SOURCE: "The Tragi-Comic Dimensions of Lear's Fool," in Costerus: Essays in English and American Language and Literature, Vol. 5, 1972, pp. 197-226.

[Below, Wood examines the Fool's function in King Lear, demonstrating the relation of the Fool to Lear's personal development.]

For a century and a half—1681-1838—Nahum Tate's version of King Lear pre-empted the stage in preference to Shakespeare's text. Tate's version restored Lear his throne, betrothed Edgar and Cordelia, and omitted the Fool as indecorous to tragedy. The rich texture and meaning of the drama suffered as much, perhaps, from blotting out the Fool's role as by superimposing the happy and false denouément.

Critics have noted the many ways in which the Gloucester subplot adds overtones and complexity to the main plot and theme. Some hold that Gloucester's story illustrates not so much a less subtle and more physical level of the Lear tale as another dimension of the Lear character and theme. The role of the Fool, too, though complex to unravel, may reveal still another dimension of the King.

Those attempting analyses of the function of the Fool in King Lear have expressed divergent, sometimes self-contradictory views, at times misrepresenting or misinterpreting both the Fool's character and function. Nor have I found a complete analysis. This failure to see clearly what the Fool contributes leaves unprobed a significant tragic depth; for to examine fully the Fool's role is to go deep into the heart, mind, and soul of Lear and into the tragi-comic structure of the world's most complex tragedy.

One cannot, I think, dispose of the Fool by saying, "Here is a wise man acting the part of a fool." Nor does the inversion, "Surely, this is a fool acting the part of a wise man," explain his function. Both are over-simplifications. Hazlitt's contention that the Fool is essential for three apposite reasons—to serve as a "grotesque ornament" to the heathen setting, to provide comic relief in circumstances which might otherwise strain pity and fear to the breaking point, and to carry pathos to its highest possible level—is one sort of over-simplification. Rümelin's scoffing at the three fools on the heath—one really crazy (Lear), one pretending madness (Edgar), and one a professional fool (Lear's Fool)—satisfying the Elizabethan craving for the ridiculous and madness in the "finest style," is a grosser sort of over-simplification.

Diverging almost every direction on many levels of simplicity and complexity from those two opposite views are the most commonly held critical opinions, ranging from the contention that the Fool's constant jibes are mere trivia to which Lear pays not the slightest heed to the judgment of Franz Horn and Oechelhaüser that he is the grandest, the most intellectual, and the most tragic of Shakespeare's rich gallery of fools.¹ Indeed, Ernest Schick praised the Fool as the chief person in the tragedy.²

To add problematical complexity, the Fool's identity, like that of other characters in the tragedy (notably Lear's), is ambiguous. Some critics have identified the Fool and Cordelia, stressing Lear's deep love for both and the empathy between the two, illustrated by the Fool's pining away during the two days of Cordelia's absence from court. Such critics stress also the facts that only the Fool and Cordelia speak unvarnished Truth, that they never appear together on the stage, and that after the Fool goes "to bed at noon," Cordelia arrives shortly to finish the task the Fool had so bravely and foolhardily begun—that of restoring Lear to sanity and to an acceptable, livable sort of self-knowledge. If one accepts this identification of the Fool and Cordelia, Lear's pitiful cry at the end, "And my poor fool is hang'd" possesses ambivalent and representational significance, like almost every other line of dialogue and episode of this highly complex play.

At times, Lear has even been identified with his Fool, a particularly pertinent viewpoint if one accepts Maynard Mack's contention that folk and medieval versions of the archetypal theme of the "Abasement of the Proud King" are formative source materials. In the best-known version of the archetypal theme of humbling the proud and exalting the humble—that of "King Robert of Sicily"—the ruler who is debased is deprived neither palace nor kingdom but is made the court Fool and is forced to eat with the "palace dogs."³

Finally, the single identity of the Fool is multiplied by that of every other character; for before King Lear arrives at its conclusion, every character is called a fool (and acts like some sort of fool), either by the Fool himself or by some other character in the play.⁴

When the many views are juxtaposed, one is struck by the wide range of ideas regarding the character, function, age, ultimate fate, and identity of Lear's Fool. To unravel or piece together the puzzle promises new insights. I propose, therefore, to analyze the function of the Fool in the tragedy of King Lear. Simultaneously, I shall relate his role first to the growth in Lear's character and second to the ironic tone the Fool makes us aware of and to the tragicomic structure which results from the Fool's collision with characters responsible for the tragic events which ensue. I hope that such an analysis and approach will throw light on the Fool's identity and reveal a significant tragic theme.

Just as Lear takes the disguised Kent into his service, the Fool runs on the stage, ready and willing to serve Lear too. In almost the same breath Lear has ordered one attendant, "Go you, and tell my daughter I would speak with her" (I.iv.83 & 46) and another servant, "call hither my fool" (I.iv.46).⁵ Lear's reply to the knight reminding (or informing) him that since Cordelia's departure his Fool has "much pined away," (I.iv.80) shows that he recognizes a close attachment between Cordelia and the Fool and shows also considerable irritation regarding some details of the division of his kingdom and his banishment of Kent and Cordelia, already too painful to discuss. "No more of that; I have noted it well," (I.iv.81) he remonstrates; and then calls for Goneril and his Fool, unaware of why he needs the Fool during the first interview with Goneril since the parceling out of his kingdom. But the knight's planting the suggestion of a "faint neglect of late," which Lear had attributed to his own "jealous curiosity," rather than to purposeful or willful neglect or ingratitude, indicates that he senses, at least subconsciously, why he needs the Fool. He may already see dimly the willfulness of his whim in dividing his kingdom on the basis of public protestations of love and the monstrousness of his banishing from his kingdom those who love him best—Kent and Cordelia. He has, of course, to date very little insight and has had no time to consider or to recognize that those acts were occasioned in part not only by the unexpected turn of dialogue and events, but also by many other factors, not the least of which is his own rash and adamant nature.

In some clever concentrated dialogue prior to Goneril's entrance, the Fool proceeds to label Kent, Lear, Goneril and Regan, and himself fools, and introduces an ironic tone. First, he proffers Kent his coxcomb, insisting he needs to hire him, too, and that if Kent chooses to follow Lear, he must wear coxcombs; for only a fool would follow a "great wheel" as it rolls down hill. Having called Kent a fool, he adds, thoughtfully, that he wishes he had two coxcombs and two daughters. Lear asks why, and he replies (labeling Lear a fool), "If I gave them all my living, I'd keep my coxcombs myself (I.iv.120-121). Then throwing his coxcomb to Lear (rather than to Kent to whom he had first offered it), he audaciously says, "Beg another of thy daughters" (I.iv.121-122). And that statement takes in Goneril and Regan—as fools.

The ironic tone becomes increasingly apparent as Lear threatens to have the Fool whipped for overstepping his "unlicensed" license. "Truth's a dog, must to kennel" (I.iv.124) the Fool replies. Though Lear is not yet ready to listen to or to believe truth, the Fool forces it upon Kent by insisting that anyone who takes the part of someone out of favor is a fool immediately establishing an ironic tone, pervasive until the Fool vanishes from the tragedy and influencing the remaining action. We recognize the irony because Kent as faithful and true counsellor has chosen to cast his lot with Lear, who he knows will need his services, despite the King's scorning his advice and banishing his person. To make clear the tone, the Fool insists, "Why this fellow has banished two on's daughters and did the third a blessing against his will; if thou follow him thou must needs wear my coxcomb" (I.iv.114-116). The Fool perceives that Lear has banished Goneril and Regan and blessed Cordelia, both literally and metaphorically; for he knows the two older daughters will not live up to the trust Lear has placed in their hands. And Lear has saved Cordelia from the mercenary Duke of Burgundy, but such interpretation extends, rather than limits, the ironic tone.

