CHAPTER V.

MAD FOLK IN COMEDY AND TRAGEDY.

(ii.) IMBECILITY.

“I ask’d her questions and she answered me So far from what she was, so childishly, So sillily, as if she were a fool, An innocent.”

(“_Two Noble Kinsmen._”)

Of the few sketches of imbeciles which we find in the drama under consideration there is hardly one which can properly be called a full-length portrait. As a class, the idiots come in for a fair share of attention; the “fool” as well as the “madman” is shewn us in the asylums of Fletcher and Middleton, but no dramatist seems to have thought the tragic or the comic possibilities of the “lunatic lean-witted fool” sufficiently promising to justify the inclusion of him as a prominent character of a play. This is not altogether surprising; the imbecile—we shall take the term as nearly as possible in its precise signification[118:1]—was not considered as an ordinary madman; he was treated like the half-developed creature he really was, looked after more carefully than the madman, and trained in simple things just like a child. So the fool occupied a subordinate place, in drama as well as in life.

The word “fool” as has been explained,[119:1] is used in our plays in more senses than one, and a few characters who answer to the description “simple,” “idiot” or “imbecile” may now be mentioned. They demand little space, for, though serving a dramatic purpose, they have little interest or importance in themselves. Nearest sanity is Pogio of Chapman’s “Gentleman Usher,” whose half-witted condition seems to be largely pose; it is a strange way of carrying out his own dictum that “gentility must be fantastical.” Bergetto, too, in Ford’s play, “’Tis pity she’s a Whore,” though consistently spoken of as “fool’s head,” “dunce” and the like, could hardly be called anything more serious than a foolish fellow. Jerome, in Chettle’s “Tragedy of Hoffman,” and Cloten, the “empty purse” of Cymbeline, have both something of the true congenital idiot about them. With Jerome, however, our judgment is influenced more by impression than by anything he says or does in the play. Hoffman and others call him an “idiot,” and he himself owns “They say I am a fool,” after which he speaks of seeking out “my notes of Machiavell.” But this is mere foolish talk, as, indeed, are most of his speeches. In a quaint scene he addresses the people as their King, but is outdone by a later speech of Hoffman’s, which he himself solicits saying, “I charge you all, upon pain of death, that you hear my cousin.” The action of a fool, indeed, but was it not also the action of honest Brutus? Therefore we must cling to our estimate of Jerome, framed from his own speeches, as justification for including him in this category. Both the actions and the words of Shakespeare’s Cloten are those of a man mentally deficient; Guiderius was not far from the truth when he said:

“not Hercules Could have knock’d out his brains, for he had none”;[120:1]

and everyone who knows him wonders

“That such a crafty devil as is his mother Should yield the world this ass.”[120:2]

A quaint pair of simples may be seen in Lyly’s “Mother Bombie.” Memphio, an avaricious old man, has a supposed son, Accius by name, whom he wishes to marry to Silena; both parties being mentally defective, the old man takes it for granted that their offspring will be sane. Silena is described as “no natural fool”; and though this would at first seem to be untrue, it becomes doubtful later if the author had any very clear idea of the nature of her malady. She begins by being “passing amiable, but very simple,” but before long her condition approaches mania. Her first speech is typical: “My name is Silena. I care not who know it, so I do not; my father keeps me close, so he does; and now I have stolen out, so I have; to go to old Bombie to know my fortune, so I will.” Candius, who listens to her, thinks her at first a “fool,” but decides that as “so fair a face cannot be the scabbard of a foolish mind,” she must be mad. In her meeting with Accius, in the fourth act of the farce, she justifies this conclusion by mistaking him for a “joint-stool.”[121:1]

Before leaving the imbeciles, we must make a bare mention of Shakespeare’s Caliban—bare, because we are hardly justified in calling him a human being at all. The son of a witch,

“A freckled whelp hag-born—not honour’d with A human shape,”[121:2]

he is only distinguished, as Coleridge says, from the brutes by his dim understanding (bereft, however, of moral reason) and the absence in him of all the instincts of absolute animals. Schlegel gives perhaps the best account of Shakespeare’s creation when he says: “It is as though the use of reason and human speech should be communicated to a stupid ape.”[121:3] Such a being as this can certainly not be classed with such “simples” and “fools” as have just been mentioned.

To the ordinary reader of drama the word “fool” describes, not a natural imbecile, but a peculiar type of character in the tragedy and comedy of Shakespeare. The Shakespearean fool has a significance which it would be out of place to dwell upon here; he is, however, speaking generally, perfectly sane, and rather rich than defective in intellect. Thus he has nothing in common with the “naturall fooles . . . suted in long coats” mentioned by Nash,[122:1] and but little with the “fool” of many a country village. For this strange character is most often a half-demented fellow with a gift for making curt, cutting remarks, and a tongue which, since its owner fears nobody, invariably vents whatever his breast may forge. There would seem to be only one of Shakespeare’s fools who is really half-witted, and that one is, of course, the fool in “King Lear.”

