Playing the Fool: The Importance of the Smallest Scene in Shakespeare's King Lear's

Alterations and adaptations of Shakespeare's plays have a long history, beginning in the Restoration and all but ending in the eighteenth century, of being reworked in an effort to preserve contemporary sensibilities and to conform to ideological notions of their particular historical moment. In the art of theater production, concerns for direction must include a synthesis between text and stage; the relationship between signs in the text and their representation on the stage must be situated within perspectives of time and place, or we may fall prey to a failure of theatre, a failure to connect with the audience who collectively and individually reads theatrical signs. In order these signs be successfully transmitted, it is natural to adapt the play to stimulate the right senses, feelings, and understandings provoked by the earliest performances.

Though directors often assume the risks of elision, they also must, in certain circumstances and under a deft imagination, perform the act of revising and adapting a play to maintain intelligibility for contemporary audiences. King Lear is a very long play and rarely reproduced in full. There is one scene in particular which elongates the duration of the play without appearing to move the action along: act I, scene v. It is a scene only forty to forty-six lines in length (depending on the version of the text) and is simple to omit. Its placement as the conclusion of act I suggests it is a highly important scene that would launch us toward the next act, however, the dramatic action runs merely as a continuation (or reiteration) of I, iv in which the Fool interjects wisecracks and riddles in Lear, Gonneril, and Albany's conversation. At the close of I, iv, Gonneril's collusion with Regan against Lear is blossoming, and Albany, sensing the dramatic tension rising, ends the scene with the words “Well, well; the event” (I.iv.311). Could a more perfect segue into the softly falling dark of the stage be written? Moreover, omitting the scene would bring about a visual shift from the Duke of Albany's courtyard without requiring its rapid and dull reintroduction, stimulating the action more quickly and pragmatically.

To give full weight to the tragedy of King Lear this comic scene could be removed in order to heighten the distress of the story, distinguishing the tragic overtones without pausing here for the quick-fire exchange. Besides, Fool appears with Lear repeatedly within the first three Acts; I, v is the Fool's second appearance, in which his character does not grow or change, he simply reacquaints the audience with his jocular and bitter nature, as he jokes and dances around Lear. Lear's request of Kent for the letters to be delivered to Gloucester weakly opens the scene, and after Kent's exit the Fool and Lear are left alone. The design of Lear's lonely engagement with himself begins here in I,v, though the Fool's presence disallows Lear's complete separation from his men. Lear's Fool is the antiflatterer, who, Viki K. Janik notices, “is cruelly missed in the first scene of Shakespeare's tragedy, where, in the distribution of parcels of his kingdom of England, King Lear ties his largess to preposterous compliments from his two eldest daughters, Regan and Goneril” (290). His position in I, v clearly serves his role as antiflatterer, critiquing the king all too late of his poor decision, as he does in every other scene in which he appears.

Fool prods Lear down the road of despair and then follows after him like a dog follows his master, freshly kicked through his own provocation. Were the Fool does not present at all, as Naham Tate designed, Lear's initial descent into madness would stem from his own mind, from his own soliloquizing. All the wit and wisdom Fool produces would have to be counterbalanced; else Lear would have to divulge his own naiveté while concealing the knowledge of himself. Tate's 1681 version completely eradicated Fool's role in order that comic and tragic elements not mix and found Lear's madness amplified by the change. Tate's version is still one of the most notable omissions in Lear's performance history and not widely regarded as successful. Lear's loneliness and isolation are indeed magnified by the loss of Fool, his shifting and disjointed consciousness must pivot around his own self, allowing him to sink into a more insular insanity.

