Shakespeare's Fools

SOMETHING over a generation ago, when the Origin of Species seemed likely to solve the riddle of the world, students of literature essayed to apply to their mystery the new key of the evolutionary hypothesis. Chaucer and Shakespeare were brought in turn to its test, and the resultant theory of periods in the one poet’s work corresponding to change in his literary models, the grouping of the other poet’s plays according to his supposed personal moods, satisfied the desire for clearness and for classification fostered by the increasingly scientific trend of thought. We believed that we saw the better for the formula.

Now, however, our widening knowledge reveals in each poet’s production survivals of earlier tendencies, crosscurrents of influence, which must give us pause. We realize that a body of work which we know, and a personal life of which we know nothing, cannot be explained in terms of each other. And it is not. the theory of development, but our persistent exploration of the Elizabethan age, our gathering of that ‘ fresh knowledge ’ insisted on by Arnold as the safeguard of truth, which has enlarged our view of Shakespeare. We are compelled to conceive how great a part the prevailing literary fashion, the popular demand, the structural features of the playhouse, must have borne in shaping the plot, and the text of the dramatist, to recognize that the line of personal growth in the man might at any moment be traversed by an occasional external influence upon the dramatist. Our intense present-day interest in things theatrical, an interest without parallel in English history, also leads us to see in the Shakespearean drama, the work not only of a poet and a man understanding of men, but of an actor and stage-manager. His text was conditioned by his own mood, by his fellow dramatists’ productions, by the actors for whom he wrote.

This phrase, the actors for whom Shakespeare wrote, does not mean, as it would at present, the world of English-speaking actors; it means the company of which Shakespeare was a member. His work was done, not, as a modern dramatist’s, for any company which Heaven and Frohman may please to call together, but for a small united band of men of whom he was one, with whom he lived in close intimacy. The form of words which styles him a professional manager writing for his bread and for the honor of his comrades, quite as much as for love of the game, is no idle one. He may have turned the pages of Holinshed’s Chronicle from literary interest, but it is as likely that his trained eye was searching for a story which would hang well on the shoulders of his close friend and leading tragic actor, Richard Burbage. Lately it has been pointed out that as Burbage grows older Shakespeare’s cent ral figure grows older, that the progress from Romeo and Richard through Benedick and Hamlet to Macbeth and Lear is a noticeable one. Much more could be done in this field of Shakespearean study had we more than scattered notices regarding the make-up of the company, notices particularly interesting, and particularly incomplete, on some points in which Shakespeare differs from all his contemporaries. For example, the introduction and treatment of the Fool.

Shakespeare’s fools are for the most part an adjunct to Shakespeare’s comedy; but into the uncharted province of comedy we do not enter here. We know it as the abode of intrigue, of lighter and lesser plot rather than of character contending with circumstance; a world in which, according to Shakespeare, the father may set his daughter’s happiness upon a hazard, the lover may change his love at a word, the traitor may repent at the last moment and receive the prize; a world in which speed and variety of incident, sparkle and vivacity of dialogue, not unity of impression or consistency of motive, are the ideal of the workman. In this maze the guiding thread is love, and the principles of the comedy are the lovers divided for a time by some cross fortune, to be united joyously in the last act. Behind the lovers there usually appear, or are felt, the wouldbe arbiters of their fate, the older figures who thwart or fix events. The dead hand of Portia’s father, and the living grasp of Shylock, twist the strands of the Merchant of Venice ; the two dukes form a stable centre about which revolves the frolic of As You Like It; the dignified figures of Theseus and Hippolyta preside over the tangle of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. And, dependent upon the fortunes of the lovers, runs an attendant train of waitingmaids, pedants, shepherds, fairies, and clownish servants, who furnish the blunders, the pompous pretense, the teasing, the mirth, and the music, whose humors and whose stupidity are used by the Elizabethan dramatist partly as brief front-stage scenes to give time for changes in the main action, partly to meet the demand of the London public for word-play and buffoonery.