This point is well made by Dr. Bradley: “To suppose that the Fool is, like many a domestic fool at that time, a perfectly sane man pretending to be half-witted, is surely a most prosaic blunder. There is no difficulty in imagining that, being slightly touched in the brain, and holding the office of fool, he performs the duties of his office intentionally as well as involuntarily—it is evident that he does so. But unless we suppose that he _is_ touched in the brain, we lose half the effect of his appearance in the Storm-scenes. The effect of those scenes (to state the matter as plainly as possible) depends largely on the presence of three characters and on the affinities and contrasts between them; on our perception that the differences of station in King, Fool, and beggar-noble, are levelled by one blast of calamity; but also on our perception of the differences between these three in one respect,—viz., in regard to the peculiar affliction of insanity. . . . The insanity of the King differs from that of the beggar, not only in its nature, but also in the fact that one is real and the other simply a pretence. Are we to suppose then that the insanity of the third character, the Fool, is in this respect a mere repetition of the second, the beggar,—that it is _mere_ pretence? To suppose this is not only to impoverish miserably the impression made by the trio as a whole, it is also to diminish the heroic and pathetic effect of the character of the Fool.”[123:1] If further proof were needed it could be found in the expressions and the turns of thought which characterise him throughout the play,—they are not the expressions of mania, nor yet of perfect self-possession; they are often, indeed, the expressions which one would expect of a feeble mind. Can one suppose,—to take only one example—that any sane man, even in the position of a Court fool, would insist, as mercilessly as the Fool does in the first scenes, upon the ingratitude of Lear’s daughters? None of Shakespeare’s other fools will be found to probe a wound so deep, but it is exactly what one would expect from a Fool whose brain is really slightly touched. It is true that he also diverts the King’s attention from his troubles in the same scenes, but it is only to return to them again with an even more piercing sting.

Still further, if we assume the actual imbecility of the Fool, a flood of light is at once thrown upon the question of his age—not that it matters in the least what his age is, but some critics have found a difficulty in reconciling the references which seem to make him now a boy, now a man. He is, in fact, a man, but his feeble intellect, together perhaps with a certain physical frailty, causes him to be treated occasionally as a boy, much in the same way that Antonio is treated by Lollio in the “Changeling.” We need not stay longer, however, to defend this view, for, as Dr. Bradley says: “Arguments against the idea that the Fool is wholly sane are either needless or futile; for in the end they are appeals to the perception that this idea almost destroys the poetry of the character.”[125:1]

Alone, then, in this division of our subject, we place the Fool of “King Lear.” Demented persons may occur here and there in our plays (such is Cassandra in “Troilus and Cressida”) and there may even be some congenital imbeciles (as Cloten in “Cymbeline”). But such cases of dementia are hard to distinguish from those of mania. In both cases—especially in the second—it is often hard to say whether or no the author intended the idea of idiocy to be conveyed. So Lear’s Fool remains unrivalled and we are glad of it. For nowhere in drama is there a more delicate intermingling of laughter and tears, of terror and pathos, than in this play of “King Lear.” The Fool needs no more lengthy description. To see him (whether as we watch or as we read) alone suffices, and nothing else will do so. When we have looked on him, we have seen “sunshine and rain at once”; there is no “better way.”

FOOTNOTES:

[118:1] Strictly speaking, the insanity of the imbecile is congenital; the general conformation of his brain is faulty, and the mental phenomena of his condition are for the most part “dissociated from active bodily disease.” (See Encyl. Brit., s.v. Insanity.)

[119:1] Above, p. 37 ff.

[120:1] “Cymbeline,” iv., 2, 114.

[120:2] Ibid., iv., 1, 57.

[121:1] Cf. “Lear,” iii., 6, 54. The expression was proverbial, it is true.

[121:2] “Tempest,” i., 2.

[121:3] It is interesting to compare the higher conception of Caliban seen in Browning’s “Caliban upon Setebos,” where, though the brute sprawls “with elbows wide, fists clenched to prop his chin,” in the “cool slush,” he nevertheless reasons vaguely upon such problems as the existence of evil, of pain, and of a law governing the universe.

[122:1] In “Have with you to Saffron Walden.” The “fool’s coat” is often mentioned in our plays.

[123:1] “Shakespearean Tragedy,” pp. 311-12.

[125:1] “Shakespearean Tragedy,” p. 312.