Page:On Shakespeare, or, What You Will, Furness, 1908.djvu/19

1908.] to her is wrung from her distracted father, but no courtier, no nobleman after Kent’s peremptory banishment, dares even breathe the name of the lost Cordelia. In such a dramatic perplexity, a Greek Chorus would fulfil its purpose by recalling to the old King his past folly, and thereby keep Cordelia’s memory ever present to us. How can this purpose be achieved on an English stage? By a stroke of his own genius, as I think, Shakespeare gave the office of a Greek Chorus to the all-licensed Fool, who, by virtue of his privileged position, could speak to the King with an unbridled tongue. Shakespeare prepares us for him as a champion of Cordelia, by telling us that since she is gone to France, the Fool “has much pined away.” His first words to the old King are in undisguised ridicule of the folly of giving away his kingdom. Read the play and mark how continually the Fool’s speeches refer either outright to Lear’s folly or lead up to it, and once he ventures so far as to refer to Cordelia almost by name. “What does Shakespeare mean,” once asked me, “by making the Fool keep ‘rubbing it in’ to poor old Lear?” I think an answer is to be found in what I have just said. The Fool never ceases to hope that he can drive Lear to reassert himself, recall Cordelia, and resume his throne until he sees that his Master is hopelessly and helplessly crazed, and then Shakespeare withdraws him; the need of a Chorus is at an end. Let me say, in passing, that I think those actors err who present the Fool on the stage as a young boy. To me, he is a man, one of the shrewdest, tenderest of men, whom long life has made wise, and whom sorrow has made tender; his wisdom is far too deep for a boy, and to be found only in a man, removed by not more than a score of years from Lear’s own age. When in his dying minutes, Lear says, “And my poor fool is hanged,” I fervently wish that I could believe that, as his storm-tossed soul was gently subsiding into calm, his thoughts revert to the loyal, loving heart of his Jester,—I think that even in that supreme hour I could spare a moment from Cordelia. Alas, no; most reluctantly I am forced to regard these words of endearment as referring to the murdered daughter lying dead across his breast. I do not know in the dramatists of those days a parallel to the Fool in Lear. Fools there are, such as Slipper in James the Fourth, and in others, but they are the ordinary, coarse, domestic Fool. It is not impossible that the Fool, Feste, in Twelfth Night,—