The literal contrast between the Fool's words and Lear's acts distills the ironic tone. The Fool's assessment, moreover, precedes the first bitter scene between Lear and Goneril and demonstrates prophetic insight. Indeed, only protestations of enduring filial love have been expressed. Apparently, the Fool is aware of the previously expressed and potential hypocrisy of Goneril and Regan as is Cordelia. According to station he is a fool, but in reality he is not so great a fool (as the world views such matters) as is his master.

More concentrated than the way Shakespeare establishes tone is his method of creating an ironic tragicomic structure. Lear's command, "Tell my daughter I would speak with her" and "call hither my fool" initiates that structure by bringing Goneril and his Fool into collision. For Lear has begun the interweaving of events simultaneously both comic and tragic and has converted King Lear into both a Commedia and a Purgatorio.

In dialogue designed, in part at least, to give Lear additional insight before Goneril appears, Kent, Lear, and the Fool use the word "nothing" in literal, ironic, and tragic contexts. Kent's remark that the Fool's platitudes, "Have more than thou showest, / Speak less than thou knowest, / Lend less than thou owest / Ride more than thou goest," (I.iv.131-134) mean nothing elicits the Fool's clever retort that they are, then, like the breath of an "unfeed lawyer / You gave me nothing for't" (I.iv.142-143).⁶ Kent's insistence that the Fool has said nothing and the Fool's conviction that Lear now possesses noting lead the Fool to ask Lear the tantalizing and pointed question, "Can you make no use of nothing, Uncle?" (I.iv.143-144). For the Fool is puzzled by Lear's mistakes and capriciousness and poignantly aware that much will come of Lear's "nothing."

In answer, Lear unwittingly repeats (except for change in tense) the devastatingly ironical condemnation of Cordelia in the first scene, "Nothing will come of nothing," when he falls into the Fool's trap by replying "Why, no boy; nothing can be made out of nothing" (I.iv.145-146).⁷ Part of the intense irony of the first "nothing" is that Cordelia's naivety and truth stand naked and bare before the cunning hypocrisy of her sisters; part of the irony of the second "nothing" is that Lear will shortly be stripped of all retainers and will stand naked and bare before the universe. But in neither case does Lear seem aware of the metaphorical, ironical, and tragic meanings he has attached to the word—"nothing." And he glimpses but faintly, if at all, the ironical circumstances in which he has placed himself. The fool, wishing Lear to define his situation clearly, now chooses to place the word in literal context, bidding Kent tell the King that the rent of all his lands now comes to precisely "nothing." For Lear will not "believe a fool," though he will listen to no one else.

Lear lashes out, "A bitter fool!"

Fool. Dost thou know the difference, my boy,
between a bitter fool and a sweet one?

Lear. No, lad; teach me.

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

[pointing to himself]

The other found out there.

[pointing to Lear]

Lear. Dost thou call me fool, boy?

(I.iv.150-161)

Apparently Lear has ignored (or failed to note) when the Fool has previously called him a fool. The clever ironical reply the Fool now makes—that all other titles Lear was born with he has given away—unites tone and structure in the Fool's recognition of the types of Fool he and Lear represent—the Fool "sweet," Lear "bitter." The Fool's antics and words are comic with tragic overtones and insight; Lear's are tragic, with comic undertones and blindness. Those facts are acutely dramatized by Lear's giving away his land and titles, reducing him to Fool in deed and position. Again, allusion to the medieval tale of Robert of Sicily may be pertinent. King Robert repents only after following the usurping angel's retinue to Rome where neither the Emperor nor Pope, though former fellow rulers, recognize him but call him a "mad fool."⁸

With his egg analogy, the Fool then points out to Lear the kind of crown he now wears and the sort of power he now exercises. Cut in two and the meat devoured, only two eggshells remain. The shells represent Lear's empty, impotent crown and power since he divided his kingdom and gave the "meat" to his elder daughters—Goneril and Regan. He has upset the order of privilege: the chain of being, the relative position of man and beast. Instead of majestically straddling his ass (as a king should), Lear has placed the ass on his own back and dragged it over the dirt. Lear totally lacked wit in his bald crown when he gave his golden one away.

So summarizes the Fool and sings out sadly the ironical humor of Lear's tragic predicament: when wise men lose their wits and act like fools, what can one expect of a mere fool? A king, reduced to nothing, reduces a Fool to less than nothing, unless the total order of the universe has been reverted. The Fool says that it has indeed been partly reverted (and by Lear himself), for he is better off than Lear. At least he knows what he is and where he stands and what kind of fool he is and what kind of fool Lear is. But Lear is "nothing," and by his own deeds, and unaware that he is nothing.

Sensing part of the truth of the Fool's bitter-sweet accusations and song, Lear asks the Fool how long he has been so full of songs. The Fool replies, I have been singing, sadly and ironically, ever since you made your daughters your mother. When you gave them rule, you put "down thy breeches" and

Then they for sudden joy did weep,
And I for sorrow sung,
That such a king should play bo-peep,
And go the fools among.

(I.iv.191-194).

The paradox of each line—weeping for joy, singing for sorrow, a king, such as Lear, playing "bo-peep" and placing himself by his words and acts among fools—is related to the self-knowledge the Fool knows Lear must eventually gain and to the tragic episodes through which Lear will arrive at that knowledge.

The jibes of the Fool and the services of the disguised Kent constantly set before Lear truths which are very difficult for him to accept. The Fool wishes, given the situation he finds Lear and himself in, that he could lie. Truth is bitter, not sweet, in a realm upset by Lear's capriciousness, his unwillingness to rule, though king. "Thy truth shall be thy dower" (I.i.110), Lear had threatened Cordelia when she replied she loved him neither more nor less than a daughter should love her father. Ironically, Truth is all the dower Cordelia needs to reveal her worth, and Truth is all the dower Goneril and Regan need to reveal their hypocrisy and potential viciousness. And bitter Truth is the dower the "sweet Fool" gives. Lear and that which the "bitter Fool"—Lear himself—is forced to accept, having given everything else away. Ironically, Lear does not realize that his rash acts have made Truth and Love the only dower for every character in the play. Ironically, too, "bitter Truth" ultimately sends the "bitter Fool" sanely mad.

At this early point in the play, truth is Lear's only possession; unlike crown and kingdom and Cordelia's love, he has never fully possessed it. Sweet lies, prior to Cordelia's bitter truth, have helped initiate a tragic situation for Lear, Cordelia, and her siters. Ironically, the first scene (probably unwittingly on Lear's part) had been a test of Truth and Love, with property, according to Lear's initial plan, to be apportioned on those bases. His plan had gone awry in his own royal court, and only sweet lies prevailed in an intensely realistic dramatic situation.

Lear's next admonition—that he will have no lying in his kingdom—is especially ironical. The Fool, in particular, he will have whipped, if he lies. The King can, however, but dimly distinguish truth from lies and is having much difficulty accepting the truth which the Fool constantly reminds him of.

The Fool wonders by what stretch of imagination the King and his elder daughters could be called "kin," (a matter which will soon cause Lear to marvel). Note, in particular, the Fool says, how Goneril and Regan will have him whipped for telling the truth, but how Lear threatens to have him whipped for lying, and sometimes he is whipped for holding his peace. He says he would rather be anything than a fool. "And yet I would not be thee, uncle; thou hast pared thy wit o' both sides, and left nothing i' the middle: here comes one o' the parings" (I.iv.199-206). Too subtly for Lear's present perception, the Fool has informed him that Goneril and Regan have lied in their protestations of love, that they will scourge those who tell the truth. At that moment Goneril—one of the "parings"—arrives and jolts Lear into the recognition that all is not well in the kingdom he has given away.