Yet this re-scripting shunts the character down a rigidly pre-formed path. One of the most interesting elements of King Lear's performance is the variety in which Lear's madness is portrayed. Some directors have given him over to madness completely, some, like Stavin, have him deny his madness throughout. Likewise, contradictory interpretations of the Fool's character and conception are contextualized by R.A. Foakes according to textual revisions and the widely varying treatments of this role. Fool has been played as a dimwit whose wisdom stems from chance second-sight; as intelligent and thoughtful; as a pretty boy or double for Cordelia; as a talented professional, and “as embodying the conscience of the King, as a voice of social protest” (111). There is no doubt Fool easily reveals the contrast between himself and Lear and it is interesting to note the considerations for treatment of Lear and the Fool have a similarly varied history. The removal of the Fool from Tate's romanticized version required the context that was omitted by removing the Fool be reconstructed, largely through soliloquy.

Sentimentality a fault of Tate's drama. As a result, Lawrence Green points out, almost all of Tate's “dramatic-high points and turns in the plot occur either at the end of a long speech or in a sudden action on stage. As a result, Lear's dramatic moments of self-realization are reserved for the ends of speeches” (261). These speeches must contain all that Fool draws out of Lear, the necessary information and the emotional build. Directors would be well advised to learn from the pitfalls of other directors, and Tate's revision of the play is hardly seen as successful by contemporary standards. Would removing scene v from act I injure the polish and performance of Lear's fears? His descent toward madness?

Green directs us to see that “polishing these dramatic moments is difficult with Lear because they usually occur in Shakespeare after a series of fast exchanges with Fool. Fool's language itself is highly figurative and simultaneously points to several different levels of meaning” (261). The scene unfolds as a game of cat and mouse: barbs thrown out by the Fool sink softly into Lear's human flesh, now that he has shed his monarchal shield. It is clear the Fool attempts to distract Lear, yet his compulsion to injure only draws Lear's attention toward more immediate problems. Marvin Rosenberg observes how swiftly the Fool is able to shift with Lear, as if they are locked in a game of fists, “focusing on Lear from different directions...as quickly as Lear responds to them” (137). Or, as we shall see, as quickly as Lear sometimes doesn't respond to them, for scene v begins the development of a sorely fragmented consciousness.

Elsewhere in the play, Fool serves as a foil for unearthing Lear's feelings, so Lear need not explain them in his own speeches, as Tate would have him do. Green supposes the rapid shift in delivered content between Lear and Fool “perhaps baffled Tate's impulse towards regularity and probability, but it is a very efficient manner of revealing what is troubling Lear” (261). Even when Lear neglects to respond to one of Fool's barbs, it is apparent he remains effected by it. His mind still moves in connection with the words Fool has spoken. Indeed, his responses are not as absent-minded as they seem and conform to Fool's rhetoric. It is Fool's talk of his daughter, “as like this as a crab's like an apple,” which broadens to the general question of “why one's nose stands i' th' middle on 's face?” that leads Lear to the comment, seemingly meant only for himself, “I did her wrong” (14;18;22). Many scholars have taken note that “her” here refers to Cordelia, but in following Fool's argument, it may well refer to Goneril, as Lear's failings could have formed her so like a “crab.” Likewise, the audience is primed by Fool's previous introductions to notice the sting the Fool produces. Lear cannot forget his guilt, his inner mind continues working over his folly and the claim: “I did her wrong,” in this light, points to Cordelia. The double-sense here is indicative of Fool and Lear's interactions.

Just after this, Fool rousts Lear out of his sentimentality and refocuses his mind on a sail's house. The end of the joke brings the image of a cuckold, and echoes the horns of Edmund's speech in I, ii—a speech we will return to shortly, for many comparisons are stretched between these two disparate scenes. For now, in the progression of the exchange, the snail's house, molded to the cuckold's cap, elicits the exclamation: “I will forget my nature. So, kind a father!” an unnatural proceeding from the events which have transpired (29). Now the audience has fallen into the rhythm of a call and response relationship and begin to become aware that the Fool's jokes lead to a heightened sense of interior conflict for Lear.

