THE FOOL Character Analysis

The Fool is Lear's own stand-up comedian, sure, but more interestingly, he's the
only guy that Lear allows to criticize him. (Remember, when Kent lips off, Lear boots
him out of the kingdom and when Lear doesn't like what Cordelia has to say, Lear
disowns her altogether.) As in many of Shakespeare's plays, the Fool is actually
really smart and the only person who tells it like it is. Compare Lear's Fool, for
example, to Feste in Twelfth Night neither one of them are afraid to call their
misguided masters "foolish" and they both function as characters that provide a lot
of social commentary. At the same time, the Fool is more than just a funny and
brutally honest guy; he's also loyal. Along with Kent/Caius, the Fool braves the
elements (which at times consist of rain, thunder, and lightning) with his master.
But the Fool is also a big mystery: what happens to him? He disappears after Act 3,
Scene 6, and nobody ever explains where he's gone. The only possible reference to
the Fool after that is in the final scene, when King Lear says "And my poor fool is
hanged" (5.3.17). This could mean a couple of things: 1) Lear might be referring to
Cordelia with a pet name, "fool," since Cordelia has just been hanged by Edmund's
goons. 2) Lear could be literally talking about his Fool perhaps the Fool was also
hanged by Edmund's henchmen or, perhaps he hung himself out of despair. It's
hard to say what really happens to the Fool. Some literary critics even speculate
that the Fool and Cordelia were played by the same actor. They never appear
onstage together, so some scholars hypothesized that the part was double cast,
and that the Fool had to disappear when Cordelia came back into the play
Why is the fool the helpful spirit in King Lear?
The Fool, ironically, is a wise voice in King Lear. He makes satiric but seriously
observant remarks. The Fool serves a role similar to that of a chorus. In Greek plays,
a chorus was a group of people who comment on what's going on in the play,
similar to a narrator. The function of a chorus was to give supplementary and
background information. Lear's Fool functions more as a voice of reason for Lear.
Evidently, the Fool is quite loyal to the king. He uses humor to help him get through
his sadness and reason to combat his increasing madness. The Fool is able
(allowed) to be honest with Lear because he has a license to do so. To be unlimited
enough to be funny, Lear allowed the Fool to say whatever he wanted. Combined
with this license, the Fool's loyalty to Lear, and his objectivity, the Fool makes
accurate, honest statements about what he sees. The Fool acts as part of Lear's
conscience, still like a satiric voice of reason when Lear has a bout of madness.
Fittingly, when the Fool disappears at the end of Act III, Lear loses most of his
reason and becomes quite mad (insane). As to why the Fool leaves in this scene is
up to interpretation. One suggestion is that the Fool and Cordelia were played by
the same actor; the Fool had to leave in this scene to allow the actor to change
before her (Cordelia's) next scene.

