Play Guide Essay on the Figure of the Fool in History and "King Lear"
The Court Fool in History and King Lear
by Thomas Canfield
“Everything is folly in this world, except to play the fool.”
–Giacomo Leopardi, Italian poet and philosopher (1798-1837)
King Lear features a remarkable character whom, at first glance, seems to run counter to the play’s identity as a naturalistic tragedy. Stemming from a long and complicated historical and literary heritage, the court fool is a central figure in Shakespeare’s plays and functions as an integral force of Lear’s dramatic art.
The idea of the professional fool or jester that resides in the imagination of most modern audience members developed in the Middle Ages, although such figures can be found in many cultures. A pygmy clown performed in the court of Pharaoh Dadkeri-Assi during Egypt’s Fifth Dynasty (c. 2500 B.C.). Court jesters are known to have existed in China as early as 1818 B.C. Fools have been documented at the courts of Philip of Macedon, the legendary Caliph of Baghdad Hārūn al-Rashīd, and in the royal household of Montezuma. In fact, after Cortez conquered the Aztecs of Mexico in 1520, fools, dwarf clowns and hunchbacked buffoons were among the treasures he brought back to Pope Clement VII. Many scholars have noted connections between Harlequin and Pulcinello, the comic servants of Commedia dell’Arte tradition, and the type of the Fool.
The traditional duties of a medieval fool were to amuse his or her master in order to prevent oppression from state affairs, and to assist in the lord's digestion by providing mealtime entertainment. The jester’s skills generally included dancing, juggling, acrobatics, singing, playing musical instruments, and extempore rhyming wordplay. Yet the fool often had another important role, as expressed by Erasmus in his “Letter to Martin Dorp” (1515): “The sorts of fools which princes of former times introduced into their courts were there for the express purpose of exposing and thereby correcting certain minor faults through their frank speech.”
By the thirteenth century, European court clowns had adopted a fairly typical uniform. Royal fools often had bald or shaved heads and wore headgear resembling a monk’s cowl or a fool’s cap–which was mounted with bells or asses ears and often turned-up or horned to resemble the comb of a rooster. Lear’s Fool, of course, calls this apparel a “coxcomb.” Many jesters wore a parti-color or motley costume consisting of a robe and tight breeches of contrasting colors. This distinctive garb typically denoted the fool’s bifurcated nature as having one foot in reality and another in the world of imagination. Some jesters at times carried a bauble–a staff or mock scepter mounted with bells, mirrors, or a ridiculous miniature head (often ornamented with asses ears). The more grotesque baubles terminated in a deflated pig’s bladder fashioned in the shape of a penis–which was used to make mock sexual gestures and to castigate members of the court.
Fools tended to exist in two classes, being either “natural” (sometimes termed “innocent”) or “artificial,” indicating that their ludicrous behavior was either real or feigned. “Natural” fools were considered entertaining due to a mental deficiency or grotesque physical abnormality. During the Roman Empire, wealthy men kept half-witted and deformed slaves as jesters for entertainment during feasts. Fools often were crippled, humped, twisted or dwarfed, and in some societies fools were deliberately malformed, since abnormal mascots were thought to protect against the evil eye. Because fools were non-essential household servants, they were status symbols not only for monarchs but also for wealthy nobles of lower rank. In some instances, peasant families would bind a young child's limbs–resulting in physical deformity–in order to induce the local lord to adopt the child into his household. This practice was known as “begging him a fool.”
In contrast to the “natural,” the “artificial” fool possessed a quick wit and the ability to engage in lively repartee. Such fools were cunning and sarcastic entertainers, but the treatment of any court dependant varied according to the master. A royal fool was considered parasitic, in that he relied solely and totally on the monarch for his existence. He could be a scapegoat for his master’s anger, but in general he was treated as well as other court “pets”–such as hounds and horses–in whose class he belonged. Since a jester wasn't expected to follow contemporary social graces, his presumed innocence allowed him to speak his mind. This freedom often took the form of criticizing the state or even his own master.