This is the simplest form of Shakespearean romantic comedy; it is an enlargement of the still simpler scheme of the Latin comedy; that is, the arbitrary father, the son in love, the knavish or clownish servant of the younger man. How Shakespeare progressed beyond this rudimentary outline; how he swung from farce to romance and back again, from romance to the verge of tragedy and back again; how he wove dissimilar actions, arranged his scenes to obtain variety in pace and tone, and transformed his wit-combat from the wooden sword-clatter of clowns to the swift rapier-play of Beatrice and of Rosalind, it is the duty of the historian of comedy to trace. We who contemplate but the one Elizabethan can follow, in even a single reappearing feature, such as his Clown or Fool, the progress of the dramatist’s experience.

Nor is it merely the progress of his experience in the sense of his own personal creative desire freely unfolding year after year. It is the progress of that growing intellectual desire as acted upon by the many compulsions which beset Shakespeare, — the compulsion of his material, the compulsion of his stage equipment, the compulsion of his audience, the compulsion of his band of actors. We are still far from being able to estimate the influence of this last upon him. It is from little more than occasional lists of the cast in early editions, from slips in the quartos of Shakespeare by which the actor’s name is printed instead of the character’s, from diary and verse-allusions to the impersonators of special parts, that, we piece together our fragmentary information as to the King’s Men, the group of players who ranged themselves first under the protection of Lord Leicester’s name, and, after bearing various titles, became King James’s Servants in 1603. Such a list, prefixed to the first edition of Ben Jonson’s Every Man In His Humour, includes ‘ Wil. Shakespeare, Ric. Burbadge, Aug. Phillipps, John Hemings, Hen. Condell, Tho. Pope, Wil. Sly, Chr. Beeston, Wil. Kempe, John Duke.’ One of these men had perhaps an influence upon Shakespeare’s comedy, — the actor William Kemp.

Kemp was a clown and buffoon of the most pronounced type. His popularity with the cheaper and noisier element of an Elizabethan audience was very great; frequently he appeared alone at the end of a play in what was called a jig, a long song and dance of improvised character, full of allusions to people and events, local ‘ gags,’ and direct address to the audience; and the success of this sort of impromptu with the groundlings was so great that the vain and ignorant Kemp extended his improvisations to the text of the part which he sustained within the play. Mantzius has suggested that this habit of Kemp’s must have been particularly obnoxious to Shakespeare, and may have led to Kemp’s leaving the company, which he did about 1598. A passage in the later play of Hamlet lends color to this suggestion; it occurs in Hamlet’s instructions to the players: ‘ And let those that, play your clowns speak no more than is set down for them; for there be of them that will themselves laugh, to set on some quantity of barren spectators to laugh too; though in the mean time some necessary question of the play be then to be considered; that’s villanous, and shows a most pitiful ambition in the fool that: uses it.’

The last part in a Shakespearean play which Kemp is known to have taken was that of Dogberry in Much Ado About Nothing; the associated part of Verges was taken by Richard Cowley, who remained of the company until his death in 1618. We know also, from the accidental insertion of Kemp’s name in the early prints, that he played Peter in Romeo and Juliet; and it is supposed, with strong probability, that he enacted the Shallow of the Merry Wives of Windsor and second Henry IV. For Kemp’s other parts we have but surmise; yet from the fact that so popular an actor must receive his opportunity in most of the company’s plays, and from the character of the Peter and the Dogberry rôles, we deduce the probability that the Costard of Love’s Labour’s Lost, one of the Dromios in the Comedy of Errors, Launce in the Two Gentlemen of Verona, Bottom in Midsummer Night’s Dream, perhaps Launcelot Gobbo in the Merchant of Venice, were done by Kemp.

