The Role Of Fools In King Lear

The fool or clown figures in Shakespearean opus bears the proficient treatment of the myth of fool on the part of the playwright. Shakespearean fools may be allocated into two categories - the clown and the courtly fool. The clowns were meant to persons who came from a rustic background. The purpose of introducing them on the stage was to evoke laughter through his comments and gestures. Bottom of A Midsummer Nights’s Dream and Dogberry of Much Ado About Nothing are typically labeled by the critics as clowns who were simple in nature. The courtly jester or fool, on the other hand, was a familiar factor in the courts during the Renaissance. They maintained verbal wit and were allowed by their masters in intellectual repartee. Touchstone of As You Like It, Feste of Twelfth Night may be categorized as the courtly jesters or wise-fools. The same is observed in the case of the Fool in William Shakespeare’s one of the four major tragedies King Lear which was composed during 1605-1606. The Fool has been introduced in the play as a clown or jester but he is not merely a flatterer in the true sense of the term. The present paper will attempt to study the treatment of the Fool in the hand of the playwright who has appropriated the Fool to a highly upgraded position in the play.

In his celebrated essay The Fool: His Social and Literary History, (1966) Enid Welsford differentiated terms like “fool” and “buffoon”, “clown” and “jester”. For him, the fool is one “who falls below the