Lear as "nothing"—juxtaposed between the Fool (less than nothing but aware of what he is and how he arrived at his position) and Goneril (unaware that she is a "paring," rapidly to degenerate to "nought")—touches precariously every facet of life, ranging from sweetness to bitterness, from truth to falseness, from comedy to tragedy. That juxtaposition begins with Goneril's stunning Lear with bitter, vituperative words.

We are in part prepared for the Fool's multiple function when Goneril questions Oswald, "Did my father strike my gentleman for chiding of his fool? (I.iii.1-2) We know at that moment that antipathy exists between Goneril and the Fool, between Lear and Oswald, between Kent and Oswald, in fact among all characters as they line up in the two camps of Lear and Oswald, or, if you prefer, Lear and Goneril. For Oswald is a bitter, ironical, foolish counterpart of his mistress, as the Fool is a bitter, ironical, foolish counterpart of Lear, what Lear is when he put down his breeches to become child of his daughters, what he is when he put aside his scepter but hoped to retain the power which the scepter represents, what he is as the proud king humbled, what he is when he becomes a fool.

The Fool has entered the stage of this great tragedy, a smile at his lips, a quip on his tongue. Goneril enters, scene four, a frown on her face, bitter, unnatural words on her lips. Lear cares not, he says, for the "frontlet" Goneril puts on and observes that of late (the last two days) she has been too much "i' the frown."

The tragi-comic structure becomes intense when Goneril and the Fool collide with his words to Lear, "Thou was a pretty fellow when thou hadst no care for her frowning. Now thou art an O without a figure. I am better than thou art now. I am a fool, thou art nothing" (I. iv. 210-215). And from this point onward in the tragedy, both Goneril and the Fool help Lear to arrive at self-knowledge through bitterness and sweetness, evil disloyalty to kin and faithful loyalty to a former master, with the recurring frowns and smiles, quips and scathing words.

The Fool, despite what some have called his cynical social views, always has a firm faith and hold on reality, blended with the ideal. And he tries, with every word he utters, to help Lear gain a comparable hold; for he knows Lear will need it desperately throughout the tragedy he himself has initiated. Part of the Fool's knowledge of real life lies in his recognition that man is secure if he does not have to ingratiate himself with other men, if he is self-sufficient in goods, in love, in affection, and if he does not have to lean on others or court their favor. Those are the few advantages of being an absolute monarch, such as Lear must have been three days before this episode.

Shooting daggerous frowns at the Fool for his latest comment about his now being better off than Lear, Goneril bids the Fool hold his tongue—a thing the Fool simply cannot do when something needs to be said or when a situation becomes too tense. So, despite his promise, the Fool proceeds to sing another ditty.

"Mum, mum
He that keeps nor crust nor crumb,
Weary of all, shall want some."

(I, iv, 216-218)

In more innocuous form, he has sung the jist of what he has just said. Pointing to Lear, he adds, "That is a shealed peascod" (I. iv. 219), (a shelled peapod), not substantially different from the analogy of the two crowns of meat Lear had given away, but more direct and more "all-licensed." Clearly, Goneril has spoken a smattering of truth when she maintains that the Fool is entirely unrestricted as to what he may say.

The Fool's primary and most obvious function to this point in the tragedy is repeatedly to show Lear the willfulness of his whim in dividing his kingdom on the basis of public declarations of love and the monstrousness of his banishing Kent and Cordelia. While reminding Lear of those truths, the Fool constantly introduces an ironical tone, shifting between humor, satire, and cynicism, but remaining basically ironical. That tone and his quips and quirks in the most tragic situations place the comic and the tragic alongside until the climactic scene of the third act, at which point the Fool disappears from the tragedy. Thereafter, an ironical tone is interwoven with pathos and brutal tragedy. Both Edgar and Cordelia in their relations with their fathers add pathos to the irony, and that addition tends to soften the tragedy, as in the first three acts the Fool's humor and pathos and irony soften and concentrate it. Bitter irony, however, is dominant in the scene at the end in which Edgar and Albany become so preoccupied with the punishment of evil characters, specifically Edmund (but Goneril and Regan also) that they forget all about the good characters—Cordelia and Lear—causing Albany, when he remembers, to cry out, "Great thing of us forgot!" (V. iii. 237) That pre-occupation with the punishment of evil results in Cordelia's being hanged and Lear's dying of a broken heart, ironical happenings as in life itself. So is Lear's dying, just as he may think he has faint indication that Cordelia breaths and lives.

Hereafter I shall illustrate additional ways in which the Fool contributes to Lear's growth. In order to eliminate repetition of episodes and dialogue, I shall retain my original organizational pattern, and point out how almost everything the Fool does and says not only aids Lear's character development but also adds to the ironic tone and in increasingly excruciating intensity places the comic and tragic alongside, at times to a degree very nearly unbearable.

The Fool's initial function, we have seen, was to make Lear fully aware of what he has done, what the probable results of his actions will be, what kinds of daughters he truly has fathered, what sort of kingdom he now lives in but no longer rules over, and what kind of men and social order are found in that kingdom. In others words, his function as an "all-licensed" Fool is to tell truth, the dower which Lear, unwittingly and angrily, has bequeathed every character, including himself, and which is, moreover, the only dower which any character possesses from the first to the last scene of Shakespeare's greatest tragedy.

The Fool has held up before Lear's eyes a mirror of the crown he wears; the power his two eldest daughters wield; the social and economic order and disorder in his kingdom (in reality no longer his); the way a wise, but not necessarily good, man should treat a person out of favor. A good man, the Fool insists, should maintain a position which renders him immune to the buffetings of fate and above currying favor from daughters. A wise man should not follow a great man, rolling down hill. The Fool's ditties and platitudes often express expedient ways of getting along with a minimum of friction in a corrupt (or amoral) society. At the same time, he questions the ethics of his own axioms and even more profoundly, the ethics of his social world. So almost every assertion he makes contains double or triple-edged irony.

Angered at Goneril's sudden shift from smiles to frowns, from praise to blame, from fawning to fuming, Lear cries out that he has another daughter who will respect and honor him, as should a daughter to whom her old father has given his all. We recognize the irony of Lear's words, even before the humiliating scene with Regan is enacted our eyes, because of the tone the Fool has injected into the play We likewise recognize the irony of Goneril's contentions that Lear's retainers have proved unruly, that she fears Lear himself condones their actions, and that his retainers are rapidly converting her "graced palace" into a tavern, or a brothel. The double-edged irony is that neither Lear nor Goneril knows it is she who is fast converting her own palace into a brothel, but that we and the Fool realize Goneril has unwittingly spoken a partial truth. When Lear shrilly shouts that he has another daughter who will not reduce the number of his retainers, we suspect, and the Fool knows, that Regan will reduce them from fifty to twenty-five, and from twenty-five to none.

Goneril, moreover, has scarcely concluded her hypocritical, smooth-sounding, "gracious" insults when the Fool observes, "For you know nuncle, / The hedge sparrow fed the cuckoo so long, / That it had it head bit off by it young. / So out went the candle, and we were left darkling" (I. iv. 234-237). The second and third lines are an old adage, but so true of Lear's predicament: he is left "darkling," his head dangerously close to being bitten off by his own offspring. But the Fool stands in pure light, revealing to the King his ultimate fate and the fate of all old men, throughout all time who do too much for ungrateful and unloving children.

