[In the following essay, Shickman maintains that Lear's Fool was most likely intended to carry a mirror on stage in order to reinforce such concepts as "folly, prudence, and self-knowledge," with which the play is concerned.]

At the height of the storm in which King Lear finds himself drenched and humiliated, and during which he begins to learn of mortal limitation and human responsibility, the faithful Fool labors to outjest his heartstruck injuries. Soaked to the skin himself, he urges Lear to recant and beg of his daughters the blessing that children would ordinarily be expected to ask of their fathers: "in, ask thy daughters blessing. Here's a night pities neither wise men nor fools" (3.2.12-13).¹ He versifies on the value of a roof over one's head, and then utters a problematic line, problematic because it seems to start so wildly from the previous one: "For there was never yet fair woman but she made mouths in a glass" (3.2.35-36).

Although attempts have been made to explicate this sudden sally,² it strikes many readers with its abruptness and incongruity, which is best explained as the product of a fool's vacillating wit or else his imperfect mental processes, for such capricious turns of thought recur in his speeches. What he is saying is that women in their vanity practice smiling before a mirror; literally, that they make faces—"mouths"—in front of a looking-glass.³ The outlandishness of this court image when delivered on a rain-swept heath is magnified by the likelihood that the Fool of Shakespeare's stage actually demonstrated what he was talking about by making a few "mouths" of his own, timed so that the audience would laugh in the face of Lear's grief and pain. Making mouths was a function of fools, and indeed an occasional source of complaint. Thomas Lodge, referring to an old tradition of the fool as devil incarnate, wrote around 1596:

giue him a little wine in his head, he is cōtinually flearing and making of mouthes: he laughes intemperately at euery little occasion, and dances about the house, leaps ouer tables, out-skips mens heads, trips vp his companions héeles, burns Sacke with a candle, and hath all the feats of a Lord of misrule in the countrie . . . it is a speciali marke of him at the table, he sits and makes faces.⁴

The Praeludium to Goffe's Careless Shepherdess records a different reaction to similar clownish propensities:

l'ave laughed
Untili I cry'd again to see what Faces
The Rogue will make: O it does me good
To see him hold out's chin, hang down his hands,
And twirle his Bauble.

And Pilgrimage to Parnassus remarks on "fine scurvy faces," while Dromo advises the clown to "draw thy mouth awrye . . . I warrant thee theile laughe mightilie."⁶

Although Shakespeare does not rely heavily on such crude buffoonery for comic effect, it is highly unlikely that Lear's Fool or any fool would talk about funny faces without making some. Nor would a skillful fool require props to imitate a woman simpering at her reflection. The palm of his hand would suffice as a looking-glass, and Lear's tragedy could, for a moment, be turned to hilarity. But it is the purpose of this essay to demonstrate that Shakespeare's Fool, in all probability, actually is meant to carry a mirror on the stage, not only in this section, where it clearly would be useful, but in others as well. In so doing, he presents emblems of folly, prudence, and self-knowledge, consonant with the tragic polarities of the play.

II

That the Fool holds a glass in this and other passages is not mere speculation. The association of the fool and the looking-glass is thoroughly established in the iconography of the period. Sometimes it is raised up to the face of the fool, as is the case in an engraving of about 1450-1460 by Master E.S., where an allegorical Luxuria presents the blithesome sinner⁷ with his own fool's face. . . . Sometimes the fool holds it for himself, as in Alexander Barclay's 1509 translation of The Ship of Fools⁸ . . . , where he admires his reflection, and actually appears to be practicing "mouths." Or he might hold the mirror up to others, as an ass-eared jester does in another of Barclay's woodcuts . . . , so that a sinner might see his folly, in this instance the vanity of fashionable dress. The last of these illustrations is especially pertinent, as we shall see, for the Fool in King Lear holds his mirror to Lear's folly in much the same way, although for different reasons.