In all these parts there is a strong family resemblance: as we call up mental pictures of Costard, Dromio, Bottom, and Dogberry, we imagine them of one common physical type, halfrustic, half-aldermanic figures, with small dull eyes, big heads, clumsy bodies, and gait of Sir Oracle. Such personages often bear but the loosest relation to the story; and in many of the comedies mentioned there is a noticeable distinction between the clownscenes and the bulk of the play. Bottom and his fellows constitute a plot by themselves; Launcelot Gobbo and his peasant-father in the Merchant of Venice, Launce and Speed or Launce and his dog in the Two Gentlemen of Verona, are very palpably given the stage at times by the playwright-manager Shakespeare; Costard and Dull and the two Dromios have their separate scenes of laborious punning and slap-stick dialogue. Whatever the clown may nominally be in these earlier comedies, — servant, messenger, or artisan, — he gets his chance alone with the audience. His function, whenever he does impinge upon the plot, is to blunder or be the victim of a blunder.

About the year 1598, however, the Shakespearean comedy undergoes a change, a change which had been more than foreshadowed in The Merchant of Venice two years earlier. The plot of this latter play, with its complex interweaving of strains, its heightened story interest, its brilliant womanly figure as centre, is in striking contrast to all preceding comedy. We can readily imagine that here for the first time the audience laughed somewhat perfunctorily at the Clown, in their impatience to resume the tale of Shylock and Antonio; and here for the first time the central personages carry a generous share of the wit of the play. The clown-note is still there; but we may suggest with plausibility that it was there because Kemp was still of the Shakespearean company and must receive his portion of front-stage scene.

Of these new features several reappear still more markedly in Much Ado About Nothing. Who the youth was who had played Portia we do not know, but he was again made conspicuous as Beatrice, and in the following year given a yet more admirable rôle as Rosalind. The wit of the play is transformed and transferred from the punning, tumbling, blundering Clown to the brilliant badinage of highborn, gallant-hearted, swift-tongued women. Kemp has his part in Much Ado About Nothing, but it is not likely that in the face of such strong story interest, of such play of teasing wit in the main action, the audience would welcome interpolation by the Clown as they welcomed it in plays more loosely and thinly built.

At the close of 1598 or in early 1599 Kemp left the Shakespearean company; and the two comedies which follow. As You Like It and Twelfth Night, show certain features which can be due neither to coincidence nor to a supposedly joyous mood just then in Shakespeare’s thought. Not only is some clever lad advanced by the dramatist-manager to the centre of the stage in the supreme women’s parts of Rosalind and Viola; not only is the heavy-headed, heavypaunched champion of his own quality displaced by the slender, quick-eyed, close-hooded court jester, agile as a monkey, domestic as a cat, faithful as a dog, intrusive as a parrot; but there is marked at this point the change in Shakespearean music from the partsong or casual comic snatch to the lovelyric brought in perforce to display the solo voice. The Merchant of Venice possessed a strong musical element; the opening of the last act is pervaded with it; but the actors do not produce it, they listen and comment. In Much Ado About Nothing, however, the servant Balthasar is called upon to sing; in As You Like It the lord Amiens, one of the banished Duke’s followers, is twice bid sing; in Twelfth Night the fool Feste sings twice at command, and has also the song-epilogue, with frequent bits of music in other scenes. Did this same actor, another figure now brought forward by Shakespeare, carry the part of the Fool in Lear, with its constant snatches of song?

Weaving together these suggestions, we find ourselves with a view of Shakespearean comedy something on this wise: that up to The Merchant of Venice Shakespeare allowed Kemp much his own way in the comic parts; that with that comedy and Much Ado About Nothing he modified and fitted more closely to his plan the conventional clown-part, centring the interest upon the woman’s figure, for which he had found an impersonator; that, after the withdrawal of Kemp, the dramatist, anxious no doubt to overcome the regret. of the audience for the departed favorite, retained in As You Like It a conspicuous fool-figure, which he altered in Twelfth Night to suit the youthful singer whom he had been training in minor rôles in the comedies just preceding.