In King Lear, how does Shakespeare use the Fool to reflect and comment
on Lear's terrible misjudgement in Scene 1?
Shakespeare uses fools very creatively. They often seem to use their apparent role
as a fool, as somebody who speaks nonsense, as a shield that actually allows them
to speak truth and wisdom. However, it is often not recognised as such by the
characters who listen to them and expect only foolery to leave their mouths. The
Fool in this play is no exception, and you are right to indicate that at various stages
he comments on Lear's initial disastrous decision to be flattered by his two eldest
daughters and fail to see the genuine love of his third daughter, Cordelia. Note what
he says in Act I Scene 4 when he first appears when he urges Lear to take his
"coxcomb," or his cap:
Why? For taking one's part that's out of favour. Nay, an thou canst not smile as the
wind sits, thou'lt catch cold shortly. There, take my coxcomb. Why, this fellow has
banished two on's daughters and did the third a blessing against his will. If thou will
follow him, thou must needs wear my coxcomb.
If we look carefully at this speech, we can see how the Fool is quite openly mocking
Lear for his decision. It is Lear that is "out of favour," and therefore unpopular, and
the Fool mocks Lear's decision by saying he actually blessed Cordelia, even though
he didn't want to do it, by banishing her. The Fool ends by assuring Kent that he
would need to wear the fool's hat if he wants to follow Lear. Clearly he is
questioning Lear's actions and saying they were very foolhardy.
In King Lear, what does the Fool's prophecy in Act 3, scene 2, mean?
The meaning of the Fool's prophecy in Act 3, Scene 2 has been debated. It is
cryptic. There are even some scholars who suppose that Shakespeare did not write
it or that it has been misprinted. There is no proof of this other than some
inconsistencies in early manuscripts of the play. In either case, it is in the play, so
what could it mean?
In general, the Fool is saying that when things will be as bad as they are now (in
that moment with Fool, Kent, and Lear), Albion (Britain) will be in chaos. Albion and
the reference to Merlin recall the tale of King Arthur and his supposed return. Arthur
will return when Britain is in dire need; he will come and restore Britain to new
glory, a utopia. The time for Merlin's prophecy will be when "slanders do not live in
tongues" and "bawds and whores do churches build," two phenomena that, while
they sound strangely promising, are quite bizarre.
The Fool is a counter to Lear. When Lear is behaving insanely, the Fool gives satiric
but genuine advice. When Lear's "wits begin to turn" in this scene and he humanely
asks the Fool if he is cold, the Fool must be counter (cryptic) to Lear's temporary
logical statements. Therefore, the Fool's prophecy is not clear, like Lear's previous

and subsequent mad behavior. The lack of lucidity of the prophecy reflects the
chaos of Lear's mind and the kingdom at that present state. The Fool's sarcasm and
confusing descriptions within the prophecy (i.e., "when bawds and whores do
churches build") also symbolize this chaos.
Also remember that the Fool's prophecy, as bizarre and unclear as it is, describes
Albion (Britain) in chaos. Then he says Merlin will make this prophecy in the future.
So, the Fool is making a prophecy of a prophecy, living in Britain at a chaotic time
and making a prediction of a time when Britain will be in a chaotic time (at which
time, Merline will make his similar prophecy). Since it is in chaos now (the Fool's
time), the prediction is bleak in that Britain will be in chaos for some time.
Discuss how the fool in King Lear is important to the play as a whole.
Explain how the Fool becomes Lear's voice of reason and his conscience.
Does the fool lead Lear to find sanity and wisdom, catalyzing the process
of his self awareness?
The Fool is essential to the narrative of the drama. One of the most important
reasons is because he is the only individual who can openly criticize King Lear.
Since he is licensed, the Fool is able to speak any truth about King Lear and not
receive banishment or death for it. This enables him to become a voice of reason
and conscience, criticizing Lear when he is wrong. The Fool is able to operate as
Lear's moral and spiritual alter- ego, questioning his actions and probing into the
nature of what might be or what should be without reproach. Since the Fool is the
only one that follows King Lear after his banishment, it is logical that Fool operates
as a one who is able to trigger Lear's awakening. The Fool is able to speak the
truth, something that got Cordelia banished and repudiated. Since the Fool follows
Lear everywhere, this would mean that truth, in a symbolic sense, never leaves
Lear's side, deny it as he might like. This becomes the reason why the Fool operates
as a catalyst for Lear's process of self- awareness and gaining wise insight into the
world and his place in it.
The Fool's lines helps to confirm such a role. Consider that in the first Act, the Fool
is the only one to speak of Lear's actions as riddled with fault and a lack of insight:
There, take my coxcomb! 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.--How
now, nuncle? Would I had two coxcombs and two daughters!
The Fool is able to speak from the earliest of points that what Lear has done might
be wrong. He continually speaks of Lear's real condition, apart from what he might
perceive it to be: "I am better than thou art now; I am a fool, thou art nothing."
This is one way in which the Fool operates in the role of a conscience, something
that reminds Lear of his action's implications, a reminder of "moral right and
wrong." The Fool is able to illuminate that Lear's "blessing" was not that, at all and
his decision was flawed, to say the least. The Fool continues this when he speaks of
how human beings behave, something that Lear as a vaulted monarch should have

