The fool as wisdom in King Lear
Date
1983
Authors
Myers, Faith Josephine
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Abstract
The Fool in King Lear has often been identified with moral wisdom. This view of him has prevailed since Enid Welsford and George Orwell, in the early years of the twentieth century, spoke of the Fool as "impartial critic" and "chorus" respectively. It is upheld in a very recent study by Siegfried Wenzel, who has compared Lear's Fool to the "humble fatuus" of the wise fool tradition. The thesis proposes a contrary reading of the Fool as confused and inconsistent. From the analysis of specific details in the Fool's speeches it attempts to show that Lear's Fool, far from being the assured and reassuring figure seen by many previous critics, has no consistent view of truth to offer, and that his uncertainty is an important crux in the play.
In the first chapter, Lear's Fool is contrasted with Shakespeare's earlier court fools, Touchstone, Feste, and, to a lesser extent, Lavatch. Shakespeare drops hints in As You Like It and Twelfth Night that his fools are to be seen as voices of wisdom. Touchstone is confident of his own capacity to know and speak truth, and his confidence is justiĀfied in particular moments at which he "shoots his wit." Lear's Fool is by contrast diffident, and his speeches unincisive. Touchstone, and especially Feste, sustain and enrich the tradition of the fool as entertainer, and Peter Bryant feels this to detract from their didactic efficacy. This chapter suggests that their wisdom and humour are mutually enhancing, and that Lear's Fool is not as funny as Touchstone and Feste, not because he is wiser than they are, but because he is less certain of his own wisdom.
Chapter Two discusses the relationship between King Lear and his Fool in the context of the King-Fool opposition in Christian homily. In Christian tradition from St. Paul, the fool is often a figure of paradoxical wisdom, asserting the existence of a clear moral order in which authority rests with God. He often reduces a proud King to his place. Shakespeare tempts us to see Lear as a foolish king reduced to his place by a wise fool, but in King Lear the homiletic pattern is radically reshaped. The Fool, faced with the wild experience of the storm, retreats inside proverbial wisdom as a way of protecting himself against the unknown. Lear, meanwhile, probes the void, and asks tragedy's unanswerable questions. The play sees a progressive undermining of the Fool's authority, culminating in his exhausted withdrawal at the end of Act Three.
In Chapter Three the Fool is contrasted with the play's other potential authority, Cordelia. The Fool is caught between worldly and unworldly values, whereas Cordelia is a fool in the unworldly Pauline sense. He is divided: she is whole. However, King Lear is a world without overt Christian justification, and its conclusion does not affirm Cordelia's unequivocal stance. It leaves us with the paradox that whilst the Fool and Cordelia are different kinds of fool, Lear's identification of them in his lament for his "poor fool" is appropriate, in that both are to be pitied for unmitigated suffering. Their contrasted, yet mutually qualifying, types of folly, deprive the play of an ethical centre.