Royal fools sometimes achieved significant influence and power, and many amassed wealth. Some of the more privileged court jesters had their own servants, ate at the same table as their masters and even operated as spies for the monarch. Because a fool’s status was isolated from the rest of the court, his singular standing both mirrored and parodied the exclusive position of the ruler. The fool’s marginalized place outside the rigid court hierarchy allowed him to come closer to the throne than anyone else and to be taken into royal confidence without being perceived as a political threat.
The names of many official jesters in the courts of Europe are preserved in historical records. In England, the long list of jesters extends from Hitard, the fool of Edmund Ironside (ruled 934-46) to Muckle John, the fool of Charles I (ruled 1625-1649) who was the last official royal jester. With the beheading of Charles I and the coming of the Puritan Commonwealth under Oliver Cromwell–accompanied by the abandonment of belief in divine right–the English court fool went out of fashion.
One of the best known English Renaissance fools was Will Somers, the legendary jester to Henry VIII who is credited with bringing about the downfall of Cardinal Wolsey. Somers went on to serve under Edward VI and Mary, and lived into the reign of Elizabeth I. In addition to a motley crowd of court entertainers, including an Italian fool named Monarcho, Elizabeth employed several dwarfs during her reign. One dwarf, Thomasina, was habitually attired in fine clothing made from the Queen's cast-off dresses. Under James I, the ruler when King Lear was first performed, England saw the appearance of Archibald Armstrong who came with the king from Scotland in 1603. Designated in official accounts as joculator domini regis, Armstrong was one of the most boisterous and impudent fools ever known at the British court. By the time James’s son Charles I came to power, Armstrong had been granted 1000 acres of land in Ireland, a pension of two shillings a day and a royal patent for making tobacco pipes.
The Fool in King Lear is one of the most puzzling figures in the play, and the role traditionally has been open to a wide range of theatrical interpretations. Over the ages, Lear’s Fool has been interpreted as a sprightly gymnast and as a hobbling arthritic, and the character has been modeled on both a monkey and a pet spaniel. The Fool has been performed as a saucy adolescent knave, a rustic clown who appears to be older than the king himself, and as a traditional medieval court jester. Most scholars believe that the first actor to play the role of Lear’s Fool was Robert Armin, a member of Shakespeare’s company who wrote Foole upon Foole (1600), a pamphlet which tells us a great deal about jesters in the Elizabethan age.
Many of Shakespeare’s characters have been identified in the generalized tradition of the clown or fool, including Dogberry in Much Ado About Nothing, Launcelot Gobbo in The Merchant of Venice and Falstaff. In the purest sense, however, Shakespeare’s most notable fools appear in the comedies: Touchstone in As You Like It, Feste in Twelfth Night, and Lavatch in All’s Well That Ends Well. In such works, the playwright’s characterization of the fool as a dramatic device seems to have been quite original. In the decade before Shakespeare’s play was produced, court fools appeared in Robert Greene’s Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay and in his Scottish History of James IV; but H.F. Lippincott notes that “there are no fools which resemble Shakespeare’s in the pre-Shakespearean English drama, and none of the Shakespearean fools is found in the known literary sources for the plays.”
Like Rigoletto, the hunchbacked jester to the Duke of Mantua in Verdi’s opera, the unnamed Fool in Lear is distinct from the other court fools in Shakespeare because he appears in tragic rather than comic circumstances. During the Restoration, this apparent disparity in the tone of the play ran counter to the neoclassical dictum of a clear separation between the genres of tragedy and comedy, thus proving distasteful to fashionable critics. In his 1681 revision of Lear, Nahum Tate completely eliminated the Fool, with long-lasting repercussions: the character remained absent from all London productions for a century and a half, until 1838 when William Charles Macready produced a new-style version of the play. After envisioning the Fool as a “sort of fragile, hectic, beautiful-faced boy,” Macready settled on a woman in the role.
