The bauble of the Fool in "King Lear" rings us into a horizon that,
before we reach it, mutters with the premonition of madness; and we
wonder if any humor can find shelter with us underneath that blackening
sky. When the Fool joins our company, we search his features in
vain for a trace of Feste's and Touchstone's temper. That spring of
geniality has been stirred by the king's misfortunes till it is roiled
into irony; and we recognize the only tone that can take lodgings in
this tragedy. It makes rifts in the gathering tempest, not of clear sky
but of lighter cloud-racks, around whose edges the first lightnings
run. We have ceased to smile and begin to forebode. All cheeriness and
whim are getting blotted out so fast that we share the Fool's longing
for the shelter of the hut when heaven began to pelt that old gray
head, "crowned with rank fumiter," upon the heath.
His irony is tart; but commiseration for his master saves it from
ill-temper. Just as it threatens to become cynical, a song occurs to
him, which is a low call drawing him back, as the mother's voice lures
her child from the edge of a cliff ere it falls over:--
"Then they for sudden joy did weep,
And I for sorrow sung."
"When were you wont to be so full of songs, sirrah?" It was not his
wont, then? By no means. This court-jester stood by when the latent
disease of the King's brain was suddenly unmasked by the sincerity
of Cordelia, whose love was more ponderous than her tongue. He saw
her transformed, in an instant of the King's first lesion, from a
daughter into an outcast. First, wonder at a blow which no one could
anticipate, and then pity at seeing that love's vessel thus pushed
over and its rareness spilled, has destroyed his appetite for mirth.
He unconsciously resorts to the Fool's alternative between jesting and
gravity, which is a fusion of both these qualities in irony; and he
catches at the ragged edges of old songs when he feels himself tumbling
into bitter aspersion of the King. He has, too, been affrighted by the
sudden and groundless vehemence which hurls the faithful old Kent into
exile as soon as he dared speak a word for Cordelia. What! Daughterhood
stamped out like a spider, life-long loyalty sent to the dogs! This
palace can dispense with jesting for the future; and our wits must
yield a different grain. Touchstone is the wise fool of life's comedy.
But Lear snatches at his fool's bauble, invests him with the pathos
of a broken sceptre and a crumbling reason, and may well inquire when
he learned to sing. "I have used it, Nuncle, e'er since thou madest
thy daughters thy mother." His songs insinuate so much unpalatable
truth that he tells the King to keep a schoolmaster that can teach his
fool to lie, and pretends that under the circumstances, with the King
undertaking to be the house-fool, lying might be an accomplishment.
No person--not even the shrewd, observing Fool--had detected in these
early inconstancies of the King the tokens of impending insanity. But
Shakspeare meant, no doubt, that the whim of abdication, the division
of the kingdom, and the absurd project to travel with a hundred knights
from one daughter's house to another, should hint to us that the
royal brain was breaking down. An expert in the phenomena of insanity
would have predicted what occurred so suddenly. But it shocked these
unprepared beholders, and curdled every smile on the Fool's face into
lines of mockery that ran full with tears. No king's misfortune was
ever so bantered by its own pathos, as love and loyalty, contrasting
with ingratitude, subsidized a Fool for the service of pity.
But he cannot long employ his Irony upon our hearts, for events develop
a dread earnest temper. There is no longer place for insinuation in the
scene. The fortune of Lear seems to challenge all the elements to match
it. As the reason topples, it appears to be clutching at the sky to
save itself, and brings it down in the winds and lightnings of midnight
to sympathize with its own eclipse. The Fool is cowed by the madness
and the storm as they intermingle; his brave innuendoes die away; and
he supplicates Lear, in plain language of human discomfort, to seek
some shelter, even under such a blessing as one of his daughters can
bestow, for that seems less inclement than the night. His vein runs
very thin during Lear's delusion that he has his daughters in court and
is trying them; and it soon disappears, swallowed in the quicksand of
the king's lunacy. Kingdom, friends, reason, family, are all crumbled
into this wreck of an old father, who pretends at last to hear the
soft and gentle voice which used to temper the pride of his state
and keep him human: he comes in to us hugging the hanged Cordelia to
his cracking heart, to feel that she will come no more; she, whom he
drove from his palace gate with violent misapprehension, will come no
more,--never, never, never! Oh, it has grown too piteous for the wisest
Fool: he can never share these scenes; his humor cannot lace these
thundrous lines. Do they swell to the measure of the firmament itself,
or is it our heart which is swelling to occupy that space? Yes: "Pray
ye, undo this button." It is the heart, too big for any thing that ever
made it smile. The lightnings of fate rend it into the drops of pity,
and they wash all tolerating smiles away.
Humor is too deeply implicated with our mortality, too warm a comrade,
too judicious a friend in our extremities, to choose such hours
of disaster to virtue for any task of reconciliation. Awful and
questioning spirits come; and Humor, yielding to them our hand, stands
aside to wait, but yields it warm enough to keep warm through any grasp
till it may be claimed again.
Shakspeare's instinct divined the precise moment when the bells of
the Fool's bauble could not compete with thunder, nor the balls upon
his cap draw off the bolt. But, while the muttering comes up from the
horizon and begins to be heard between the lines, the bells still
shake, as in the last scene of the first act, where they render more
sombre the expectation of what must finally come down upon our heads.
The recollection of Cordelia gives the King a lucid interval: it breaks
like a breadth of heaven into his brain, and into ours through that
little sentence, "I did her wrong."
"Canst tell how an oyster makes his shell?" "No." "Nor I neither; but I
can tell why a snail has a house." "Why?" "Why, to put his head in; not
to give it away to his daughters, and leave his horns without a case."
Lear listens absently to the quaint chatter; for he detects the threat
which has been approaching from the distance, and is now quite near.
"Oh, let me not be mad, not mad, sweet Heaven!
Keep me in temper: I would not be mad."
After helping Kent and Gloster bear off the King just before old
Gloster's eyes are plucked from his head, the Fool disappears from the
tragedy, as if all light were to be quenched with such an act, and all
moods but terror to be stamped with those jellies under Cornwall's feet.
"Make no noise, make no noise; draw the curtains!"