Fool's methods are double, says Rosenberg, “as Fool incites Lear to sanity, he baits him, too, and the pitch rises” (139). At the scene's climax, Fool builds Lear up to a near break-down, taunting, “if thou wert my fool, nuncle, I'd have thee beatn' for being old before thy time” (36-7). Several things are operating on the audience at this point. This is the first concretization of the idea that the old king is now a fool, this claim, the constant “nuncle,” and the coxcomb, all call attention to Lear's drastically changed state. In sublimating the fool within Lear's character, Tate was not far off, for the Fool now seems to be a reflection of Lear's jagged internal vision. They appear together throughout the play, except when Cordelia replaces the Fool as the foil by which Lear may most harshly judge himself. Lear and the Fool's inverted relationship contrast the disparity of Lear's opinion of himself and that of the Fool while the audience as observer is privileged to hold both.

Within Fool's suggestion of “being old before thy time,” lies a provocation, and as Lear so often asks, “How's that?” the fool replies, “Thou shouldst not have been old till thou hadst been wise” (37; 38-40). Wisdom and its attendant suggestion of punishment for failing it, pushes Lear's mind in a similar, yet morbid direction: “O, let me not be mad, no mad, sweet heaven!” (41). We are again bound by the logic of Fool's rhetoric. Lear's cry is let to linger until the arrival of the Gentleman which contributes to the intensity of the moment by his sudden, interruptive appearance. The call back to practical matters: “Are the horses ready?” (43), at the pinnacle of Lear's emotional swing between hope and wild despair again thrusts Lear into a direction he may not otherwise have taken: calling Fool to him, binding himself further to the constant reminder of his pain. His tenderness toward Fool is growing; the intensity of emotion endured is likely the binding element which reinforces that feeling of intimacy which they so surprisingly share.

Directorial vision plays an advanced role in delivering the essence of this scene. The depth of possibility that this scene can engage with belies its length. Though there are few characters and few highly charged lines, the complex arrangement of the scene can better be seen by the audience whose role amidst the chaotic swirl of events mirrors that of Lear's—we also are not in control of the chaos and must reasonably parse out actions and reactions from within its unknowable depths. A broader figurative context is here developed which constellates themes across the play. This appeal to heaven acknowledges the hand of fate and thus Lear's requests and appeals, again and again, are refused by a source outside of his control.

Let us return to Edmund's exchange with Gloucester in I, ii, where an audience's attunement to the powers of the heavens is established. Gloucester urges a meeting with Lear, and Edmund reluctantly accepts to convey Gloucester's business to him. After hearing that Edmund will do this, Gloucester embarks upon a pretty speech about the sun and stars. His indulgence in the belief that heavenly bodies control earthly events is coupled in the next line with nature: “Though the wisdom of nature can reason it thus and thus, yet nature finds itself scourged by the sequent effects” (95-8). Lear's repetition of nature and appeal to the heavens, reinforces the idea that “we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and stars, as if we were villains on necessity, fools by heavenly compulsion...” (110-12). Though Edmund's deliverance is scathing, it does no less to situate in our minds Lear's verbal reinforcements as attachments to his character. For blame of heavens to be linked so roundly with foolishness only draws us back to Lear and doubles the claim of his foolish nature. Lear's only anticipation of an answer for one of Fool's jokes has as its subject the heavenly bodies so scorned by Edmund.

