Extra-temporality, Morality, and Fantasy:
The Fool and Poor Tom as Vessels of Truth in King Lear
"A thin line separates a fool from an idiot. On one end of the line lies the fool and on the other, the idiot. Snap the line, then who's the fool and who's the idiot? That's the million dollar question" (Omkara).
A number of Shakespeare's plays feature fools as a part of their action, and these fools generally fall into one of two categories: natural or artificial. Natural fools are those rendered amusing by virtue of some natural deficit: a physical deformity or handicap, ubiquitous stupidity, a simple, buffoonish disposition, or madness. Artificial fools, on the other hand, assume the appearance of idiocy in order to amuse, relying more on wit than on slapstick physical comedy to drive their points home. The fact that the guise of the natural can be assumed, however, implies the existence of a relationship between these two spectrum-ends of folly, and this relationship becomes most apparent in King Lear. The Fool in Lear does not fall neatly into the realm of the artificial, but his rustic songs and coxcomb-laden capers are imbued with enough wit and moral force that could call him "natural" would be misleading at best. In keeping with the play's tragic spirit, its natural is not a clownish servant like Launce from Two Gentlemen of Verona or Peter from Romeo and Juliet, but the mad Poor Tom o' Bedlam, eking out a miserable existence on a storm-swept heath, plagued by devils only he can see. I ought to point out that Tom himself is a fabrication: a disguise assumed by Edgar, elder son and heir of the Earl of Gloucester, driven into exile and self-abnegation when the scheming of his bastard half-brother Edmund convinced the Earl that his heir was intending to murder him to claim his estate. The Fool, however, interacts not with Edgar but with Tom, and the juxtaposition of the two characters, beginning before they ever occupy the stage together, is a compelling one. Detachment from the constraints of linear time, moral instruction, and literary allusion link the Fool and Tom in speech, and thus the delineation between the fool and the idiot becomes blurred; the audience can see the two as opposite sides of the same coin. "This cold night will turn us all to fools and madmen," the Fool claims, and though the statement is one of desperation, it is not precisely wrong (F .72). The tenuous connections between sanity, madness, and folly hang like a shadow over the play, forming a major conflict within the mind of Lear. He receives his wisest counsel from his licensed Fool, who is ever eager to show the king the existence of his own folly; the king will hold the words of a mad beggar in high regard, calling the brutal, wretched openness of both the words and their speaker "the thing itself" (Q .90). When the words spoken by the Fool and the beggar begin to sound alike, the idea that those derided by "sane" society as mad speak more sense, more truth, than members of that same society becomes not only possible, but viable. The madman and the fool, in a sense, are the play's vessels of truth, united in an effort to bring Lear to awareness of his own madness and folly.
A connection between the two characters must develop, however, before their collective capacity to bring truth to Lear can gain strength. Shakespeare presents this juxtaposition mainly through common linguistic patterns, but a shared habit of prediction achieves the same effect. Unlike Tom, the Fool is given leave to address the audience directly, relating to its members as an equal rather than a mere character on a stage. The "Merlin" soliloquy, given at the end of Act 3, scene 2 of the Folio, actually presents itself as a prophecy within the world of the play, reinforcing the growing fears of the kingdom's inevitable dissolution into disrepair:
When priests are more in word than matter;
When brewers mar their malt with water;
When nobles are their tailors' tutors,
No heretics burned, but wenches' suitors,
Then shall the realm of Albion
Come to great confusion.
...Then comes the time, who lives to see't,
That going shall be used with feet.
This prophecy Merlin shall make; for I live before his time (F .80-94).
This prophecy (according to textual notes in the Norton text) is a parody of "Merlin's Prophecy," which was written in George Puttenham's 1589 text The Arte of English Poesie, which Shakespeare's audience may well have known. Certainly the names Merlin and Albion would have been: Albion was the historic name for Britain during the time of King Arthur, and Merlin, of course, was Camelot's resident wizard. Sir Thomas Malory's 15th-century epic Le Morte d'Arthur, or Geoffrey of Monmouth's account of the reign of Arthur and his fall at Camlann, written a century earlier, were seminal works even so soon after their publication. The invocation of that beloved legend's tragic ending may well have foreshadowed to Shakespeare's audience that his Lear, too, would end in strife, despite the optimistic conclusion to the play's source, already familiar to that audience. The Fool's descriptions of minute subversions of "the way the world works" mirror those made by the Earl of Gloucester himself two acts prior, when he muses with some alarm over the recent eclipses that "portend no good to us," describing how in their wake, "love cools, friendship falls off, brothers divide; in cities mutinies, in countries discords, palaces treason, the bond cracked between son and father" (Q .96-97, 99-101). In a way the Fool aligns himself with Gloucester, or at least the divisions he lists, and thus aligns himself with Edgar/Tom: the primary change-agent of Gloucester's plot. Unlike "these late eclipses," however, Merlin's prophecy does not concern itself with events that have fallen out in the play-world (F .95). The final line of the verse ends with "for I live before his time" - Lear's Britain predates even Arthur's (F .94). By linear play-time standards, the Fool could never have known of Merlin's existence- unless he was somehow removed from time. Beyond simply breaking the fourth wall to speak his prophecy, he breaks the conventional order of past, present, and future, combining his story's future and the audience's history in a manner that seems impossible. By drawing attention to the temporal paradox of Merlin, known to the audience but not yet born within the world onstage, the Fool deliberately establishes himself as a sort of extratemporal figure. He sets a precedent for the ability to operate outside of linear time constraints. When Tom later manifests an inkling of this ability, the audience, already aware of its existence and its association with the Fool, is better able to view the action as a basis for connection between the two characters.