Between the two most tragic questions which Lear asks, questions saturated with pathos, lie the Fool's most flippant statements. Appalled at the audacity and hypocrisy and disrespect of Goneril, Lear doubts his paternity of such an "unnatural hag." He doubts, moreover, the evidence of his own senses, and his own identity. So the tortured questions, "Are you our daughter?" and "Doth any here know me . . . Who is it that can tell me who I am?" (I. iv. 238, 246, & 250) reveal a search for a legitimate explanation for Goneril's existence and, more importantly in this context, for Lear's own self-identity. Between those two soul-searching questions, emphasizing and complicating them, are the Fool's sardonic and flippant question and exclamation, "May not an ass know when the cart draws the horse?" and "Whoop, Jug! I love thee" (I. iv. 244-245). Obviously, from the Fool's point of view Lear has sunk below the level of a fool to that of an ass (as in archetypal tales), and again he reminds Lear how disastrously he has upset the usual and prevailing order of the universe by making his daughters his mother. The Fool, moreover, has an instant reply to Lear's probing for identity. The King is but "Lear's shadow."

With uncanny insight, the Fool anticipates both questions and answers: Lear thus is but a shadow, standing in utter darkness. Only the Fool attempts to answer Lear's question, and his answer strikes closer to the heart of the King's tragedy than any assertion yet made.

Goneril, as anxious to rid herself of the Fool as to rid herself of Lear and his hundred knights, sends him after the King who has left in great haste (and "heat") for Regan, his devoted daughter—(so he thinks), with the command, "After thy master . . . thou more knave than fool" (I. iv. 237-38).⁹ Calling "Nuncle Lear, nuncle Lear," take thy Fool and folly with thee, the Fool runs after Lear, singing another ditty—ironical, amusing, and tragic in content—about a fox and a daughter, sure to go to slaughter if my cap (with coxcombs) "would buy a halter" (I. iv. 337-343). Thus ends the first collision of comic and tragic elements.

The second such collision begins with the Fool's being present when Lear confronts Regan for the first time since the division of his kingdom. First, however, the Fool must prepare Lear for this meeting with Regan, as he had tried to prepare him for what to expect from Goneril. Consequently, the Fool says that if Lear's brains were reverted to his heels (as Lear has reverted order and privilege), he would need no slippers to preserve his brains from chilblains. He simply has no brains, no perception.

In the former scene, the Fool had made Lear half aware of what he had forfeited. Goneril had made him but half afraid he could never regain it. As yet, he feels not totally impotent, for he has still another daughter whom he has not rejected and who he hopes has not rejected him. Whereas Lear has high hopes for a cordial reception of his hundred retainers and himself at Regan's, the Fool "can tell what he can tell: Regan is as much like Goneril as a "crab is to a crab" (I. v. 18-19) Lear needs to know that before he confronts Regan, and the Fool warns him; still the significance of the warning does not dawn upon Lear until he arrives at Gloucester's palace with but half his retinue (the other fifty—wise in the way of the world—have deserted him enroute) and finds Kent in the stock. Then the fact dawns but dimly.

The Fool feels impelled to forewarn Lear before each encounter with Goneril and Regan so that he will survive the shock. The fact that the Fool is present at both initial encounters illustrates again the tragi-comic structure. It is, of course, a moot question which of the "parings" ultimately proves more vicious. Goneril first tells Regan they must "do something i' the heat" (I. 1. 312), but it is Regan who wants to know why Lear needs even one retainer; it is she who says during the night of the awful storm that her father may enter Gloucester's palace, but without a single follower.¹⁰

The Fool does not, however, want Lear to endure more pain than he can bear: he is merely trying to prepare and help him to endure pain. So when the King alludes to his having done "her [Cordelia] wrong," the Fool deftly switches topics to how an oyster makes his shell and to the timely discovery that he knows why a snail has a house. When Lear would know why, he says, "Why to put's head in, not to give it away to his daughters and leave his horns without a case" (I. v. 33-34). As Lear grieves over the "Monster ingratitude" of Goneril, the Fool says if Lear were his fool, he would have him whipped for "being old before he was wise," indirectly telling Lear again the sort of reception Regan will give him.

To divert Lear's attention away from himself and his misery, the Fool startles him with the ridiculous remark, "The reason why the seven stars are no more than seven is a pretty reason." Lear's reply, "Because they are not eight" (I. v. 37-40) pleases the Fool, convinces him he has achieved his objective. He tells Lear he would make a good fool.

Arriving with his reduced retinue at Regan's, Lear is stunned, more than he was by Goneril's bitter words, to find Kent in the stocks. But the Fool is not surprised. He knows too much of life, of privilege and lack of privilege, of those who control purse strings, and of those who are penniless. He tries to jest about Kent's predicament, alludes to his "cruel garters"; but Lear is beginning to awaken from the daze he has been in and demands an explanation. The Fool is willing to provide one, long before Cornwall and Regan do. He attributes Lear's reversal in treatment to his reversal in fortune, "Fathers that wear rags / Do make their children blind; / But fathers that bear [money] bags / Shall see their children kind." (II. iv. 48-51). He who controls fortune controls the affections, he has found. And Lear's experience verifies the Fool's words.

When Kent asks why Lear comes with so few followers, the Fool characteristically remarks that had Kent been placed in the stocks for that question he had well deserved to be. Kent, as usual, would know why. And the Fool's reply is the most expedient advice he ever gives:

We'll set thee to school to an ant, to teach thee there's no labouring i' the winter. All that follow their noses are led by their eyes but blind men; and there's not a nose among twenty but can smell him that's stinking. Let go thy hold when a great wheel runs down hill, lest it break thy neck with following it; but the great one that goes up the hill, let him draw thee after. When a wise man gives thee better counsel, give me mine again: I would have none but knaves follow it, since a fool gives it.

(II. iv. 68-77).

To that metaphorical prose counsel the Fool adds still another ditty which sums up what he has just said:

That sir which serves and seeks for gain,
And follows but for form,
Will pack when it begins to rain,
And leave thee in the storm.
But I will tarry; the fool will stay,
And let the wise man fly:
The knave turns fool that runs away;
The fool no knave, perdy

(II. iv. 79-86).

Both ditty and advice probe Lear's problems, the very basis of his society with its misplaced values. The Fool knows something must be wrong with a world in which a man is loved only so long as he has "money bags," only so long as he is on the uphill road, only so long as he possesses power. What more expedient advice could he give Kent and himself? He asks for his advice to be returned when a wise man supplies something better.

The Fool's experience has showed him that when a man is rapidly slipping, those who remain faithful and loyal to him are fools. Yet those who forsake him are knaves. The Fool confesses himself to be a fool of that sort, perhaps because he prefers being fool to knave.¹¹ One feels strongly that if the Fool were not in his position forced to follow Lear, he would still be one of the faithful disguised followers, as Kent is. Can it be that the Fool has already learned through suffering, through the scorn of the world, not just that inflicted by two ungrateful daughters, the lessons Lear is being forced now to learn about his kingdom, his daughters, and himself? Already, those followers, wise in the way of the world, have deserted Lear, but the Fool's insistence that those who follow the way of the world are knaves condemns the moral basis of that social world.

It is debatable which of the two scenes after the division of kingdom—the first with Goneril or the one with Regan—is more tragi-comic in structure. The second, however, possesses an ironic intenseness which compels the Fool to indulge in fewer amusing or satirical aphorisms and ditties. The first possesses an unexpectedness which causes Lear to exhaust the resources of language in cursing. The second scene, in which Goneril soon joins her sister in usurping the "meat" of Lear's crown, eclipses the Fool's attempts at sad humor or ironical satire and stops the curses in Lear's throat. There are fewer of the Fool's quips because Lear has exhausted the welcome of both unrejected daughters. Humbled, Lear kneels before Regan begging for gratitude and love.