Is it a mercenary, box-office view which suggests that the greatest of Shakespeare’s comedies were produced in part to supply the loss of one actor, to meet the talents of others ? but when we consider if he who played Touchstone could have played Malvolio, have played Edgar in the Tom o’ Bedlam scenes of Lear, have played Stephano in the Tempest, are we not following the only lineof Shakespeare’s daily thought which we are capable of following? We know that Falstaff, as created by Shakespeare’s friend and fellow-actor John Heming, became instantly one of the most popular of characters, and it is a credible tradition which asserts that The Merry Wives of Windsor was written at the Queen’s command, that she might see Falstaff in love. The figure of Falstaff in this play is escorted by that of the immortal Slender, sighing for sweet Anne Page; the jovial bulk of the one, the lackadaisical length of the other of the ill-assorted comrades delighted the Elizabethans as they do us.

Is it accident that in the later Twelfth Night, along with the highly sentimental plot of Viola and the Duke, there is interwoven a rollicking plot of Shakespeare’s own creation, in which the jovial bulk and the lackadaisical slenderness again walk the stage together as Sir Toby and Sir Andrew? Is it accident that Sir Andrew sighs unavailingly, as Slender had sighed? In these products of high and joyousimagination, even as in the world of commerce, there is a relation between demand and supply. The situation of confident masculine superiority tricked into love had proved popular in Much Ado About Nothing; the figures of Falstaff and Slender had proved popular in the Merry Wires; the motives and figures of these earlier comedies were unhesitatingly reëmployed by Shakespeare in Twelfth Night.

There is but a step from the study of Shakespeare’s practical reworking of stock situations — such as the maiden disguised as a page wooing another woman for her secretly beloved lord, or the tricking a man into believing a woman in love with him — to a study of the practical daily duty of the dramatist to employ his company in the kind of rôles best fitted for them. It is a mark of the poet’s artistic development that the device when repeated is raised to a higher power; it is a mark of his professional tact and his professional necessities that the device and the character-type, when successful, should reappear.

Such, then, may be in part the reason for Touchstone, the first of Shakespeare’s true fools: a concession, on the one hand, to the demand of the public for scenes of interlude and display of verbal agility; an effort, on the other hand, to differentiate the new buffoon in look, costume, and function, from the type represented by Kemp. Touchstone, as befits his calling, appears usually at the elbow of his patron; his unsolicited comment is intruded just as his later colleague Sam Weller intruded his anecdotes upon Mr. Pickwick, and has no more to do with shaping the romantic plot. Despite Professor Barrett Wendell’s stricture, however, that Touchstone and his fellows are not essential parts of the plays in which they appear, that without them everything might fall out as it does, I think we feel between this Fool and his world a living and necessary bond, a bond other than that which links Dogberry or Bottom to the play in which, not of which, he is a part.

A romance is nothing if not discursive, gregarious; it flies from court to camp, and finds each populous; its personages stroll about, innocent of dramalic purpose, desiring only to fleet the time as they did in the golden world. Doubtless the plot of As You Like It would work out were Touchstone absent; but the less said the better about a plot to which Touchstone is unnecessary, and to which the impossible repentances of Oliver and of the usurping Duke are necessary. As You Like It has no plot, it has situation, — situation carefully created, but carelessly dissolved; and to the situation Touchstone is necessary. He is the bond between the real world outside the forest and its temporary substitute; the Fool’s is the only steady head in the epidemic of romantic exile and romantic love. The atmosphere of Arden would be but the ordinary mingling of ozone and sentiment, were not that loyal devotee of court life twirling his bauble under the antique oaks; the key of romantic extravaganza would lack of its full chord did we not hear the voice of the Fool’s common sense parodying Orlando’s love-verses and capping Rosalind’s ‘ Well, this is the forest of Arden! ’ with ‘ Ay, now I am in Arden: the more fool I; when I was at home, I was in a better place! ’

