“The Fool is more important to the play than he may at first seem.” By considering the dramatic presentation of The Fool in King Lear, evaluate this view.
Ryan argues that “The Fool furnishes a vital reflexive means of activating and monitoring our awareness of fundamental issues” within ‘King Lear’. Through the Fool’s shrewd comments and cynical paradoxes, he presents the audience with a social commentary, much like the Greek Chorus of a Greek tragedy. His role as truth-sayer allows Shakespeare to subtly urge the audience to consider key issues that may otherwise have been overlooked by a Jacobean audience. In this role, the Fool plays a vital role in acting as a catalyst for Lear’s growing compassion, although he is perhaps less significant than Poor Tom. He is a figure of prophetic wisdom, allowing Shakespeare a medium through which to make criticisms and cynical predictions about society’s fate, considering that the age of ‘King Lear’ has been estimated to be around the 6th century BC. And finally, the Fool offers some comic relief for the audience, bringing a sense of humour at times to the play that a modern audience may overlook.
The Fool urges the audience to invert traditional associations of ‘foolishness’ within society. Enid Welsford argues that “the Fool strikes the key note of the tragedy of Lear’ by investing certain characters such as Lear and Gloucester with his motley, representing foolishness. To a Jacobean audience, the King constituted the greatest and wisest voice of authority in the Kingdom, being directly chosen by God and therefore holding powers of wisdom unknown to the average man. Therefore the Fool’s insolent remarks such as “thou wouldst make a good fool” to Lear would seem absurd and shocking and yet his words seem to resonate. His argument that one must “let go thy hold when a great wheel runs down a hill lest it break thy neck with following it” makes great sense and as the audience watch his prophecies play out, in the death of Cordelia and the allusion to Kent’s death also, it urges the audience to reconsider their conceptions of foolishness. The way in which the Fool’s verse is often written in rhyming couplets emphasised this prophetic quality and endows him with a sense of sagacity. The proverbial nature of his language emphasises these qualities further, illustrated in the lines “speak less than thou knowest, lend less than thou owest” which Dent argues echoes the proverb “speak not all you know, do not all you can, believe not all you hear”. The Fool’s significance is great in terms of prompting thought and debate within the minds of the audience, acting much like a Greek Chorus in making social commentary without influencing the events of the plot significantly. As a prophetic and wise character he is able to prompt the thoughts of characters such as Kent and Lear but to little effect, instead with a greater purchase on the thoughts of the audience, who recognise the Fool’s wisdom even if they may fully agree or understand his message.