The fool of medieval and Renaissance art has a mirror because in the metaphorical sense he is one. This attitude is revealed in the literature of fools, which typically introduces an encyclopedic catalogue of folly and sin with a mirror metaphor or simile, as in James Locher's prologue of Barclay's publication: "Therfore let euery man beholde and ouerrede this boke: And than I doute nat but he shal se the errours of his lyfe of what condycyon that he be. in lyke wyse as he shal se in a Myrrour the fourme of his countenaunce and vysage."⁹ Clearly the comparison is important, for it is repeated in Barclay's own introduction: "this our Boke representeth vnto the iyen of the redars the states and condicions of men: so that euery man may behold within the same the cours of his lyfe and his mysgouerned maners, as he sholde beholde the shadowe of the fygure of his visage within a bright Myrrour."¹⁰

Nigellus Wireker's Speculum stultorum, or Mirror of Fools, a much older book (1160, but republished many times, as late as 1669), is introduced with a similar declaration:

The title of this book is Speculum stultorum. It has been given this name in order that foolish men may observe as in a mirror the foolishness of others and may then correct their own folly, and that they may learn to censure in themselves those things which they find reprehensible in others. But even as a mirror reflects only the outward appearance and the form of those who look into it, but never holds the memory of a past image, so is it with fools. Seldom, and then only with difficulty, are they drawn away from their folly, no matter how much they may have been taught by the foolishness of others.¹¹

The frontispiece of Speculum stultorum predictably illustrates a fool in cap and bells holding a mirror up to the hero of the story, Daun Burnel the Ass, whose reflection in it is clearly visible. . . .

Also, there is the example of the trickster-fool Eulenspiegel, known in England as Howleglas (owl-glass), whose very name declares his function. The frontispiece of the book of his adventures, written in 1500 by the anonymous N., shows him with an owl in one hand and a mirror in the other. . . .¹² The message is always the same: here is the glass wherein you may behold your own folly.

III

Yet the reasonable suggestion that Lear's Fool also carries a mirror has not been examined by Shakespeare scholars, perhaps because of a certain disagreeable redundancy in the conception. In other words, if the Fool is himself the King's mirror, the "glass" in which his follies are reflected, why should he need to hold one too? To the modern audience, the device might seem repetitious or naively obvious, although evidently it was acceptable to the original viewers precisely because it evoked a readily recognizable tradition. Playgoers were formerly much more comfortable with emblemata than we are today, and considerably more receptive to the signals they provided. But the Fool's mirror conveys to us, too, a potent purpose beyond its specific emblematic import. It is this object which sets him apart as an iconic and didactic presence in a play of elementary proverbial wisdom and instruction on the most fundamental of lessons. We are intended to share in Lear's education—"set to school to an ant"—that we might learn, as a child does, from what is familiar, very plain, and, if need be, often repeated. A mirror in the hand of Lear's Fool produces something of this naive instructional effect, although the perception would be altogether insufficient to make the case if the lines in King Lear did not also give evidence.

It is remarkable that there are several unnoticed sections that do provide such evidence, but before citing them, it is necessary to mention other meanings of the mirror well established by the time of Shakespeare. I do not refer here to the ubiquitous use of the metaphor so thoroughly outlined in Professor Grabes' The Mutable Glass,¹³ where it means "model" or "exemplar," (as in The Myrrour of Magistrates), but to specific iconographic associations. It was also understood as the standard attribute of the personages of Truth and Prudence, and of self-knowledge. . . . These virtues (or the egregious lack of them) are immediately recognizable as basic themes of the tragedy,¹⁴ so that one would hardly be surprised to see a modern production that somehow introduced an on-stage looking-glass for its symbolic value.

The hypothesis here is that Shakespeare intended Lear's Fool to carry this complex emblem, thus prompting a re-examination of the lines. A surprising number would seem to reward the examiner, for they do assume significance and resonance in the light of the hypothesis, and enrich the important themes just named. The most notable of these passages is the "sweet and bitter fool" rhyme:

Fool: That lord that counsell'd thee
To give away thy land,
Come place him here by me,
Do thou for him stand.
The sweet and bitter fool
Will presently appear:
The one in motley here,
The other found out there.
Lear: Dost thou call me fool, boy?

(1.4.140-48)

Textual footnotes almost always agree that upon his last verse the Fool points to King Lear; Lear is the "bitter fool."¹⁵ The troubling weakness of this interpretation is that it is undramatic, not very funny, nor does it really make sense. Is it worth the effort for the jester to set Lear up elaborately as the foolish lord and then point to him as a fool? Lear's response, "Dost thou call me fool, boy?" seems a superfluous question considering the thinness of the disguise. It is also awkward and implausible to "place him here by me" and then immediately say that the bitter fool, Lear, is "found out there." But with the prop of a mirror, this very oddity reveals a significant meaning.