Touchstone is on the stage in seven scenes, and conspicuous in most, of them; he talks constantly, but it is no Dogberry braggadocio and mispronunciation; his reproof to the shepherd Corin for his mode of life and his dissertation on the Lie seven times removed are the stuff that high comedy, not farce, is made of. There is, however, one slender bond between him and the earlier clowns of Shakespeare: he seems, like them, a man of mature years. And if the rôle of Touchstone was played, as seems probable, by the actor who succeeded to Kemp’s place in the Shakespearean company, this feeling is justified by the age of the new comedian, Robert Armin, for whom Shakespeare in such case intended the part. Armin, a poverty-stricken scribbler of about thirty, had recently been the clown of the company known as Lord Chandos’s Men. We know that he took up the rôle of Dogberry played by Kemp; what more likely than that he should in the following year be cast as Touchstone? He was still with the King’s Men in 1605, when the will of one of them made bequests to several fellow actors; but for some subsequent years he seems to have been in other fields, returning to his allegiance in 1610, not long before his death. While with the Shakespearean company, he achieved high repute as a comic actor; and it is noteworthy that the part of Malvolio, which is recorded as immensely popular with Elizabethan audiences, follows close after Touchstone chronologically, and is, in the stock companies of our own generation and the last, usually impersonated by the same actor.

Neither Touchstone, nor the whole group of victim and victimizers in Twelfth Night, — Malvolio, Sir Toby, Sir Andrew, Maria, and Feste the Fool, — is in the original used by Shakespeare. Perhaps it was the Elizabethan joy in a complex and variegated comedy-pattern which impelled Shakespeare to weave other threads into the Italian love-story of mistaken identity and tangled wooing, to transform the colorless Italian household of Olivia’s servants into the damask and the yellow, the sable and the motley, the laughter, mischief, and music which delighted an English audience. Perhaps it was the dramatist-manager’s desire to give each of his company a characteristic opportunity in a comedy written for court presentation which urged Shakespeare in Twelfth Night; for there is no other play by him, in which so many sharply differentiated parts are on a nearly uniform level of interest. The dreamy sentiment of the Duke, the manly vehemence of Antonio, the devotion of Sebastian, the proud passion of Olivia, the tenderness of Viola, permitted a quintette of actors full exercise of their romantic talents; the figures of Sir Toby and Sir Andrew are so evidently a reincarnation of Falstaff and Slender that doubtless the actors who earlier carried those parts reappeared now; the rôle of Malvolio afforded as fair an opportunity to the powers of Armin — or another—as it afforded food for laughter to a queen of anti-Puritan leanings; and the lad whose voice had already won him notice sang here in fool’s costume.

Feste, the fool of Twelfth Night, is hardly more than a boy; he is perhaps, as suggested, the same who sang the part of Amiens in As You Like It; and his beautiful voice and powers of vocal mimicry are especially displayed in Twelfth Night. He is twice called upon the stage solely that he may sing, and he is left on the stage to sing the epilogue; the scene in which he teases the imprisoned Malvolio is full of songsnatches; but his other duties in the play are merely those of the earlier servant-clowns, to carry a message, to play with words, to vex his mistress with a sharp saying or two. And with this disposition of him we find ourselves entirely in accord. The play is packed so full of intrigue and of varied feeling, the mixture of highflown sentiment in the Duke’s speeches, of bitter reproach in the episode of Antonio’s arrest, of absurd caricature in the trick upon Malvolio, of ridiculous cowardice in the pretended duel scene, of love burlesqued in Sir Andrew, love suppressed and love passionate in Viola and Olivia, carry the audience through such a gamut of interests and emotions, that the figure of the Fool is but an ornament. As such, Shakespeare uses him; Feste is the singing boyish voice of this comedy, vocal with song.