And the Fool's feeble attempts to stay Lear's passion with poorly timed jests of "cockney and eels and buttered hay" do not permit us to forget that the irony of the play is becoming increasingly bitter. Under the new glaring light of double ungratefulness, the Fool's humorous quips, fulfilled, have become fundamentally tragic.

Powerless to further entertain or distract and enlighten or disillusion his King, helpless to shield him longer from pain and suffering, unable to teach him further how to endure, aware of the futility of jesting or shielding Lear, the Fool stands silently by pitying his master, until Lear, utterly exhausted emotionally and spiritually, appeals to him with the agonizing cry, ". . . this heart / Shall break into a hundred thousand flaws / Or ere I'll weep. O fool, I shall go mad!"

And indeed, Lear does go mad in that climactic scene in which the three fools—the professional (Lear's Fool), the assumed (Edgar), and the real (Lear)—"figure away in fine style on the heath,"¹² while the very elements of the universe go mad. Every facet of life, as represented by the witless King and the witty Fool, the disguised beggar and the disguised friend, is uprooted and repositioned by rain, wind, thunder, and fire.

The Fool's function in relation to Lear also shifts. I have showed that after Lear's first willful whim he needed to become acutely aware of what he had done and of the inexorable results. And the Fool performs that function. Later, Lear needed both additional warning and comfort, but more especially he needed a silent participator in his grief. That service, too, the Fool provides. At the crisis, when Nature collaborates with two unnatural hags to scourge Lear, he must have comfort, protection, companionship and love. We are told that throughout the mad heath scene the Fool has tried in vain to "outjest Lear's heart-struck injuries." Even the companionship and love he provides prove inadequate.

Internal and external convulsion of man and cosmos is Shakespeare's most magnificant imaginative tragic conception. Nothing could be more painful than Lear's Blow, winds and crack your cheeks! Rage Blow!

You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout . . .
You sulphurous and thought-executing fires, . . .
Singe my white head! And thou, all-shaking thunder,
Smite flat the thick rotundity o' the world

juxtaposed to the Fool's "O Nuncle, Court holy water in a dry house is better than this rain water out o' door. Good Nuncle, in, and ask thy daughter's blessing. Here's a night pities neither wise man nor fool!" Nor does any dialogue illustrate more painfully the tragi-comic structure (III. ii. 1-13).

The elements of the universe continue "rumbling their bellyful," spitting fire, spouting rain. Meanwhile Lear rejects the Fool's suggestion that it is better to flatter those in high places, those with "money bags," than to suffer so, houseless and bareheaded. The King does not tax the raging elements with unkindness: he never gave them kingdom, called them daughter. Still, he accuses rain, wind, thunder, and fire of collaborating with "two pernicious daughters" in "high-engendered" battle against a head as old, and bare, and white as his, and concludes, "Oh, oh! 'Tis foul!" And, indeed, "'tis foul" (III. ii. 15-24).

Simultaneously trying both to entertain Lear (incapable now of being entertained) and to remind him why he faces the violent storm without a "good headpiece" (a house to put his head in), the Fool sings an indecent ditty about unmarried men who beget children before they have a home to put them in. Gloucester and Lear's predicaments are thus summed up. Lear had truly made "his toe / What his heart should make" (III, ii. 25-35) with the inevitable woe and sleepless nights.¹³

At the very height of the storm, in reply to Kent's question regarding the identity of Lear and him, the Fool asserts, "Grace and a codpiece—that's a wise man and a fool." But at that point, Lear is dangerously close to madness, and the Fool close to being a wise man; so which is "grace," which "codpiece" is ambiguous, like so much else in the tragedy. Shocked that his master whom he has never seen without a golden crown on his white head could have endured such a night bareheaded, Kent leads the King to a hovel.

Lear agrees to seek the shelter, not for himself, but for his Fool, "Poor fool and knave, I have one part in my heart / That's sorry yet for thee" (III. ii. 73-74). At the hovel entrance, Lear, who has probably never before given way for any one to pass, bids his Fool proceed before him out of the storm into shelter. The Fool apparently objects and remonstrates against his King's latest Christian reversion of privilege; but Lear insists, "In, boy, go first. You houseless poverty / Nay, get thee in. I'll pray, and then I'll sleep" (III. iv. 26-27).

The ingratitude of natural daughters, the scourging of the elements, but more than all else, Lear's Fool and Gloucester's son, disguised as fool—gradually teach the pagan Lear two fundamental Christian virtues—compassion and charity.

From the scourging of unnatural men (daughters) and natural elements (rain, wind, thunder, fire) in the presence of the thing itself—Edgar—unaccomodated man—Lear gains a virtue and sees a vision never seen nor possessed before, certainly not in the pre-tragic days as imperious absolute monarch. Looking beyond the blanket without which they would all have been shamed,¹⁴ Lear perceives for the first time in more than eighty years—the thing itself—man reduced to the lowest and exalted to the highest levels. The almost completely mad Lear identifies himself and generic humanity with the assumed mad Edgar to answer the heart-rendering question he had asked in Act I—"Who is there who can tell me who I am?" Lear's probing tragic questions, together with the Fool's quip about Edgar's blanket saving them from shame, combine, as so often in the play, the height of comedy and depth of pathos. Clearly, the tragi-comic structure is becoming increasingly bitter. For Edgar's deceived father has forced him to use his madman's disguise.

Of all cries in the tragedy, the most ironic and penetrating is Lear's tragic acknowledgment, "Thou art the thing itself." Here at the climax his immediate reaction—"Off, off, you lendings! Come unbutton here" (III. iv. 112-113) corresponds to his very last beautiful, ironic, tragic words which release his life, "Pray you undo this button" (V. iii. 308). Self-identity here is basically a social gesture—an attempt to become one with the lowest forked animal—shedding all gowns and furr'd robes. The last "unbuttoning" unites self with the cosmos; but both involve and "undressing" to release and find the real self.

Lear's most profound discovery and the Fool's witty retort, "Prithee, Nuncle, be contented, 'tis a naughty night to swim in;" (III. iv. 114-115) juxtapose the tragic and the amusing to a degree almost too painful to endure. Kent has been shocked to find Lear in the storm—bareheaded. Despite the cleverness of his retort, the Fool would be shocked to see his King, customarily robed in furred gowns, swimming naked in the rain. The Fool adds another tone to the ironic when he says of Gloucester, coming toward them bearing a torch, "Now a little fire in a wild field were like a lecher's heart, a small spark, all the rest on's body cold. Look, here comes a walking fire" (III, iv. 115-119). In view of Gloucester's past lechery, his future blindness, and his present loyalty to Lear, the Fool's comment is comic, lewd, symbolic, and ironically prophetic.

More than any other character in the play, the Fool has helped Lear to arrive at self-discovery in Edgar— the unaccomodated man, who borrows no silk from worms, no furs from beasts, no wool from sheep. "Robes and furr'd gowns" which "hide all" had in the past kept Lear from arriving at self-knowledge, self-fulfillment, self-identity; more tragically, they have kept him from learning compassion, charity, and love. Lear sees Cordelia in the mad Edgar—the rejected daughter, the rejected son—and he goes beyond that vision to self-knowledge: the reason for the rejected Lear.

From his very first appearance with quips and coxcomb, the Fool has been trying to help Lear strip away all falsity all superfluity to discover the thing itself. Lear has just discovered what the Fool apparently has known all along that on a literal level natural man is but a "poor bare forked animal"; but it is also unaccommodated man who embodies those virtues and qualities which make the human predicament livable or bearable. Edgar owes no commodity to Nature; the Fool owes nothing to Society. Lear has but recently discovered that the Fool is "houseless poverty," as Edgar is "poor, bare, forked." From those two "unaccommodated men" Lear learns some Christian virtues and perceives that which reduces man to the level of animals and exalts him to the level of the gods.