Consider this interpretation: The Fool gives his mirror to Lear, instructing him to "stand" for the counsellor, who, mirror in hand, becomes a mock-Prudence, ostensibly the opposite of Folly. The Fool declares himself the "sweet" fool and then points, not at King Lear, but into the mirror. The "bitter fool" will presently appear within the looking-glass. The old man credulously looks where the Fool points, and sees—himself. "Dost thou call me fool, boy?" he demands, perhaps still uncertain of the Fool's intent.

This explication of the rhyme surely makes more dramatic sense than the generally accepted interpretation. It is at once comic and painful when the King is led (as a child might be) to peer curiously into the glass, realizing after a brief but crucial moment that the joke is on him.¹⁶ Moreover, in discovering that he is the bitter fool, Lear presents familiar emblems. First, holding the glass, he seems the prudent counsellor, taking on the iconography of Prudence herself (who, in addition to bearing a glass, often wears the mask of an old man behind her head to signify the wisdom of years with its ability to look both backward and forward . . . ); but then we recognize the iconography of the fool shown his folly. . . . This is not Prudence after all. Lear's petulant response indicates that he is not yet ready to learn from his errors, that he lacks the Socratic self-knowledge symbolized in Ripa's Iconologia by a mirror in the hand of Instruction. . . . Although a venerable figure similar to Ripa's, King Lear—too foolish, too stubborn, too old to learn—becomes, in this vignette, a negative example of introspection and the anti-type of Instruction.

In the same scene, the Fool very likely makes didactic use of his mirror a second time when he interjects that Lear is "Lear's shadow" (1.4.231). The word is sometimes synonymous with "reflection," as in the quotation from Barclay cited above, with the usage occasionally found in Shakespeare, as in Richard II: "The shadow of your sorrow hath destroy'd / The shadow of your face" (4.1.292-93); or in Richard III: "Shine out, fair sun, till I have bought a glass, / That I may see my shadow as I pass" (1.2.262-63). Understanding "Lear's shadow" in this sense, it is reasonable to suppose that the Fool might augment the words with Lear's actual reflection by raising a mirror to his master's face.¹⁷

This seems the more likely if we consider that at that very moment the King has briefly closed his eyes:

Lear: Does any here know me? This is not Lear.
Does Lear walk thus? speak thus? Where are his eyes?
Either his notion weakens, his discernings
Are lethargied—Ha! waking? 'Tis not so.
Who is it that can tell me who I am?
Fool: Lear's shadow.

(1.4.226-31)

The enraged king can hardly believe that the insulting events of the scene are happening to him: he must be asleep. As he speaks his astonishment, he feigns a sleep-walker's lethargy. He shuts his eyes: "Where are his eyes?"; and opens them with the words "Ha! waking?" Thus the Fool has time to position himself while Lear staggers absurdly as a somnambulist about the stage.¹⁸ The tragic "Who is it that can tell me who I am?" from one who so slenderly knows himself is dramatically answered not only by the Fool's words, "Lear's shadow," but by the presentation of the appropriate emblem of self-knowledge and of folly. Perhaps the jester has another purpose as well. According to Stoic theory well known to Shakespeare, an angry man—as Lear certainly is at this moment—might mitigate his rage, and avert its consequences, if confronted with his reflection in a mirror.¹⁹

IV

It becomes almost problematic to explain the absence of an on-stage mirror in King Lear, so well does this symbol accord with the fundamental themes already mentioned: truth, prudence, folly, instruction, and self-knowledge. Other factors also suggest its place in the iconography of the play. For example, although Lear's jester may be identified by his coxcomb and motley, which are mentioned several times, there is no reference at all to the characteristic "bauble," nor any evidence that he owns one. When he would confer on Caius the status of fool (for following one who is "out of favor"), he offers only his coxcomb. Could it be that he does not have a bauble to offer because he has a mirror in his hand instead?²⁰ Moreover, the looking-glass symbol operates with several glass and mirror images: "I shall not need spectacles," "glass-gazing," "Get thee glass eyes," "see thyself," "Lend me a looking-glass." Its very shape—round, convex, and globe-like in most of our illustrations—repeats the circular figures of the play: coronet, "operation of the orbs," "true blank of thine eye," "O without a figure," "wheel of fire," "wheel come full circle."²¹ And, as the attribute of Prudence placed in the hand of a motley fool, it restates one of the most persistent motifs in King Lear, that of "the world turned upside-down," in which fathers beg blessing of daughters, "the cart draws the horse," "old fools are babes," one "goes to bed at noon," and an aged father outlives his children contrary to the way of nature.