Twelfth Night is the last, for a long time, of Shakespeare’s true comedies. The three years following 1600 contain, besides Julius Cæsar and Hamlet, three bitter plays, comedies only in the sense that they do not find their solution through death: All’s Well That Ends Well, Measure for Measure, Troilus and Cressida. All’s Well has a clown, servant to the mother of the contemptible Bertram out of whom Shakespeare makes a hero; Measure for Measure has a constable, Elbow, and two or three jolterheads who with him muddle evidence before the Duke. With both we are back upon an earlier plane of Shakespeare’s work. The clown is of his first servant type, — quibbling on words, blundering over messages, intruding coarse foolery upon his superiors; and the constable is an attempted recall of Dogberry.

We must feel in these supposedly comedy figures a flagging of Shakespeare’s interest; and this change is more than paralleled in the major motives of the two plays. Their plots both turn upon ideas intensely repugnant to us; they are alike in our view harsh, bitter, impossible; we refuse acceptance to their unforgivable heroes, their incredibly forgiving heroines. Nor can we believe, different though the Elizabethan feeling is for some Shakespearean figures, such as Shylock or Iago, that the audience of that time regarded these two ‘ comedies ’ more as food for mirth than we do. Neither, I think, can we quite follow the suggestion of Leslie Stephen, who saw in these plays also the playwright’s attempt to supply certain of his company with the kind of characters best fitted to them.

It is a poor theory which covers all the facts. Students who treat Shakespeare’s work and life in moods may be termed visionary at some points, but they have here their capital argument. For these few plays, lying between the High Comedies and the beginning of the great tragedy-period, we have as yet found no explanation other than the passing of their author through a time of bitter personal feeling, a time reflected perhaps also in the later series of the sonnets.

The line of the tragedies, which begins with Julius Cœsar and Hamlet, about 1600 and extends to about 1608, has only one figure to detain us, that of the Fool in King Lear. Upon his character and raison d’être there has been a wider diversity of critical opinion than upon any other Shakespearean creation except Hamlet. All students attribute to his figure profound meaning: Dowden, for instance, says that our estimate of the play depends upon the view we take of the Fool.

In arriving at that view, it is of paramount importance to remember that in Shakespeare’s original the Fool does not exist; his figure entire, and the sharing of Edgar as a pretended lunatic in the mad scene on the heath, are additions by Shakespeare. It is also to be borne in mind that when Shakespeare added a professional jester to the cast of this tragedy, and when he placed the mad scene at the centre of the play, he was, as an actor, entirely aware of the importance he was giving these features. The stress upon the Fool’s part is assuredly intentional; how are we to interpret it?

We regard King Lear as one of the two most harrowing of Shakespeare’s tragedies. The name of Lear stands popular parlance for the martyrdom of trusting and abused fatherhood; the names of Goneril and Regan are synonyms for monster. Yet outside the range of that popular estimate which is based on tradition, there has been found another view, — the view that Lear’s two daughters are, up to the time of his madness, guilty of no great misconduct toward him; that his own cruel violence, at the opening of the play, in disowning Cordelia and banishing the devoted Kent for a whim, demands a return blow from Fate; that the highly probable disorders of his followers in his daughters’ houses, the gross rudeness of the disguised Kent when acting as his messenger, amply merit the stocks, and the request of Goneril and Regan that Lear dismiss part of his train; that the fury of the curses which Lear heaps upon them for this request and for their punishment of Kent’s conduct is out of all human reason, though it is of a piece with the headlong violence of Lear during the first half of the play. In short, there is a view in which, if we read the text without traditional prepossession, we shall find insufficient cause for Lear’s frenzied flight into the storm. Up to that point we cannot say that Lear has received worse treatment than he has given, or as bad. Now, how does Shakespeare make it appear that. Lear is a pitiable, martyred figure, that Goneril and Regan are monsters?

