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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. 41. DS 41. u 414 s 107 +