understood: "Truth's a dog must to kennel; he must be whipped out, when the Lady
Brach may stand by the fire and stink." While Lear does not immediately capitulate
and admit error, it becomes clear that Shakespeare has designed the Fool's
character as a voice of reason in a world that is lacking it. When the Fool speaks of
how Lear should act, it is a reminder of how there can be a means to achieve
wisdom and sanity in a world that does not immediately embrace it:
Have more than thou showest,
Speak less than thou knowest,
Lend less than thou owest,
Ride more than thou goest,
Learn more than thou trowest,
Set less than thou throwest;
Leave thy drink and thy whore,
And keep in-a-door,
And thou shall have more
Than two tens to a score.
The Fool reflects how Lear should act in contrast to how he does act. It is here in
which the Fool is a form of conscience for Lear, something that does not change
even though contingency and context changes so many others in the drama.
Towards the end of Act II, the Fool continues his role as Lear's conscience when he
reminds him of the traps of parental failures that the king has entered:
Fathers that wear rags
Do make their children blind,
But fathers that bear bags
Shall see their children kind.
The Fool's role as conscience cuts through wealth, privilege, and power. The
elements that Lear believed as real and permanent are now fleeting, and the Fool's
presence suggests that character and dignity are the only currency of value in a
constantly changing world. The Fool's function parallels Cordelia as an example of
transcendence and permanence in a world of shifting values and allegiances. It is
quite meaningful that the Fool and Cordelia never appear on stage together at the
same time, confirming their mutual value to Lear.
The point in which the Fool serves as a catalyst for Lear's transformation into selfawareness can be seen in Act III. One reason why the Fool is able to help in his
master's transformation is because of his loyalty and allegiance, reflective of a
conscience that never dissipates: "I will tarry, the Fool will stay. Acting as a force
of permanence in a condition of transience, the Fool solidifies his role as an agent of
moral right. During the storm, the Fool operates as a means of support as Lear
struggles to grasp the "corrupted world of man." The Fool is a reminder of how Lear
should appropriate a reality that he has brutally miscalculated:
He that has and a little tiny wit,

With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,

Must make content with his fortunes fit,
Though the rain it raineth every day.
When the Fool makes clear that personal failure lies in the trust placed in "the
tameness of a wolf, a horse's health, a boy's love, or a whore's oath," it is a
reminder of the role that the Fool has played in Lear's transformation. Lear's selfawareness finally takes hold because the Fool has spoken elements of truth from
the very start of the drama. The Fool is a voice of reason and conscience because
he never leaves Lear, similar to a universal sense of moral right and wrong that
does not change. Wisdom is applicable to all situations, a condition that the Fool
embodies. While conditions around Lear have drastically changed, the Fool
remains. As a result, the possibility of moral restoration and redemption. The Fool's
importance lies in this hopeful notion in a world where hope is fleeting and
condemnation is everywhere. The Fool leaves after Act III, reflective of how Lear has
embraced his own conscience and self- awareness. This makes the Fool's role a
vital one, as Lear has become the agent of change that the Fool represented from
the drama's exposition.
There is another reason that the Fool is important in the play. Lear has specified
that he intends to stay with each of his daughters Goneril and Regan with one
hundred knights. He will stay with Goneril for a month and then with Regan for a
month. Then return to Goneril. Altogether he will be staying with each daughter for
half a year with one hundred knights. This will obviously create chaos. Each
daughter will just be getting rid of all these men and restoring domestic order,
when here they will be coming back again blowing their hunting horns, with a
hundred horses and probably a big pack of hunting dogs. Shakespeare could not
show this on his small Elizabethan stage. The Fool therefore has to represent all the
hundred knights and the trouble they create. The Fool is consistently insolent to
Goneril and encourages the King to be boisterous, rude, demanding, and jocular.
Together the King and the Fool suggest the general atmosphere created by one
hundred rough, fun-loving men who have nothing to do but enjoy themselves in
hunting, feasting, drinking, joking, laughing, sometimes quarreling, and in general
taking over the whole castle for a month at a time. Goneril is the first to play
hostess. We can imagine how any woman would feel if she had to put up with such
an invasion. Even if she truly loved her father, it would still be a housewife's
nightmare; but she doesn't love him at all. And she has no idea how long the King
will live. The Fool adds to her irritation because he keeps making fun of her. He
knows she is angry and frustrated, but this only amuses him because he doesn't
like her. He dislikes her because he truly loved Cordelia and feels that the youngest
daughter was cheated out of her inheritance by the mendacity of her two older
sisters. The more trouble Lear and his hundred knights cause Goneril, the more the
Fool will enjoy it.