The most effective means by which he reaches this is the use of the subplot, the story of Gloucester and the unredeemed hideousness of his traitor son Edmund. By making both Goneril and Regan love Edmund with jealous sensuality, by making them active sharers in the blinding of the helpless Gloucester almost in the presence of the audience, the dramatist drives us to horror and loathing of them; their previous conduct, to their father appears in the lurid light of their later conduct to others. And since no one ever sees the play without a prepossession from hearsay or reading, the first half of it is judged by us in anticipation. We do not recognize the way in which, for the Elizabethans, opinion of Lear changed at the middle of the play; and it is therefore hard for us to see the real function of the Fool.

The Fool does not come upon the stage until near the close of the first act, when his opening speech attacks Lear for the unwisdom of his division of the kingdom. Thereafter he appears in six long scenes, always at Lear’s elbow, and always harping upon the same theme. To one of his earlier gibes Lear says, ‘ Dost thou call me fool, boy? ' and the Fool answers, ‘ All thy other titles thou hast given away; that thou wast born with.’ He proclaims that the reason a snail has a house is that he may put his head in it, not that he may give it away to his daughters; he taunts Lear that he has made his daughters his mothers; in the uproar of the storm on the heath he cries to Lear to go in and ask his daughters’ blessing. Not all his chatter is of this kind: part of his talk and part of his constant snatches of song, especially in the mad scene, are aimless and witless, lending all the more force to the sudden stabs of meaning which reach the old king’s half-dazed mind. Early in the play, in response to the Fool’s goading tongue, Lear threatens the whip; a little later, when Lear is pacing the stage, struggling against the fear that his daughters mean to compel his will to theirs, he laughs mechanically one moment at the sound of the Fool’s voice, and in the next moment marks it no longer; but when the storm is upon them, when Lear’s brain has begun to turn, he is beyond all hearing of the Fool’s labored jests; it is not till his eyes fall upon the wretched cowering figure that he realizes the Fool’s presence.

Surely the audience, whatever its first opinion of Lear’s violence, has changed its attitude when the moment arrives in which the storm-beaten, bewildered, discrowned king bends over his servant to say,—

The presence of the Fool in the mad scene, as in all preceding scenes, is then not only a pitiful travesty, in his almost solitary devotion, of Lear’s former court, but also a means of influencing our feeling towards Lear. At first we agree with the Fool’s mocking censure of his master; but while the knowledge remains with us, thanks to the Fool’s unresting tongue, that Lear has pulled his fate upon his head, we soon reach the point when we do not wish to hear these reminders, and the Fool’s illtimed iteration becomes painful to us, whose ideas of Lear are changing. But even as Lear’s helplessness palliates his earlier sins, so does the Fool’s visible suffering, in the mad scene, palliate his earlier bitter jests. Only from such weakness, and from the mouth of a fool, could we have tolerated them; nor would we tolerate them except from a fool whose years, like his wits, are too scanty to realize his master’s agony.

The age of Lear’s fool has been a disputed question. It would seem as if Lear’s greeting on his entrance, — ‘ How now, my pretty knave! ’ — as if the king’s constant address of him as ‘ my boy,’ ‘my good boy’; as if the Fool’s evident physical fragility and timidity, were sufficient indications of his youth. But critics like Furness, for instance, opine that the wisdom of the Fool is too deep for any boy, and would see in the Fool a man of much the same age as Kent, a man of small and slender frame, of course, but still a grown man. Let us however add to the indications of the Fool’s youth in the text, the force of the theatrical contrast of persons and voices which would result in the mad scene were the Fool a boy; the aged king raving at the storm, the sane but desperately anxious Kent urging his services upon his master, and the boyish singing voice of the wander-witted Fool breaking into the pauses of Lear’s fury with scraps of senseless song, laboring, as the text says, ’to outjest Lear’s heartstruck injuries.'