But the Fool's mirror makes an appearance of another kind in Act 3, Scene 2 when, prior to his exit, he declares, "I'll speak a prophecy ere I go." His glass now becomes a magic mirror as he delivers a prophecy in "pseudo-Chaucerian"²² lines:

When priests are more in word than matter;
When brewers mar their malt with water;
When nobles are their tailors' tutors;
No heretics burn'd, but wenches' suitors;
Then shall the realm of Albion
Come to great confusion.
When every case in law is right;
No squire in debt, nor no poor knight;
When slanders do not live in tongues;
Nor cutpurses come not to throngs;
When usurers tell their gold i' th' field;
And bawds and whores do churches build;
Then comes the time, who lives to see't,
That going shall be us'd with feet.
This prophecy Merlin shall make; for I live before his time.

(80-96)

Although there is no definite indication of a glass here, the presence of one would change for the better the delivery of this long speech. Instead of facing the audience, the Fool would gaze prophet-like into his mirror, intoning the lines with appropriate antics.²³

What makes this interpretation more likely is that the magic mirror is the usual tool of prognosticators in the art and literature of the period. Magic glasses are discussed in Reginald Scot's Discouerie of Witchcraft and in comparable literature.²⁴ One appears in Beaumont and Fletcher's The Bloody Brother, in Greene's Frier Bacon, and in Chaucer's "Squire's Tale":

This mirour eek, that I have in myn hond,
Hath swich a myght that men may in it see
Whan ther shal fallen any adversitee
Unto youre regne or to youreself also,
And openly who is youre freend or foo.

(132-36)²⁵

Shakespeare himself refers to one who "like a prophet / Looks in a glass" (Measure for Measure 2.2.94-95), and he places a prophetic mirror in the hand of Banquo's eighth king to show Macbeth the future Stuart line. Most important, the magician Merlin employs an enchanted mirror in Spenser's Faerie Queene (a known source for King Lear) through which the whole world can be seen and the future foretold. The Fool's mention of Merlin at the close of his "prophecy" confirms the likelihood that a prognostic glass was intended in Lear also.²⁶ Indeed, the Fool fantastically declares that he is acting the part of Merlin "before his time."

V

The hypothesis that Lear's Fool was intended to carry a mirror on the stage is strengthened by accumulation. The supposition that the Fool makes mouths in an actual glass becomes more credible because he appears to have a mirror in three other instances ("Lear's shadow," "The other found out there," and "I'll speak a prophecy"). One naturally looks for other citations which would verify further, and some possibilities deserve mention in closing. For example, the Fool might be entertaining himself with his glass in this passage:

Fool: Shalt see thy other daughter will use thee kindly, for though she's as like this as a crab's like an apple, yet I can tell what I can tell.

Lear: What canst tell, boy?

Fool: She will taste as like this as a crab does to a crab. Thou canst tell why one's nose stands i' th' middle on's face?

(1.5.14-20)

The play on "crab" (meaning crab apple, but with the implication of a "crabby" face); the talk of exact likeness; the emphatic use of "this" in both lines 15 and 18, which may signal sour faces grimaced for the benefit of the audience; the "telling" of things to come; and the riddle about the location of one's nose together indicate, or at least strongly suggest, that the Fool is regarding himself in a mirror as he speaks.²⁷

Finally, there is an instance at the end of the play which, although also uncertain, could dramatically modify our perception of that pitiful and terrible scene. Enter Lear with Cordelia in his arms. Frantically he calls for a looking-glass, hoping she might yet be alive: "If that her breath will mist or stain the stone, / Why then she lives" (5.3.263-64). The heart-rending sorrow of this scene replicates the ending of The Rape of Lucrece, for there, too, "children predecease progenitors" (1756), leaving a father to lament a daughter's death. In these strikingly similar denouments, the identical image, that of the mirror, is evoked. Lucrece becomes for her sorrowing father a "Poor broken glass" in which he sees reflected the face of death (1758-61).²⁸ Lear, lacking a glass, desperately tries a feather, which does not stir. Is the mirror ever brought as he commands?²⁹ No stage direction indicates that it is, but if it is, surely it would be the long-absent Fool's own mirror, cracked now to signify his death, but recognizable to all, and a pathetic reminder of a "great thing of us forgot." Perhaps it is the sight of this very object which suggests to King Lear the remarkably ambiguous "And my poor fool is hang'd" (5.3.306), for it would be as if the body of the Fool were carried onto the stage. At this insupportable moment, Fool and daughter actually seem confused in Lear's failing mind. Moreover, because the Fool apparently is played by the same actor that boys Cordelia, the Shakespearean audience would respond in a similar way to their gradually merging identities, associating both together at last with the same transcendent principles of truth and selfless love.³⁰ And then, the dead Fool mystically present, a new and final truth would be told. Held to the lifeless mouth of Cordelia, but clair-voyantly reflecting the forgotten Fool, the mirror would become in the hand of the expiring king a symbol of the ultimate truth of death and of the ultimate self-knowledge.

