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SHAKESPEARE’S ART OF POESY IN KING LEAR anonymous play does not really display any close connection between wisdom and folly, which would ultimately contribute to the protagonist’s recognition of his own hamartia. Twentieth-century Shakespeare criticism has thoroughly explored the dramatic function of the Fool in general and the possible adaptations of this role by Robert Armin, the official fool of Shakespeare’s company in particular. A detailed discussion of this would digress too far from the main focus of my contrastive textual analysis. Regarding the literary antecedents of this character, Enid Welsford explains that a direct connection can be traced between Shakespeare’s representation of the court jester as the “sage-fool”'?° with Erasmus’ Moriae Encomium, a grammar school text book with which Shakespeare must have been familiar.’ The sage fool thus partly stands for “the truth teller whose real insight was thinly disguised as a form of insanity,”!” but he is also supposed “to emphasize one peculiarly dreadful instance of the reversal of position between the wise and the fool.”!*? His main theatrical function provides a direct tie between the audience and the stage and entitles him to the role ofa social critic, a feature to which Gonorill refers when calling him Lear’s “all-licenc’d foole.”!?* Elaborating on Enid Welsford’s idea of the Erasmian connection, John X. Evans further refines the notion of folly in King Lear and argues that it is ultimately understood as a virtue that defines authentic Christianity," and even direct intertextual links can be detected between Shakespeare’s and Erasmus’ work. Evans’ main focus is not the Fool but Cordelia, whose strong moral determination represents the Erasmian idea of “pious folly,’1°° which aims to eliminate mundane desires and intermediate feelings like filial love and maintains a direct connection with the “highest good.”'”” Thus Cordelia becomes a Christ-figure whose task is to redeem her father from his folly, an idea which is supported by the similarity between her words and behavior and some Biblical passages. To single out an example which has become a bit of a commonplace in the secondary literature on King Lear, Evans notes the resemblance between Cordelia’s refusal to answer her father’s question 130 Enid Welsford: The Fool: His Social and Literary History, Gloucester, MA, Peter Smith, 1966, 256. 1231 T. W. Baldwin: Shakespeare’s Small Latin and Less Greek, Vol. I., Urbana, Illinois University Press, 1944, 436. 132 Welsford: The Fool, 248. 18 Ibid., 256. 134 Shak-speare: His True Chronicle, sig. D1v. John X Evans: Erasmian Folly and Shakespeare’s King Lear: A Study in Humanist Intertextuality, Moreana 27:103 (1990), 4. 186 Tbid., 12. 187 Ibid., 14. 135 + 36 »