To Fool quickly quips: “the reason why the seven stars are no more than seven is a pretty reason” to which Lear replies, perhaps with preoccupation “Because they are eight” (I.v.31-33). The Pleiades, or seven sisters, were mythologized most notably in Hesiod's Works and Days, as the daughters of Atlas (II, 383-404). They are the winter stars. Aeschylus records that the sisters are placed in the heavens over the sorrow that they felt for their father. Hesiod's infamous quote, known well to sailors follows, “and if longing seizes you for sailing the stormy seas, / when the Pleiades flee the mighty Orion,/ and plunge into the misty deep / and all the gusty winds are raging...” (618-9). Like many of the deeply considered lines in Shakespeare, connections arise that are considerable in adding weight to metaphorical tropes. Here we find a divergence in understanding between and Elizabethan audience and a contemporary one. Many would understand the allusion to Greek mythology, and also the importance of the constellation to sailors, thus suggesting the reinforced trope of the storm. Yet today's audience might not get the connection, at least perhaps not as deeply. That is not to say this line holds no immediate importance to the dramatic performance of the play. Lear answers only this riddle, and it is because of its revealing answer he is condemned to be the fool. The missing sister, the nonexistent eighth, could very well gesture toward Cordelia. This line, therefore, is essential in accumulating Lear's blame and Lear's foolishness in banishing his daughter.

The microcosmic relevance of this scene seems to support the idea that it should be cut. The recurrent themes found in the nuanced text of I, v is just that—recurrent, they exist elsewhere. Kent first brings up the theme of majesty falling to folly, and Fool reconfirms this by joking about “two crowns of an egg” in I, iv. We must remember that Lear's madness serves as a governing principle, and it is in I, iv that his madness begins to unfold. The later iteration of “O Fool, I shall go mad!” (451) is not only a self-fulfilling prophecy, but one that has been foreshadowed by me, v.

Shakespeare is both liberal and intentional with his patterning. Despite the volume of recurrence, I, v still contextualizes much of what has been said, and indeed, what will be said. This is the moment when the actor's body will sink into the roles of Lear and Fool, the moment when they have the most elasticity and can better affect the audience with an intimate tableau amidst scenes of tumultuous chaos. The heavens are a volatile anchor; more realistically, it is Fool that plays this role, though the audience discovers him to be nearly as volatile, he is, at the very least, consistent. This is not the only association the Fool gains by this scene. His privileged knowledge of events seems miraculous, and his predictions ring true before the corresponding events unfold. The final line of I, v concludes most ominously, “She that is a maid now, and laughs at my departure,/ Shall not be a maid long, except things be cut shorter” (44-5). This end rhyme too is often cut short, but, as Rosenberg notes, is “contributory to Fool's dialectic...with its multiple erotic implications, perhaps accompanied by visual gesture,” (141). Though the jest comes out of context and concludes the scene, there is a threatening overtone which Rosenberg misses. The Fool is not simply providing relief from an uncomfortable scene: he is acting in his oracular capacity and declaiming the early fall of Goneril's life. This does more than Rosenberg's assertion for “a momentary interdiction of intense emotional response...and a wry implication about the length of his own artwork” (141). The playwright infuses the final line of Act I, the line which will be most fresh in the minds of the audience, with a foreboding portent, while simultaneously indulging in a humorous exeunt.

There have been several prophecies at work in King Lear, and Fool, similar to the words of the Oracle about Oedipus's impending fall, the prophecy being fulfilled combines, as Northrop Frye suggests, “two themes of divine will and natural event [death]” (255). But by the standards already enforced in King Lear, nature is hardly “natural.” S.L. Bethell perceives two meanings of “nature” in his book Shakespeare and the Popular Dramatic Tradition: nature, as opposed to the realm of grace (heavenly portents); and secondly, nature as opposed to civilization (56). The nature to which Lear binds himself is formed of the same substance as his cuckold's crown. It isn't enough for a man to cuckold himself: the run of comparisons through the animal kingdom—crab, oyster, snail, puts Lear lower and lower on the chain.

Not only does this scene debase Lear as is proper to his own marginally registered assessment, it has the power to exemplify Lear's increasing preoccupation with Regan and Gonneril's own infidelities. James C. Bullman, in the introduction to his text Shakespeare, Theory and Performance calls attention to the “affective power of the body, its present bodiliness, its capacity to arouse an audience's passions—the physical and emotive force of acting that resist inscription—which is a part of the pleasure we derive from live performance” (6). Yes, some scenes are like it, but Lear's tragic accumulation of guilt and Fool's drive to injure with his jabs, make this scene all the more sinister.