Notes

¹ Shakespeare quotations are taken from The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston, 1974).

² For an example, see C. Herbert Gilliland, "King Lear III.ii.25-36: The Fool's 'Codpiece' Song," English Language Notes, 22, no. 2 (1984), 16-19.

³ Cf., The Winter's Tale (1.2.116-17): "making practic'd smiles, / As in a looking-glass"; or A Midsummer Night's Dream (3.2.238): "Make mouths upon me when I turn my back." A fair lady with a fool at her feet regards her visage in a glass in Brosamer's engraving, "Le Fou et la Femme," reproduced in Raimond van Marie, Iconographie de l'art profane au moyen-age et a la renaissance (New York, 1971), II, p. 453, fig. 485.

⁴ "Wits Miserie, and the Worlds Madnesse," in The Complete Works of Thomas Lodge, ed. E. W. Grosse (New York, 1963), IV, p. 84.

⁵ Quoted in Olive Mary Busby, Studies in the Development of the Fool in the Elizabethan Drama (London, 1923), p. 66.

⁶ Busby, p. 41. Other complaints of "scurvey" and "Mimik" faces "match't with monarchs, and with mighty kings" are noted in Leslie Hotson, Shakespeare's Motley (New York, 1952), pp. 86-87.

⁷ William R. Elton, "King Lear" and the Gods (San Marino, Calif, 1966), p. 303, notes: "The Renaissance secularization of folly increasingly transformed it from a context of sinfulness to one of imprudence."

⁸ Sebastian Brant, Shyp of Folys of the World, trans. Alexander Barclay (1509); also see T. H. Jamieson's edition of Barclay's The Ship of Fools (Edinburg, 1874).

⁹ Jamieson Vol. I, p. 10.

¹⁰ Jamieson p. 17.

¹¹ Nigellus Wireker, The Book of D aun Burnel the Ass: Nigellus Wireker's "Speculum stultorum, " trans., intro. and notes by Graydon W. Regenos (Austin, Texas, 1959), p. 23.

¹² Although the owl is often associated with wisdom, it is also frequently used as a symbol of folly, stupidity, ignobility, and drunkenness. In Troilus and Cressida (2.1.90), Ajax calls Thersites a "vile owl." See Seymour Slive, "On the Meaning of Frans Hals' 'Malle Babbe,'" Burlington, 105 (1963), 432-36; also, Enid Welsford, The Fool: His Social and Literary History (London, 1935), p. 223 illustrates fools with their owl.

¹³ Herbert Grabes, The Mutable Glass: Mirror-imagery in Titles and Texts of the Middle Ages and English Renaissance, trans. Gordon Collier (Cambridge, Eng., 1982).

¹⁴ To expand on these themes, or to cite the scholarship, would prove a monumental task, far beyond the scope of this essay. Truth differs in appearance from Prudence in that the former is frequently nude and holds a balance. For an examination of the iconography of truth, see Ivan Gaskell, "Vermeer, judgment and truth," Burlington, 126, (1984), 557-61. The mirror of Prudence also signifies self-reflection. Socrates was remembered to have exhorted his pupils to "know" themselves, and indeed to view themselves each day in a looking-glass to reflect on their deportment. See Grabes, pp. 137-39, for the "Socratic" mirror as the way to self-knowledge and self-correction. The mirror symbolizes self-knowledge in Julius Caesar (1.2.51-70), e.g., "And since you know you cannot see yourself / So well as by reflection, I, your glass, / Will modestly discover to yourself / That of yourself which you yet know not of."

¹⁵ E.g., The Riverside Shakespeare, p. 1262, n. 147; the Arden King Lear, ed. Kenneth Muir (London, 1972), contains a similar gloss.

¹⁶ Perhaps "sweet fool" refers to the one who holds up the mirror, while "bitter fool" means the one who is obliged to see himself reflected there. The expression, "found out there," contains a clever play on words: "Found out" means "discovered," while "out there" refers to the world within the looking-glass.