Shakespeare undoubtedly had a well-considered purpose for including Lear’s Fool in the play, and the mingling of comic elements within a serious plot is a typical feature of his tragedies. Anyone familiar with the Porter in Macbeth or the Gravedigger clowns of Hamlet can attest to this fact. Such comic characters often provide a brief interlude in the tragic course of events, increasing the appeal of the play and momentarily releasing the audience from the tension of the gathering tragedy. The juxtaposition of comic elements within a tragic structure also amplifies the poignancy of the tragedy itself through contrast, as many critics have suggested. However, because Lear’s Fool is such a major character in the play, his purpose goes beyond that of a minor comic foil to the course of tragic events.
In Lear’s jester, we see the paradox of the “wise fool.” Although he makes his living by witty speeches and comic behavior, the Fool’s primary role in the play is that of a speaker of unpleasant truths. In this sense, he is not so much the provider of merry interludes that we–and Lear–anticipate, but instead he is a “bitter fool” who enlightens the king about the harsh facts of the world. Goneril refers to him as an “all-licens’d Fool,” meaning that he is afforded the broad freedom to do and say what he likes in the presence of his betters. Even so, his biting speeches and acid commentary on Lear’s rash behavior–and on the disrespect of their father by Goneril and Regan–readily result in threats of the whip. Countering the expectations of his master to be a light-hearted court entertainer, the Fool maintains his diplomatic distance by speaking in oblique riddles, catch phrases, proverbs and snatches of song–yet his best efforts continually skirt the risk of being incendiary.
The word “fool” appears 49 times in King Lear, more frequently than in any other Shakespeare play except for Twelfth Night. Yet as Kent notes in 1.4, the use of such terminology in the play is “not altogether fool.” In the inverted, topsy-turvy world of this tragedy, all the admirable characters are addressed as fools or alluded to as being foolish including Lear, Albany, Kent, Edgar, Gloucester and Cordelia. The most sweeping reference to folly is spoken by Lear himself, who refers in his madness to the human condition as “this great stage of fools” (4.6).
The Fool points out to Lear that he has “mad’st thy daughters thy mothers” and “gav’st them thy rod, and put’st down thine own breeches” (1.4), and his prophetic speeches evoke a medieval debate on the proper relationship between youth and old age. The brief reference in 1.2 to the chiding of the Fool by Goneril’s servant is one of the indications of a decline in Lear’s power. Goneril uses the king’s defense of his Fool–which entails Lear physically striking back at her gentleman–as an excuse for having Lear’s own actions “come to question.” Unlike his metaphorically-blind master, the Fool clearly sees Lear’s predicament and is able to make, if somewhat cryptically, both his master and the audience conscious of the magnitude of the king’s errors and his fallen status after he abdicates.
On one level, the Fool functions as Lear’s conscience after he disowns Cordelia for being honest in lieu of the false vows of Goneril and Regan. It could be argued that the Fool not only points out Lear’s folly and change in sovereign status, but that his lucid insight also spurs Lear on to the harsh realization of “filial ingratitude” that accelerates the king’s spiraling madness. Scholars have often been troubled by the fact that the Fool disappears barely halfway throughout the play. However, perhaps Shakespeare at this point considered the Fool no longer dramatically necessary, Lear having learned the hard way the necessary lesson about loving devotion versus sycophantic lip service that the Fool sought so earnestly to teach. The advent of Edgar in the assumed guise of the mad Poor Tom O’Bedlam, in a sense, replaces and overshadows the madcap musings of Lear’s court fool. Most importantly, Lear’s madness gains full force after the Fool disappears; the king can handle no more instruction concerning his rash actions, thereby rendering the Fool’s presence superfluous.
Because the Fool remains an enigmatic character even in his exit, there have been various methods of portraying his disappearance from the stage. Some interpretations have included the Fool cravenly deserting Lear in the king’s darkest hour; the Fool being stabbed by the insane Lear during the mock trial after being mistaken for one of the “unnatural” daughters; and the Fool dying alone and abandoned in the hovel of mysterious causes while his master is taken away. No matter how stage productions choose to depict his curious exit, the Fool’s enigmatic character and equivocal nature continue after 400 years to make King Lear one of the most complex and rewarding challenges for directors and actors in the literature of the theatre.