Part of the power of episodes which I have analyzed derives, as I have showed, from the juxtaposition of disparate elements: Nature "rumbling its bellyful," weak humanity, a King and a Fool, whose roles have been interchangeably interwoven, the highest and lowest of mankind—at its mercy. The tragic knowledge Lear is forced to accept alongside the bitter tragicomic jests of a motley clown: a witty Fool, and at this point in the tragedy, an almost witless King. The comic and the tragic, the amusingly ironic and the highly serious are interwoven so skillfully that one is scarcely aware of the many ambiguities and contradictions and complexties until he tries to isolate them for purposes of analysis.

Before following Kent into the hovel, the Fool makes a final comment about the nasty night which has tried to destroy both King and Fool and which has, indeed, helped destroy Lear's wits, making Fool and King intellectually equal as Lear's first act had placed them on equal social and economic levels. The Fool sings out that such a night will turn all men to fools and madmen, that it is indeed a "brave night to cool a courtesan," and that men with little wit must be contented with "fortune fit," for "the rain it raineth every day" (III. ii. 74-77). In his present madness with but little wit and less property and overabundant rain, Lear heartily grants the Fool's assertions. And he prays heaven never to have to suffer such violent contact with any of those elements again.

Nor can the Fool resist making one final prophecy before leaving the storm for the protection Lear is demanding that he accept. The first lines are ironical comments about hypocritical priests who preach endlessly but provide no spiritual uplift and about brewers who enrich themselves by adding water to their malt, thus decreasing its quality. The rest of the prophecy is so far removed from real-life situations, so idealistic that the Fool knows no such social and spiritual Utopia will ever be attained "in Albion." They are these:

When nobles are their tailors' tutors,
No heretics burned, but wenches suitors,
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' the field,
And bawds and whores do churches build—
Then shall the realm of Albion
Come to great confusion.

(III. ii. 79-92)

Since these lines sum up the Fool's social philosophy and are his final assessment of the world which has dealt such cruel blows to Lear, we need to examine them closely. The total view seems harmonious with the Fool's digs and quips to and about Goneril and Regan.

It is realistic, without biting cynicism; critical, without damning sarcasm. If the Fool is severe in his comments about every moral and social strata from whores, to cutpurses, to nobles, the episodes of the tragedy corroborate his views. Nor is he as severe as Lear in his assessment of the world, and he is more right. Wiser than a Fool has a right to be, he knows his proposals will never be realized: thus the prophetical statement. If Eden or Arcadia or Utopia existed, truly England would be in great confusion. If an old man could even trust the public expressions of love made by his own daughters, such devastating chaos and tragedy would not ensue. King Lear provides a penetrating criticism of Shakespeare's social world and of its hypocrisy, of the discrepancy between public declamations and private acts, of a world in which words are separated from acts. And Shakespeare's most succinct and ironical, at times most amusing, expression of those social evils are to be found in the Fool's dialogue.

I have already dealt with the climactic episode in which the Fool plays such a significant role: the point at which Lear arrives at self-identity. But the denouément, so far as the Fool's role is concerned, follows immediately thereafter and consists of the trial scene, conducted by the three great fools of the play, and arraigns Goneril and Regan before the final bar of judgment. In that Day-of-Doom scene, Edgar serves as judge, the Fool as jury, Lear as arraigner. The mad Lear accuses Goneril of having "kicked the poor King her father" and anatomizes Regan to find the "cause in nature that makes these hard hearts" (III. vi. 49-50; 81-82). The Fool asks the defendant if she is Goneril; Lear insists she cannot deny it. The Fool's reply, "Cry you mercy, I took you [Goneril] for a joint stool" (III.vi.54-55) reaches the height of tragedy and depth of comedy in a single stroke. The more intense the situation, the more ludicrous are the Fool's comments. This trial in which all major participants are mad becomes the maddest tragi-comic scene ever enacted before men.¹⁵

In the storm the Fool had cried out that the cold stormy night would turn all men to fools and madmen. By the time of the simulated trial of Goneril and Regan, one is forced to concede the night has done its worst. Knowing Lear is mad but wanting him to recognize his own condition, the Fool asks, "Prithee, Nuncle, tell me whether a madman be a gentleman or a yeoman" to which Lear replies that a madman is "A king, a king!" (III. vi. 10-12).

The Fool has barely called Goneril "a joint stool" when Lear madly strikes out against Regan "whose warped looks proclaim" what her heart is made of. Lear cries for arms, sword, and fire to fight the corruption in this hall of justice, threatening the ultimate rendition of God's justice in the Day of Doom itself; and he calls Edgar a "false justicer" to permit the vile Regan to escape (III. vi. 56-59)

In vain Kent attempts to convince Lear to lie down to rest so that his frenzy may pass away, but Lear cannot rest until justice has been restored in his kingdom. Throughout the trial scene, Lear's comments to Edgar suggest mental empathy if not identification with his Fool. For example, he wishes to "entertain" Edgar as one of his hundred retainers but dislikes the "fashion of his garments. You will say they are Persian attire, but let them be changed" (III. vi. 84-86). The ludicrous statement reminds us of the Fool's comment that had Edgar not retained a blanket they would all have been shamed; it reminds us that all Lear's retainers have forsaken him; it reminds us that "rob'd and furr'd gowns hide all" but that Lear apparently still prefers them to a blanket.

Lear, at last induced to lie down, bids Kent "draw the curtains so, so," thus closing the curtain on the role of his Fool with the words, "We'll go to supper i' the morning," to which the Fool adds the contradiction, "And I'll go to bed at noon" (HI. vi. 89-92). Kent tells us that the Fool must help bear his master to Dover and cannot, therefore, be left behind; but after saying he will go to bed at noon, Lear's Fool speaks not another word. With the reappearance of Cordelia, his services are not needed, and the tone shifts to the ironically pathetic. With the villainies of Goneril, Regan, and Edmund, the tone shifts to the ironically tragic. But irony is one of the dominant tones from beginning to end of the tragedy. And more than any other character, the Fool contributes that tone.

Before summarizing the total effect of the Fool's role in King Lear, I should like to suggest precisely how contagious it is, for it spreads to every character. First, the Fool calls Kent a fool for entering the service of Lear, who has banished two daughters and blessed the third against his will. Throughout the remainder of Acts I and II, he repeatedly calls Lear a fool, insisting that the King could easily get another coxcomb from Goneril and Regan, strongly labeling them fools. In the third act, Lear himself becomes a mad fool. Meanwhile, Edgar, disguised as madman, is added to the Fool's list of fools for being faithful to the deceived Gloucester, who had threatened Edgar's life. And he calls himself a fool for following Lear, a "great wheel going down hill." But he reminds us he would rather be that sort of fool than a knave.

Kent, moreover, upon arriving at Gloucester's palace, calls Oswald a vicious pompous ass—the worst of fools and knaves—and insolently adds Cornwall to the list with the words, "None of these rogues and cowards / But Ajax is their fool" (II. ii. 132-133).

Both Goneril and her husband, the Duke of Albany, call each other fools. Goneril's "My fool usurps my body" and "O vain fool" are mild alongside Albany's "See thyself, a devil / Proper deformity seems not in the fiend / So horrid as in woman /. . . Thou changèd and self-covered thing, for shame." (IV, ii, 28-64) Threatening in his disillusionment and fury, should he lose control, to tear Goneril's flesh from her bones, Albany's words are mild compared with Goneril's foolish evil acts.

