Fool's fate of being driven into the cold; spectators viewing the play for the first time have not yet seen this happen. Cordelia, of course, was threatened with exposure (of sorts) yet found warm shelter in France (hence the Fool's immediate qualification about Lear doing his third daughter "a blessing against his will"). Thus it is the actor-Cordelia, more than the character-Cordelia, who illustrates the sense in which Kent is in danger of catching cold. The Fool's words look to the past and the future, but his stripped appearance makes an immediate visual statement about chilliness.

⁷ Booth, p. 154; cf. Stroup, pp. 128-29; Anshutz, p. 244.

⁸ Feste's "A foolish thing was but a toy" is verbally similar. For the priapic fool, cf. Leslie Hotson, The First Night of Twelfth Night (New York: Macmillan, 1955), chap. 7.

⁹ If Robert Armin played both Fèste and Lear's Fool, the song about -the wind and the rain becomes still more haunting; cf. Julian Markels, "Shakespeare's Confluence of Tragedy and Comedy: Twelfth Night and King Lear," Shakespeare Quarterly, 15 (1964), 75-88; William A. Ringler, Jr. ("Shakespeare and His Actors: Some Remarks on King Lear," Proceedings of the Comparative Literature Symposium, 12 [1981], 183-94), challenges the traditional assumption that Armin played the Fool on the grounds that he would therefore have been too old to double as Cordelia. However, his strongest argument is undercut by Doris Adler, whose Ohio Shakespeare Conference paper on "Robert Armin: Cordelia and the Fool?" is abstracted in Shakespeare Newsletter, 27 (1977), 30.

¹⁰ For the fool's doubleness of being, William Willeford, The Fool and His Scepter (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1969), chap. 3, "The Fool and Mimesis," also chap. 4; for the scattering of the seeds of folly, hence of the Fool's being, throughout the play, John Reibetanz, The "Lear" World: A Study of King Lear in Its Dramatic Context (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977), pp. 80-107.

¹¹ The best discussion is Hugh MacLean, "Disguise in King Lear: Kent and Edgar," Shakespeare Quarterly, 11 (1964), 49-56. Rachel Massey points out to me that the principal "good" characters—Edgar/Poor Tom, Kent/Caius, Cordelia/Fool—all prove themselves by their willingness to undergo costume changes.

¹² Stanley Cavell, "The Avoidance of Love: A Reading of King Lear," in his Must We Mean What We Say? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), chap. 10.

¹³ Cf. John C. Meagher, "Economy and Recognition: Thirteen Shakespearean Puzzles," Shakespeare Quarterly, 35 (1984), 18.

¹⁴ Similarly, the first metaphorical use of "fool" in the main plot is Goneril's "Old fools are babes again" (I.iii.19), so if the Fool is absorbed into Lear, he may also be said to originate in Lear. As an instance of direct response to the Fool's accusations, Lear's "Dost thou call me fool, boy?" produces the delayed response in the same scene, "Beat at this gate that let thy folly in" (I.iv.262). This leaves only II.iv.270 (Lear's "fool me not so much") as a gratuitous use of "fool" early in the play, compared to Lear's five gratuitous allusions toward the end. The classic study of "Fool in Lear" is William Empson, The Structure of Complex Words (Norfolk, Conn.: New Directions, 1951), chap. 6. For another illustration of Lear's continuation of the Fool's role, cf. E. A. J. Honigmann, Shakespeare: Seven Tragedies: The Dramatist's Manipulation of Response (London: Macmillan, 1976), pp. 118-19: "The extraordinary oneness of the two [the Fool and Lear] continues after the Fool has dropped out of the play, for in IV.6 Lear echoes the Fool's voice and personality, continuing his riddling (e.g., 'your eyes are in a heavy case, your purse in a light'), his Schadenfreude, his sex obsession and, probably, his 'fantastic' general demeanour."

¹⁵ S. L. Bethell, "Shakespeare's Imagery: The Diabolic Images in Othello," Shakespeare Survey, 5 (1952), 62-80.

¹⁶ Richard Fly, Shakespeare's Mediated World (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1976), p. 113. Cf. text for n. 20, below.

¹⁷ Maynard Mack, "The Jacobean Shakespeare: Some Observations on the Construction of the Tragedies," in Essays in Shakespearean Criticism, ed. James Calderwood and Harold Toliver (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1970), p. 33.

¹⁸ Cf. Leontes's "unrecognizing recognition" of the theatrical falseness of the "real" world in WT, I.ii.291 ff.: "Is this nothing? / Why, then the world and all that's in't is nothing," etc.

¹⁹ I owe this view of Desdemona to Irving Massey's brilliant unpublished essay, "The Ethics of Particularity: Leibniz and Literature." Massey writes, "Like all sacrificial victims, Desdemona must be pure; but, as the special kind of sacrificial victim she is, what she must be pure of is attributes, other than the attribute of innocence itself."

²⁰ Honigmann, p. 116.