¹⁷ Marvin Rosenberg, The Masks of King Lear (Berkeley, 1972) p. 107, states parenthetically, "A mirror in Fool's hand would multiply ironies. He is Lear's looking-glass. Does Lear himself carry a mirror?" Elsewhere (pp. 118-19) Rosenberg suggests that the Fool may hold a mirror up to show Lear "who he is." In the Quartos, the words "Lear's shadow?" are spoken in the interrogative by Lear, not the fool, and although this is not the widely accepted version, it is possible that Lear himself utters these words in response to the mirror thrust before him.

¹⁸ The crux of this interpretation is that "walk" means "sleepwalk." See Lawrence Rosinger, "Shakespeare's King Lear, I.iv.226-230," Explicator, 41, no. 4 (1983), 8; and Macbeth, 5.1.2-3: "When was it she last walk'd?" (my italics).

¹⁹ Grabes, p. 139.

²⁰ In Renaissance illustrations of fools, their baubles sometimes are graced with a carved fool's face, so that the clownish holder might confront or converse with his own image. To replace this with a mirror is consistent and plausible.

²¹ See Rolf Soellner, "King Lear and the Magic of the Wheel," Shakespeare Quarterly, 35 (1984), 274-89. He states, "The play of Shakespeare in which the figures of circle and wheel are most prominent is King Lear," and notes that most of the circular images in Lear are vertical, like the Wheel of Fortune, rather than horizontal, like the coronet. Elton, pp. 135-36, discusses cyclic themes and wheel imagery. The Fool's advice to Kent about a great wheel rolling down a hill (2.4.71-77) could be demonstrated with the round mirror, another "vertical" circle, serving as the wheel. Imagine how he would use its handle to pantomime "lest it break thy neck."

²² As glossed in the Arden edition, the style of the lines quoted "are a parody of some pseudo-Chaucerian verses to be found in Puttenham, Arte of English Poesie." Busby, pp. 69-70, points out that mock prophecy speeches of this kind are not unusual for clowns, and cites examples. Cf. Regan's words, "Jesters do oft prove prophets" (5.3.71). The "prognostic fool" theme occurs earlier. Gulled into believing in Edgar's perfidy, Gloucester finds confirmation of astrological prophecies: "This villain of mine comes under the prediction" (1.2.109-10).

²³ For example, upon "Then shall the realm of Albion / Come to great confusion," the Fool might turn the glass upside-down, figuring the "topsy-turvy world," which his speech essentially describes.

²⁴ For a discussion of the magic mirror, see Grabes, pp. 125-30.

²⁵The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, ed. F. N. Robinson (Boston, 1957), p. 129.

²⁶ See Roland M. Smith, "King Lear and the Merlin Tradition," Modern Language Quarterly, 1 (1946), 153-74. The author notes that the many references to Merlin literature in Lear argue that the Fool's "prophecy" lines are authentically Shakespeare's (154).

²⁷ It is remarkable that in The Taming of the Shrew (2.1.225-33), "crab" is associated not only with a sour face, but with a fool's coxcomb and a mirror.

²⁸ The father's lament over his dead daughter at the end of The Rape of Lucrece (1751-76) bears other comparisons with King Lear: "If children predecease progenitors, / We are their offspring, and they none of ours" (1756-57) is a monde renversé idea comparable to many in King Lear. Lucretius "counterfeits to die with her" (1776), as Lear actually does with Cordelia. See also 1812-13 and 1819-20 for fool motifs resembling King Lear. Cf. Truth's mirror in plate 6, which also reflects "a bare-bon'd death by time outworn" (Lucrece, 1761).

²⁹ Rosenberg, pp. 313-14, calls this looking-glass "a grim metaphor for the whole search for identity," but believes that both feather and glass are figments of Lear's disordered imagination. In Richard II (4.1.265ff), a king calls for a glass which is brought, and which he turns to a symbol of vanitas by dashing it to the ground.

³⁰ See Richard Abrams, "The Double Casting of Cordelia and Lear's Fool: A Theatrical View," Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 27 (1985), 354-68, which shows how audience awareness of double casting "heightens the play's pathos by inducing an ironic consciousness." E. A. J. Honigmann, Shakespeare: Seven Tragedies: The Dramatist's Manipulation of Response (London, 1976), p. 116, believes that at the end of the play, "Cordelia and the Fool have become one in Lear's mind."