Let us ask ourselves, again, if this lad who sings so frequently be not, in the Shakespearean company, the Fool of Twelfth Night; there is even one snatch of song here which is reminiscent of the epilogue song in the earlier play. Do we query what rôles the boy could have played in the years between Twelfth Night and Lear ? Why not Ophelia, and her madness and her song? We must remember that all the women’s parts were taken by boys; and the very fact of Ophelia’s being made to sing on the stage shows that one lady was noted for his voice. We must remember also, in discussing any one actor’s rôles, that the King’s Men had in their répertoire plays by writers other than Shakespeare; when the students of seventeenth-century stage history shall have gathered all their material, we may perhaps know the répertoire of Shakespeare’s stock company from month to month, and be able to see the succession of parts taken by its different members.

That this succession will differ markedly from the procedure of modern times, we have no reason to believe. The managerial assignment of such a group of parts as Falstaff, Sir Toby Belch, the First Grave-digger in Hamlet, Stephano in the Tempest, to that individual in the company best adapted to play them, is not peculiar to either the nineteenth century or the seventeenth; it is a characteristic of stock companies. The répertoire of the leading comedy actor in the Ben Greet company to-day is close to that of the late George Weir, the veteran comedian of the Benson company, and may be compared with that of John Lowin, prominent among the King’s Men from the death of Heming to the closing of the theatres. Dickens’s assignment of rôles among the followers of the immortal Mr. Crummies is typical of theatrical managers at all dates; and though we would not affirm that Shakespeare inserted front scenes for Kemp or songs for his boy-protégé in the same way in which Nicholas Nickleby was required to insert a dance for Mr. Folair, we might repeat that the practical workings of a stock company are much the same in all ages, and that the company’s author might sometimes see his opportunity through the lens of necessity. In Shakespeare’s case, it needs not say, such a conjectured necessity is, like the clocks of his ancient Rome and the seacoast of his Bohemia, forgotten in the joy of his triumphant invention. To quarrel with him because expediency shared with inspiration in the bodyingforth of Falstaff and Mercutio, Dogberry and Slender, were like quarreling with the violin because its anguish and its ecstasy reach our souls only over a bridge of catgut and hair.

In all this suggesting, this piecing together of possibilities, there is an uncertain quantity of no uncertain magnitude, — the will of Shakespeare. Emphasize as we may the compulsion of his material and of his company upon him, we cannot, exclude the likelihood that at. any moment some influence unknown to us may have shaped his course. Of Lear’s fool, for instance, Bradley has said: ‘One can almost imagine that Shakespeare, going home from an evening at the Mermaid, where he had listened to Jonson fulminating against fools in general and perhaps criticising the Clown in Twelfth Night in particular, had said to himself, “Come, my friends, I will show you once for all that the mischief is in you, and not in the fool or the audience. I will have a fool in the most tragic of my tragedies. He shall not play a little part. He shall keep from first to last the company in which you most object to see him, — the company of a king. Instead of amusing t he king’s idle hours, he shall stand by him in the very tempest and whirlwind of passion. Before I have done, you shall confess, between laughter and tears, that he is of the very essence of life, that you have known him all your days though you never recognized him till now, and that you would as soon go without Hamlet as miss him.”

Certainly the difference between this Fool and Hamlet is hardly greater than the difference between him and the Costards and Dromios of Shakespeare’s early years. To speak of the change as due to the poet’s intellectual and spiritual growth is true; to speak of it as arising from the varying necessities of each newly contrived dramatic action is true; to speak of it as conditioned by the desires of the audience and the needs of the actors is also true. We can discuss the farcical clumsiness of the clowns of Shakespeare’s youth, the wit and wisdom of the Fools of his maturity; or we can discuss the same figures as the parts written for the boor Kemp, the parts written when Shakespeare, freed from Kemp’s demands, though bound still to use his company, brought his comic figure into harmony with his dramatic intent. The latter view is to-day especially suggestive; and were that ‘ onlie begetter ’ of a renascence of thought, the body of new facts, granted to our researches, we might hope for a nearer and a truer glimpse of Shakespeare; hope to see in him the workman of this our clay as well as the poet who abides not our question.