Edmund, moreover, calls both Regan and Goneril fools and plays them, like fools, one against the other. He obviously considers every character but himself a fool, particularly his father, the Duke of Gloucester, whom he dupes, deceives, betrays, and causes to be blinded. In the trial by combat, however, Edgar proved Edmund to be the most villainous fool of all. And Lear himself calls his dearly beloved Cordelia "my poor fool."

So the entire tragedy is one in which the fools of this world enact their respective roles, not the least of which is the dominant role of court fool, often assigned a proud King when he is debased. One becomes poignantly aware in analyzing the Fool's role of the "emblematic and Morality-based dimension as a meditation or oration in the tradition of De Contempu Mundi," which concludes with its dramatic illustration of man's miseries, "We came crying hither . . . When we are born, we cry that we are come to this great stage of fools."¹⁶ One also becomes very much aware of the psychic distance which separates individualized characters from their homiletic and morality functions and from their emblematic and symbolic roles.¹⁷

In this paper, I have not attempted to relate the Fool with homiletic or morality functions; I have not directly attempted to analyze his emblematic or symbolic roles. Primarily, I have analyzed the Fool's role as it affects the development of Lear's character and as it contributes to the ironical tone and the tragicomic structure. But it would be difficult to select a character in King Lear who touches more complexly and deeply the tone, the structure, and the emblematic quality than Lear's Fool.

Is the Fool a man or a symbol? Is he a fool or a wise man? Is he himself, or some one other than what he purports to be? Is he a wise man clothed in motley and coxcomb? Or is he a fool gifted with a wise man's words and insight? Is he significant in the tragedy, or can his role be dropped without altering the meaning? What is his purpose? Does it change in the different scenes in which he appears? Why does Shakespeare drop him from the dramatis personae at the end of the sixth scene of the third act? Precisely what does he contribute to Lear's growth, precisely what does he contribute to the tone and structure of the tragedy?

The most tangible and unambiguous of these questions is what the Fool contributes to Lear's development. Still, even that is just about as intangible and ambiguous as anything can be. As I have showed in my analysis, Lear's first act endows all characters with Truth and Love as their sole doweries, thus forcing each to cast aside his customary hypocrisy to become what he truly is. As constant companion to Lear, that forces the Fool to speak only Truth, as ugly as it may be to the King. Because he speaks Truth and expresses what may have been Lear's attitude and what must have been Shakespeare's, the Fool becomes perhaps in part a mirror of the King's pagan society which is in fact Shakespeare's Elizabethan world, universalized as the cosmos.

To tell truth is merely one of the Fool's offices. Besides pointing out to Lear the irrationality of his initial acts in a society resting on an amoral hypocritical basis and besides drawing out for Lear his many other blunders, the Fool must teach Lear some basic lessons in human sympathy and Christian charity, qualities which an autocratic pagan monarch should not be expected to have acquired. Certainly Lear had not.

At times the Fool's function is to offer understanding and sympathy and to alleviate, after he has warned Lear he must suffer and told him why, Lear's suffering. He has showed Lear that he must suffer; he has partly showed him how and why, though Goneril, Regan, and Cordelia have performed that task more thoroughly. Having done those things, the Fool must save Lear from suffering too intensely. In this function, the Fool is not entirely successful, fundamentally because Lear has set in motion certain wheels of fire over which neither the Fool, nor Lear, nor any other character exercises control. When Lear goes mad, there is little the Fool can do for him. When he regains sanity, and a degree of wisdom, and Cordelia, he no longer needs his Fool.

The Fool sets up a mirror in which Lear can see himself and his acts, can see his daughters and their words which contradict their acts. And he helps Lear to grow immensely in wisdom and humility and in human kindness Imagine the pre-tragic Lear pitying his Fool, "I have one part in my heart / That's sorry yet for thee" or bidding him go before his king to seek shelter. Probably the pre-tragic Lear had never once thought of his Fool as a human being.

More importantly, the Fool must help Lear arrive at self-understanding and at self-identity so that he may answer his own tragic questions. The Fool with the disguised Edgar helps Lear to see behind robed and furred gowns to discover the thing itself—Man—a poor, bare forked creature, a worm, an animal, but gifted with the words, aspirations, and ideals of the gods. Even the lowliest of men—Edgar, a madman, who owes nothing to Nature, and a Fool, who owes nothing to Society, have within them that paradoxical reality and potential. Finally, in the trial scene, the Fool, again with Edgar, must help Lear arrive at an acceptable workable sense of justice among men which comes short of the justice of God but which still makes the life experience bearable and, at times, noble.

Those, then, are perhaps the major ways the Fool helps Lear to arrive at insight and wisdom.

But the Fool has a larger function in the tragedy than pointing out to Lear his mistakes, than suggesting the mediums of his punishment, than alleviating Lear's suffering when it becomes too intense to endure. He has other functions than serving as a mirror for Lear and his daughters and than speaking as a mouthpiece of Truth. He has another function besides helping Lear arrive at a balanced sense of justice and at self-recognition and self-identity.

King Lear, more than Shakespeare's other tragedies, speaks with many voices about the total human experience, and one of its major voices is its social outcry. In Triolus and Cressida (and elsewhere), Shakespeare expresses the generally accepted view of his age that in the universe there is a "place for everything, and everything is in its place." In King Lear, he questions that view and seriously doubts that everything is in its place. Lear's Fool cogently expresses Shakespeare's views regarding the social world, a world, if not topsy-turvy, at least with many misplaced values, worse than that, a world with many evil social conditions. Indeed, the Fool is the chief medium of Shakespeare's social protest. And on one very significant level, King Lear is a social protest.

For example, why cannot Lear take his daughters at their word? Is it not because there are too many hypocritical office seekers and crown grabbers? There are so many squires in debt, so much slander in the tongues of men, too many cutpurses among human throngs, so few whores who build churches, so few cases in law which are just.¹⁸ Should those conditions be righted, then indeed would confusion reign in Albion. For men in a world in which only righteousness and justice and truth prevailed would not know how to live. Note the havoc resulting from Lear's making just one of these virtues—Truth—prevail in his kingdom.

It is the Fool who calls our attention to the evils prevalent in our social world, to its conniving and hypocrisy, to its lust for place and position, and gold. It is he who says a man is a fool (in the eyes of the world) if he follows a man whom the world has rejected. But he, who does not, is a knave. Being more "all-licensed" than any other character, he is also more all-knowing. And he knows most about society to which he owes nothing and by which he is not even recognized as existing. He knows truly that primitive unsophisticated man suffers intensely if forced to live in a civilized hypocritical society.

Lastly, the Fool creates a pervasive ironic tone and a basic tragi-comic structure, dominant in the tragedy, until the putting out of Gloucester's eyes. That is not to say that the tragi-comic is the sole structure,¹⁹ but it is very important; and it possibly enables Shakespeare to make more penetrating comments about the human predicament than any other he may have used. It also made possible Shakespeare's Commedia and Purgatorio in the same scene, using identical episodes and dialogue, as in life itself.

The Fool's first words make one aware of the ironic tone. Thereafter he injects, extends, and intensifies that tone. I have suggested that is one reason Cordelia must die. As we in life forget about rewarding the good in our overlasting pre-occupation with punishing the wicked, so Edgar and Albany forget about Lear and Cordelia. Ironically, too, Lear must die just as he may have faint hope that Cordelia lives. The ironic tone begins, then, with the Fool's throwing Kent his coxcomb and telling him about Lear's having banished two daughters and having done the third a blessing.²⁰ Thereafter irony pervades the dialogue and major episodes, even those in which the Fool does not directly participate and together with the tragi-comic structure reaches, at times, an almost unbearable intensity, and lends the tragedy multiple contradictions, both realistic and idealistic, innumerable ambiguities, and much of its power and grandeur.