Is the Fool really a half-wit?

But the Fool is one of Shakespeare's triumphs in King Lear. Imagine the tragedy
without him, and you hardly know it. To remove him would spoil its harmony, as the
harmony of a picture would be spoiled if one of the colours were extracted. One can
almost imagine that Shakespeare, going home from an evening at the Mermaid,
where he had listened to Jonson fulminating against fools in general and perhaps
criticizing the Clown in Twelfth Night in particular, had said to himself: 'Come, my
friends, I will show you once for all that the mischief is in you, and not in the fool or
the audience. I will have a fool in the most tragic of my tragedies. He shall not play
a little part. He shall keep from first to last the company in which you most object to
see him, the company of a king. Instead of amusing the king's idle hours, he shall
stand by him in the very tempest and whirlwind of passion. Before I have done you
shall confess, between laughter and tears, that he is of the very essence of life, that
you have known him all your days though you never recognized him till now; and
that you would as soon go without Hamlet as miss him.'
The Fool in King Lear has been so favorite a subject with good critics that I will
confine myself to one or two points on which a difference of opinion is possible. To
suppose that the Fool is, like many a domestic fool at that time, a perfectly sane
man pretending to be half-witted, is surely a most prosaic blunder. There is no
difficulty in imagining that, being slightly touched in the brain, and holding the
office of fool, he performs the duties of his office intentionally as well as
involuntarily: it is evident that he does so. But unless we suppose that he is touched
in the brain we lose half the effect of his appearance in the storm-scenes. The effect

of those scenes (to state the matter as plainly as possible) depends largely on the
presence of three characters, and on the affinities and contrasts between them; on
our perception that the differences of station in King, Fool, and beggar-noble, are
levelled by one blast of calamity; but also on our perception of the differences
between these three in one respect -- viz. in regard to the peculiar affliction of
insanity. The insanity of the King differs widely in its nature from that of the Fool,
and that of the Fool from that of the beggar. But the insanity of the King differs from
that of the beggar not only in its nature, but also in the fact that one is real and the
other simply a pretence. Are we to suppose then that the insanity of the third
character, the Fool, is, in this respect, a mere repetition of that of the second, the
beggar that it too is mere pretence? To suppose this is not only to impoverish
miserably the impression made by the trio as a whole, it is also to diminish the
heroic and pathetic effect of the character of the Fool. For his heroism consists
largely in this, that his efforts to outjest his master's injuries are the efforts of a
being to whom a responsible and consistent course of action, nay even a
responsible use of language, is at the best of times difficult, and from whom it is
never at the best of times expected. It is a heroism something like that of Lear
himself in his endeavour to learn patience at the age of eighty. But arguments
against the idea that the Fool is wholly sane are either needless or futile; for in the
end they are appeals to the perception that this idea almost destroys the poetry of
the character.
This is not the case with another question, the question whether the Fool is a
man or a boy. Here the evidence and the grounds for discussion are more tangible.
He is frequently addressed as 'boy.' This is not decisive; but Lear's first words to
him, 'How now, my pretty knave, how dost thou?' are difficult to reconcile with the
idea of his being a man, and the use of this phrase on his first entrance may show
Shakespeare's desire to prevent any mistake on the point. As a boy, too, he would
be more strongly contrasted in the storm-scenes with Edgar as well as with Lear; his
faithfulness and courage would be even more heroic and touching; his devotion to
Cordelia, and the consequent bitterness of some of his speeches to Lear, would be
even more natural. Nor does he seem to show a knowledge of the world impossible
to a quick-witted though not whole-witted lad who had lived at Court. The only
serious obstacle to this view, I think, is the fact that he is not known to have been
represented as a boy or youth till Macready produced King Lear.
But even if this obstacle were serious and the Fool were imagined as a grown
man, we may still insist that he must also be imagined as a timid, delicate and frail
being, who on that account and from the expression of his face has a boyish
look.1 He pines away when Cordelia goes to France. Though he takes great liberties
with his master he is frightened by Goneril, and becomes quite silent when the
quarrel rises high. In the terrible scene between Lear and his two daughters and
Cornwall (II. iv. 129-289), he says not a word; we have almost forgotten his
presence when, at the topmost pitch of passion, Lear suddenly turns to him from
the hateful faces that encompass him:
You think I'll weep;
No, I'll not weep:

I have full cause of weeping; but this heart

Shall break into a hundred thousand flaws
Or ere I'll weep. O fool, I shall go mad.
From the beginning of the Storm-scenes, though he thinks of his master alone, we
perceive from his words that the cold and rain are almost more than he can bear.
His childishness comes home to us when he runs out of the hovel, terrified by the
madman and crying out to the King 'Help me, help me,' and the good Kent takes
him by the hand and draws him to his side. A little later he exclaims, 'This cold night
will turn us all to fools and madmen'; and almost from that point he leaves the King
to Edgar, speaking only once again in the remaining hundred lines of the scene. In
the shelter of the 'farm-house' (III. vi.) he revives, and resumes his office of love;
but I think that critic is right who considers his last words significant. 'We'll go to
supper i' the morning,' says Lear; and the Fool answers 'And I'll go to bed at noon,'
as though he felt he had taken his death. When, a little later, the King is being
carried away on a litter, the Fool sits idle. He is so benumbed and worn out that he
scarcely notices what is going on. Kent has to rouse him with the words,
Come, help to bear thy master,
Thou must not stay behind.
We know no more. For the famous exclamation 'And my poor fool is hanged'
unquestionably refers to Cordelia; and even if it is intended to show a confused
association in Lear's mind between his child and the Fool who so loved her (as a
very old man may confuse two of his children), still it tells us nothing of the Fool's
fate. It seems strange indeed that Shakespeare should have left us thus in
ignorance. But we have seen that there are many marks of haste and carelessness
in King Lear; and it may also be observed that, if the poet imagined the Fool dying
on the way to Dover of the effects of that night upon the heath, he could perhaps
convey this idea to the audience by instructing the actor who took the part to show,
as he left the stage for the last time, the recognized tokens of approaching death. 1
Something has now been said of the four characters, Lear, Edgar, Kent and the
Fool, who are together in the storm upon the heath. I have made no attempt to
analyse the whole effect of these scenes, but one remark may be added. These
scenes, as we observed, suggest the idea of a convulsion in which Nature herself
joins with the forces of evil in man to overpower the weak; and they are thus one of
the main sources of the more terrible impressions produced by King Lear. But they
have at the same time an effect of a totally different kind, because in them are
exhibited also the strength and the beauty of Lear's nature, and, in Kent and the
Fool and Edgar, the ideal of faithful devoted love. Hence from the beginning to the
end of these scenes we have, mingled with pain and awe and a sense of man's
infirmity, an equally strong feeling of his greatness; and this becomes at times even
an exulting sense of the powerlessness of outward calamity or the malice of others
against his soul. And this is one reason why imagination and emotion are never
here pressed painfully inward, as in the scenes between Lear and his daughters, but
are liberated and dilated.