Comedic acts within a tragedy serve to better accentuate those tragic elements whose tragic nature takes a fresh breath in humorous context. Fool's jokes, random and seemingly nonsensical insertions, brighten an audience's emotive responses that may otherwise become mired in overwhelming tragedy. That Tate reworked the play to have many other such buoys, most notably the happy end with Cordelia and Edgar's marriage gains him credit, though his version is, to be sure, a pale version of the original. But so much is lost, especially in the enhancement of the tragedy, without Fool, and without I, v. Fool, whether played in white face with a red nose secured by an elastic band or as in Peter Brooks' casual, studied version, nonetheless invokes tragedy conflated with merriment.

The two irreconcilable states, because they have been so thoroughly intertwined, are present within the play even as Fool moves off to his possible death, his tragedy accentuated by the progress of Lear's. Though he is a clown, he wears the cap of tragedy. Lear's laughter in I, v punctuates the lack of humor in Fool's jokes. Many actors have played the chuckle to mirror Lear's sad laugh for Cordelia. The tragic and comedic elements of the scene are held in tension with one another. They produce an irreconcilable state, where, Mark Roche remarks, “the tragic and comic are not juxtaposed; they are identical” (256). Much like the relationship between Fool and Lear, it is hard, sometimes, to tell where one ends, and one begins. Fool's statement in I, iv, that he is Lear's shadow and can therefore expound the concrete details of Lear's identity, not only aligns himself intimately with Lear but effectively sublimates himself into Lear's person (196). Thus, Lear becomes the tragicomic figure and Fool.

King Lear follows a response and recognition structure consistent with many of Shakespeare's plays. The audience is directed with an excessive amount of witness and responses, so that we become sensitive as much to the reactions as to the actions themselves. The exchange in I, v primes the audience both for the expectation of call and response, where reactions are sometimes unexpected and fragmented, and for uneven emotional responses aroused by the tragicomic consolidation.

The classical design of King Lear leans heavily on Lear's internalized anguish, which is tempered and drawn out for the stage by Fool and his persistent diversions. There is a signifying practice at stake in every play, and the text further opens a plurality of readings that reject universal signification. It is therefore of the utmost importance to rely on the complexity of such a small scene, for it has the ability to reach across the structure of the play, to fortify and mold it. We should not deny its due place in the production. After this close analysis Albany's “Well, well, th' event” in closing I, iv, does not compare to the arousal produced in I, v.

A performance text, as defined by Marco De Marinis, “is conceived of as a complex network of different types of signs, expressive means, or actions, coming back to the etymology of the word 'text' which implies the idea of texture, of something woven together” (100). To unravel even the most insignificant stitch threatens to undo the entire blanket. It is impossible to tell what repercussions and differences will be produced by omitting I, v, but what is not contestable is that there are repercussions: the anxiety and emotional intensity reached in I, v, even in reiteration of other scenes, serves as its own focal point. It is an outstanding scene for its brevity and compactness and though its product is innocuous, it nonetheless acts to reinforce the global rhythm of the project and would not do to be cut.

For the audience, King Lear exists in a series of unfolding moments, the logic and laws of which govern interpretations of the play in its entirety and also in parts, as each scene relates paratactically to the one following. Just as Lear is bound in response to the logic of Fool's rhetorical questions, we are bound by the logic of the play. At once subversive and expository, I, v's microcosmic significance is dependent upon Fool and Lear's twinned relationship. The intimacy of the scene gives credibility to Janik's claim that “we miss [Fool] so much at the end of King Lear that when the ex-king announces that his 'poor fool is hanged' (V.iii.306), the audience thinks of the clown and the actual referent, Cordelia, in the same breath (292). Had the audience not had the space in which to breathe along with the Fool and King in their mostly private scene, this would not formulate itself so distinctly. Furthermore, the double-sense that was so well established in I, v psychologically reasserts itself as the audience interprets “fool” as referring to both Fool and Cordelia.