In a literal sense, one must grant that the Fool is what he purports to be—Lear's court fool; but, emblematically, considerable evidence could be presented, though it would be beyond the scope of this paper, to show that he pre-figures every character in the play, particularly every character embodying the virtues of Truth and Love, but especially Cordelia, and more fundamentally and truthfully Lear himself.

I agree with Hazlitt that King Lear is Shakespeare's greatest tragedy. He thought it Shakespeare's greatest work because in it "he is the most serious." I think it Shakespeare's greatest work because in it he is the most comic and tragic at the same moment and from the same point of view. And no character in the tragedy is more tragi-comic than Lear's Fool.

Notes

¹King Lear, in The Variorum Shakespeare, ed. Horace Howard Furness (Philadelphia, 1908), pp. 452, 464.

² Ibid., p. 453. (Throughout the long footnote which follows, I shall refer to the Variorum edition as VE.) Some critics have held that the chief function of the Fool is to serve, when all others save Kent have abandoned Lear, as his closest friend and wisest counselor. Hudson thinks it inconceivable that Shakespeare, without the Fool, could have effected the desired growth in Lear's character (VE, pp. 436-437). Hense thinks the Fool holds up a mirror in which Lear can see himself as he really is (VE, p. 460). Others think that the chief function of the Fool is to speak Truth which Lear will accept only from the mouth of his "all-licensed" Fool; others say his role is to divert Lear's attention from his own suffering, to stave off madness, while still others hold that both Edgar's assumed madness and the Fool's professional role actually contribute to Lear's sanity. Some note that he adds to the total confusion of the play or stress his satisfying the cravings of the Elizabethan age for madness and horror, others that he gives the play unity and balance. (See VE, pp. 430-464).

Contradictory as are those views of function, there is even less agreement as to the Fool's ultimate fate. His last words, "And I shall go to bed at noon" (III. vi. 92) have been, among others things, interpreted to mean that he recognizes approaching death and must "breathe out his life in a play of thought" (VE, p. 437) or that he vanishes from the stage as fools did in life, as mere objects, without claim to personal interest (VE, p. 464). Others say that he disappears "of causes mysterious." Frederick Warde likes to think that Lear's cry, "And my poor fool is hang'd" (V. iii. 304) literally refers to the Fool. See Frederick Warde, The Fools of Shakespeare (New York, 1913), p. 189. See also other critical views in the Variorum Edition of King Lear, pp. 430-464; The Tragedy of King Lear, ed. Virginia Gildersleeve (New York, 1933), p. xv; Shakespeare's Tragedy of King Lear, ed. William J. Rolfe (New York, 1890), p. 23; "Introduction," The Tragedy of King Lear, ed. Kenneth Muir, 8th ed. (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1952); John Leslie Palmer, Comic Characters of Shakespeare (London, 1946), pp. vii & xiii; John W. Velz, "Division, Confinement, and the Moral Structure of King Lear," Rice University Studies, LI (Winter, 1965), 97-108; Harriet Dye, "The Appearance-Reality Theme in King Lear," College English XXV (April, 1966), 514-517; and Maynard Mack, King Lear in Our Time (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1965), pp. 40-53 & 66-69.

Nor has there been agreement as to the Fool's age. He has been said to be anywhere from twelve to eighty (and all ages in between). In the Macready production (1838), the first after Tate to restore the Shakespeare text, the Fool was even a woman. See Huntington Brown, "Lear's Fool, a Boy, Not a Man," Essays in Criticism, XIII (April, 1963), 164-171; Warde, pp. 188-189; and The Variorum Shakespeare, p. 464.

³ Mack, pp. 49-50. See also Middle English Romances, ed. W. H. French and C. B. Hale (New York, 1930), pp. 937 ff. I agree with Professor Mack that the archetypal theme is significant source material; and I think, moreover, that in many ways it accounts for the important role assigned the Fool.

⁴ According to the Fool, we have a kingdom of Fools—Kent, Lear, Goneril and Regan, and the Fool himself. Lear will add Cordelia. And everyone knows how foolish it was, as the world views matters, for the King of France to accept Cordelia—dowerless—and what a fool the Duke of Burgundy was, as the gods view such matters, not to recognize Cordelia's worth, though dowerless.

⁵ All references to King Lear are from Shakespeare The Complete Works, ed. G. B. Harrison (New York, 1952) and will be cited in the body of the essay.

⁶ The Fool's words mean more than Kent grants. Taken as a whole, they constitute sound pragmatic advice and, if followed, would place a man in a safe, if not admirable, position in a dramatic situation reverberating with social implications, crossing and upsetting every social strata. Lear, of course, had violated all the maxims, Kent a good portion.

⁷ Italics are mine. Ironical and multiple meanings of "nothing" combine with the Fool's role to establish more than other aspects of the tragedy, its tone and structure. Indeed, the entire tragic action grows out of Cordelia and Lear's "nothing." And, too, the Fool (as a human being) is nothing.

⁸Middle English Romances, pp. 937 ff.

⁹ Italics are mine.

¹⁰ Apparently Regan has left her own palace to show Lear how inconvenient it is for her to receive him. That Lear is forced into the storm from Gloucester's palace; that Gloucester is blinded by Lear's daughter and her husband in his own palace; that Regan wishes to usurp that palace in union with the bastard Edmund as queen and king of Lear's realm—all these are tragically ironical.

¹¹ As her last insult to the Fool, Goneril had called him more knave than fool; but note, how by his acts, he has given her the lie. The court fool needed, of course, to be a man of learning, wisdom, quick observation and understanding. But he must constantly entertain and do the bidding of his master. Accordingly, the jester's life was lonely and subject to the whims and caprices of his master, "contemned above the board, hated below it, yet feared by all." See Warde, p. 2.

¹² Rümelin's comment regarding the heath scene, a scene which he calls "horrible" but lacking "in the wonderful" and lacking magnificence. See The Variorum Shakespeare, p. 462.

¹³ The Fool's ditty is somewhat cryptic, but he apparently is reminding Lear that he had entered Goneril and Regan in the regions of his heart, when he should have placed them at his toe and that he should have placed Cordelia in his heart instead of trodding underfoot and banishing.

¹⁴ When Lear, noting the nakedness of "poor Tom" asks if his daughters have brought him to his pass, if he could save nothing, the Fool facetiously remarks, "Nay, he reserved a blanket, else we had been all shamed" (III. iv. 64-67).

¹⁵ This great scene is Shakespeare's tragic version of the great comic scene between Prince Hal and Falstaff in Henry IV, Part I.

¹⁶ Mack, p. 69.

¹⁷ Indirectly, I have had to touch on the Fool's emblematic and symbolical roles though detailed analysis of those roles is beyond the scope of this paper.

¹⁸ I'm roughly paraphrasing the Fool's soliloquy—his prophesy (see III. ii. 80-92). Shakespeare's social comment contains double-edged irony. For example, he does not condone Lear's foolish notion that he can retain the name but not the responsibilities of kingship.

¹⁹ Mack points out (p. 70) that the dominant structure of the Gloucester sub-plot is homiletic. I find other structural patterns also, but the dominant structural pattern of episodes in which the Fool appears is tragicomic.

²⁰ Actually, the ironic tone begins with the first scene between Kent, Gloucester, and Edmund and with Lear's division of his kingdom on the basis of public declarations of love. But an audience does not become aware of the ironic tone until the first words of the Fool.