Seite 109 [109]
THE INFLUENCE OF EARLY MODERN THEORIES OF GOVERNANCE
landed, / We must incline to the King. I will seeke him, and / Priuily releeue
him [...] though I die fort, as no lesse is threatned me, / the King my old master
must be releeued.”*!" Before he is blinded on stage, he boldly confronts Regan
in order to protect Lear, and he warns her, “I would not see thy cruell nayles
/ Pluck out his poore old eyes, nor thy fierce sister / In his aurynted flesh rash
borish fangs.""
There is at least one other character, alongside Kent and Gloster, who
undoubtedly tries to insist that justice is done, and in a highly unusual way: in
Cordelia’s absence, the Fool provides company to Lear and makes him confront
his folly with his riddles, which figuratively comment on the plot. The Fool
is known for his verbose diction, which Christy Desmet describes as “oral
performances, being dependent on rhythm and sound, [which] bring cultural
wisdom before the mind’s eye by personification, stimulating imaginative
vision through acoustic effects.”*”” The Fool’s verbosity is in sharp contrast
with Cordelia’s silence at the beginning of the play. Although the audience
is provided no information regarding the Fool’s earlier behavior, the text of
the play directly connects his intense linguistic activity with Lear’s division
of the kingdom and its consequences. When the Fool appears on stage, Lear
notices that his singing is unusual, and when he asks him for an explanation,
the Fool answers, “I have vs’d it nuncle, euer since thou mad’st thy daughters
thy mothers; for when thou gauest them the rod, and put’st downe thine own
breeches then they for sudden ioy did weep, and I for sorrow sung.”*'? The other
distinctive feature of the Fool’s utterances is that he never speaks in blank
verse and he makes frequent use of similes, proverbs, and “rhymed adages,”
sometimes much more for the sake of the audience than to communicate with
the King.** Ted Hughes has observed that the real power of the Fool’s words
derives from the fact that they indirectly refer to Divine Truth, which the
characters cannot easily perceive in “ordinary words”:
But these words can encompass the truth in their fashion, on the right tongue.
Their inability to declare the truth directly gives them licence to sing about it
obliquely, and to glance towards it crookedly, as the hidden meaning, the irony,
in the joke. Ihe ultimate personification of this appears again in King Lear, as
10 Ibid., sig. Glr.
a Ibid., sig. Hlv.
Christy Desmet: To See Feelingly: Vision, Voice, and Dramatic Illusion in King Lear, in
Christy Desmet: Reading Shakespeare’s Characters: Rhetoric, Ethics, and Identity, Amherst,
Massachusetts University Press, 1992, 126.
Shak-speare: His True Chronicle, sig. D1r.
W. H. Clemen: King Lear, in W. H. Clemen: The Development of Shakespeare’s Imagery,
Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1951, 141-142.
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