Lear, the Fool, and the Slyness of a Fox

I am really enjoying Lear and the richness of all the characters in this play, but there are three who I find particularly interesting:

Lear

The Fool

Edmund

As I see and read each of these characters it seems to me that Shakespeare has turned the world on its head. Lear, it appears, is the real fool, The Fool seems extraordinarily wise, albeit somewhat insecure, and Edmund, I think, has the clearest view of the world around him and is willing to use what he knows to fulfill his desired end. While they are all completely different in nature and character, I find them each compelling.

Lear: I still can't quite figure Lear out. As I asked in a comment on one of the blog posts last week, is Lear evil? Senile? Spoiled? Childish? I'm not certain. He clearly embodies all of these characteristics, but I'm not certain that his intent is evil or that it is even intentional. In fact, I think that there is an inference of a loving and happy relationship with Cordelia prior to his disowning her in Act I. I think what's being revealed in Lear is his own uncertainty at the state of his own mental well-being and the strength of his own mind:

LEAR

Thou think’st ’tis much that this contentious storm

Invades us to the skin; so ’tis to thee;

But where the greater malady is fix’d,

The lesser is scarce felt. Thou’dst shun a bear,

But if thy flight lay toward the roaring sea,

Thou’dst meet the bear i’ th’ mouth. When the mind’s free,

The body’s delicate; this tempest in my mind

Doth from my senses take all feeling else,

Save what beats there—filial ingratitude!

Is it not as this mouth should tear this hand

For lifting food to’t? But I will punish home.

No, I will weep no more. In such a night

To shut me out? Pour on, I will endure.

In such a night as this? O Regan, Goneril!

Your old kind father, whose frank heart gave all—

O, that way madness lies, let me shun that!

No more of that.

I think to some degree what we're seeing here in 3.4 is the dissolution of a man who can't quite understand where his mind is going or why. He senses that he is no longer in control of himself or his mind and that "tempest in [his] mind" makes it impossible for him to feel anything else.

The Fool, I feel, is not so much another character in the play as he is another player in Lear's mind: the matter to Lear's anti-matter. While he answers characters directly, I am not always certain that these answer are coming from another physical being—although this is clearly the way it's being played on the stage—as much as it is another person speaking through Lear himself. A kind of muse or a second part of Lear's personality.

One of the things that strikes me about The Fool is that he gets away with saying things that I believe no one in Lear's court would say. He speaks the truth, but when he does it's almost as a whisper. This makes me feel like I'm not watching or listening to an actual court jester, but another part of Lear's personality. The reasonable and intelligent part of Lear, but the part that Lear himself is no longer able to give his full attention to. The Fool is the voice in the back of Lear's head. The Fool is Lear's mind playing tricks on him and yet the fool is often the only voice of reason in Lear's head.

Note the following from 3.2:

EARL OF KENT

Who’s there?

FOOL

Marry, here’s grace and a codpiece—that’s a wise man and a fool.

EARL OF KENT

Alas, sir, are you here? Things that love night

Love not such nights as these. The wrathful skies

Gallow the very wanderers of the dark,

And make them keep their caves. Since I was man,

Such sheets of fire, such bursts of horrid thunder,

Such groans of roaring wind and rain, I never

Remember to have heard. Man’s nature cannot carry

Th’ affliction nor the fear.

LEAR

Let the great gods,

That keep this dreadful pudder o’er our heads,

Find out their enemies now. Tremble, thou wretch

That hast within thee undivulged crimes

Unwhipt of justice! Hide thee, thou bloody hand;

Thou perjur’d, and thou simular of virtue

That art incestuous! Caitiff, to pieces shake,

That under covert and convenient seeming

Has practic’d on man’s life! Close pent-up guilts,

Rive your concealing continents, and cry

These dreadful summoners grace. I am a man

More sinn’d against than sinning.

Note that the Earl of Kent doesn't say, "Where's the king" when he enters the room in response to The Fool, he responds directly to Lear, as if there is no one else there. I haven't looked closely enough at the entire text to see how The Fool interacts with the other characters in the play, but it seems that The Fool is only in the room at the same time as Lear and the lines he delivers often seem as if they could be delivered by Lear himself. At the very least, it seems that what he says could easily be the narrative that is playing in Lear's mind.

Edmund is of interest to me because of how clearly he sees the world and how well he is able to manipulate the world around him because of how he understands it. To me some of the best lines in the play are delivered early on after Edmund speaks with the Earl of Gloucester and the Earl reveals that he believes, "These late eclipses in the sun and moon portend no good to us." Edmund, after the Earl leaves, gives a kind of wink to the audience and then proceeds to use his knowledge of human nature to manipulate Edgar.

EDMUND

This is the excellent foppery of the world, that when we are sick in fortune—often the surfeits of our own behavior—we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and stars, as if we were villains on necessity, fools by heavenly compulsion, knaves, thieves, and treachers by spherical predominance; drunkards, liars, and adulterers by an enforc’d obedience of planetary influence; and all that we are evil in, by a divine thrusting on. An admirable evasion of whoremaster man, to lay his goatish disposition on the charge of a star! My father compounded with my mother under the Dragon’s tail, and my nativity was under Ursa Major, so that it follows, I am rough and lecherous. Fut, I should have been that I am, had the maidenl’est star in the firmament twinkled on my bastardizing. Edgar—

Enter Edgar.

Pat! he comes like the catastrophe of the old comedy. My cue is villainous melancholy, with a sigh like Tom o’ Bedlam.—O, these eclipses do portend these divisions! fa, sol, la, mi.

In short, people will blame their poor estate on anything, the moon, the stars, the alignment of the planets, rather than take responsibility for their own actions and acknowledge what those actions have given birth to. Edmund knows this isn't so, and he knows how to use the predilections of those around him, leverage those predilections, and use them to create his own destiny. In this case he makes Edgar believe that he, Edmund, is a sworn servant of the stars and is driven hither and yon by whatever the planets dictate, which actually turns the whole idea of the stars controlling humans on its ear. Because it is in fact Edmund not the stars who is controlling Edgar.

This wisdom, this streetwise quality, I think, makes Edmund one of my favorite characters in the play.