Character and Role of the Fool in King Lear
Uploaded by sujata2123 on Jul 14, 2005
The Role and Character of Fool in King Lear
The usual method of analyzing Shakespeare’s characters is to tabulate what they say and do, and add what other characters say about them. Though this is possible method and one which occupies a prominent place in the Shakespearean critical tradition known as ‘character criticism’, it can be misleading as it starts from the wrong end. Shakespeare did not begin by inventing characters and then search for a suitable plot to embody them. His characters are largely defined by their roles or by their functions in the plot. This definition of a role by circumstances is obvious with the fool in King Lear, who is basically the traditional Fool, a truth-teller. He is also, equally obvious, a splendid part of the comic actor of Shakespeare’s stage, Robert Armin, fresh from his triumphs in as You Like It and Twelth Night. Our impressions of the characters depend very largely on the close relationship between him and Lear. Shakespeare does not tell us everything; for example, we are not told what happens to him after the storm scenes in Act III. During the storm the Fool labours to outjest Lear’s injuries, but in earlier scenes his devotion to Cordelia makes him harp on Lear’s foolishness in distinguishing her.
Lear’s response to Cordelia’s non-rational rejection of an assessing process that would have made her rich is to brand his daughter ‘foolish’ in the extreme. By that token, he is also links her with ‘official’ representative of foolishness in the play. Terrence Hawkes has pointed out that two kinds of reasons are in operation in the world of King Lear; instrumental reason and a process which is intuitive. This instrumental reason is the one applied by lear to judge cordelia’s refusal to outbid her sisters in expressing love for their father. From the point of view this instrumental, lower reason , intuitive reason often appears as a kind of madness or foolishness, in which the apparently irrational proves capable of genuine insight. While Cordelia is banished from Lear’s sight the Fool remains serving to a large extent as the representative of the pole opposed to reason and in Cordelia’s absence, as its most effective voice the fact that Cordelia and the Fool never appear on the stage together- added to the fact that all female parts on the...