The pattern of dialogue firmly created within I, v is more audible without the interplay between several characters, as in I, iv with Goneril, Lear, Albany, and Kent engaged in a dance of tongues into which Fool shoots his verbal darts. The audience is able to better understand the mechanisms Fool employs to incite Lear through their private, oblique interchange in I, v. Janik too notices that Lear's Fool appears in five scenes and serves as a “fine dramatic scene opener and closer” (292). As we reviewed earlier, Fool's end couplet in I, v has enough malicious foreboding behind its bawdy claim to unsettle the mind of the crowd as it meets the closing curtain. It does not go unnoticed that Fool assumed the position of the Oracle in another scene with “This prophecy Merlin shall make, for I live before his time” (III.ii.92). Just as threads of connection are woven to make up the fabric of the play, this line of thought is not missed, and Fool's jesting prophecies have all come true.

The play concludes without satisfying the terms of justice it has the power to mete out, as other versions of King Lear have had. Thus, the audience is denied the feeling of natural resolution. Fool's absence from the final scene is, in this way, markedly appropriate. Though the play's resolution flows against human desire to see retribution, to expect justice in the face of injustice, it does follow the logic the play has established over the course of the production. Without I, v the law well established by Fool's intimate attachment to Lear and his ability to draw out that which we most wish to hear from Lear—remorse—is tenuous. The meaning of Fool's actions cannot be immediately identified during a single viewing of the play, but close reading helps to produce the experience of the play as a larger whole as it is contextualized by this scene's importance.

In the experience of King Lear an audience develops, naturally and unwittingly, sensitivity to the myriad tones of law and logic that are sounded through the characters. Implications are everywhere: hidden meaning, doubled gestures, paradoxes within the play's logic. Lear of course is the character who establishes much of the rules of the play, and Fool, particularly Lear's private Fool, in his capacity to expose Lear's internalizations is as instrumental in this as the title character. It is a director's daunting duty to work through the consequences of cutting even a small portion of a play, as in the case of I, v. Intelligibility might not be lost with the scene's removal, but we could remove something much subtler, much more important. Allowing I, v to remain in the position Shakespeare placed it, an audience is offered the opportunity to experience the multiple potentialities and melancholic elements that each scene, each speech, each word can offer. Though it may be tempting to remove, losing that scene would undermine the richness of Lear's development and diminish the poignancy of Fool's accompanying plight.

Works Cited

Bethell, S. L. Shakespeare and the popular dramatic tradition. New York: Octagon Books, 1970. Print.

Bulman, James C. Shakespeare, theory, and performance. London: Routledge, 1996. Print.

De Marinis, Marco. “Dramaturgy of the Spectator.” Performance: critical concepts in literary and cultural studies. Ed. Auslander, Philip. London: Routledge, 2005. 219-236. Print.

Frye, Northrop. Fools of Time: Studies in Shakespearean Tragedy. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1967. Print.

Green, Lawrence D. “'Where's my Fool?' Some Consequences of the Omission of the Fool in Tate's Lear.” Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 12.2 (1972): 259-274. Web. 8 Mar. 2014.

Janik, Vicki K. Fools and Jesters in Literature, Art, and History: A Bio-bibliographical Sourcebook. Westport : Greenwood Press, 1998. Print.

Rosenberg, Marvin. The masks of King Lear. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972. Print.

Shakespeare, William, and R. A. Foakes. King Lear. London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1997. Print.

Shakespeare, William. "The Tragedy of King Lear: A Conflated Text." The Norton Shakespeare. 1st ed. Eds. Greenblatt, Stephen, Walter Cohen, Jean E. Howard, Kartherine Eisaman Maus. New York: W. W. Norton, 1997. 2479-2553. Print.

West, M. L. Works and Days. Special ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996. Print.