In the Fool, this detachment from time and the knowledge allotted to a character based on his space in play-time occurs both on the large scale and the small. Verses such as Merlin's prophecy predict not only the course of the play but that of literary history as it will develop in and perhaps beyond the play's world. Other verses, however - namely the "fathers that wear rags" speech, contained only in Act 2, scene 2 of the Folio - foreshadow the fates of single characters (F .217). The first four lines of the verse pertain most directly to Lear, as the father who, having divested himself of his title and kingly accoutrements, finds his children "blind" to his needs: not so "kind" as he believed (F .218, 220). The final couplet, though, seems more applicable to Tom than, perhaps, to any other character in the play. "Fortune, that arrant whore,/ Ne'er turns the key to th' poor," the Fool claims, and one of the only truly "poor" characters in the play is indeed Tom (F .221-222). If name signifies identity, then the word "poor" is half of him. Certainly he seems wholly bereft of the benefits of Fortune, hounded by devils and lashed by the elements as he is. Paradox results when one considers the fact that yet again, the Fool had no way of knowing about Tom's existence. Edgar has divested himself of his identity in solitude, observed by the play's audience, with which he does not interact; his haunting refrain of "'Poor Tuelygod, Poor Tom!'/ That's something yet. Edgar I nothing am" has barely left the audience's ears before the Fool enters, speaking only once before he sings the verse that calls the newly formed figure of Tom back to mind (Q .182-183). Though the Fool is ignorant of Tom's existence as yet, the two characters' presence seem inextricably linked, by the carefully time exit-entrance dynamic and the verse, promising ill tidings to the departing figure of "basest and most poorest shape" (Q .169).
The exit-entrance relationship (digression though it is) is one that appears again in Act 3, scene 4 of both texts, when Tom and the Fool interact for the first time. This connection is more notably cemented in the Quarto; the Fool and Tom enter "severally," with the Fool bursting from the hovel in terror, claiming to have encountered a "spirit" who "says his name's Poor Tom" (Q .37). Tom is the figure that, in madness, first begins to mimic the Fool's pattern of speaking, and so too does he take on some aspect of the Fool's extratemporal nature. Unlike the Foo, however, Tom manipulates only play-time within his speech, rather than moving into the audience's temporal reality. In crafting a past for himself, Tom refers to the plights of characters that Edgar, his maker, might not have even been aware of. Tom refers to himself as "stock-punished, and imprisoned," just as Kent is set in the stocks during Act 2: a fate that Edgar, depending on how the play is staged, would not have known occurred (Q .114). Similarly, Tom claims he "hath had three suits to his back," an eerie echo of Kent's decrying the servant Oswald as a "three-suited, hundred-pound, filthy worsted-stocking knave" - during a scene when, again, Edgar was not present (Q .114, F .14-15). If Tom is perceived not as a mere disguise taken up by the dispossessed Edgar, but as a separate and independent entity, his very existence would have been mired into the heath in which he dwells; he would have no knowledge of an "Oswald" or a "Kent," because they would comprise no part of his world. One explanation for his oddly precise invocation of their plights may well be his ability, mirroring that of the Fool, to disconnect from the constraints of linear play-time. Certainly Tom's unwitting allusions to the past are nowhere near as mystical as the Fool's, but they could just as easily be perceived as precisely that - glimpses into a past to which he was not privy - than as flukes in staging or commonly held beliefs about Oswald's less-than-stellar character. The expression of extra-temporality through language acts in accordance with the shared tendency to speak in allusion and the "beckoning" effect achieved by the position of entrances immediately following the invocation of the other's name or presence.
All of these attributes contribute to a growing identification between the Fool and Tom, made more puissant by their penchant for moral instruction, aimed especially at Lear: instruction that comprises a significant portion of their role as truth-tellers. From his first appearance onstage, the Fool concerns himself largely with trying to convince Lear that he, in dividing his kingdom based on words and not deeds of filial love, has "pared thy wit o' both sides and left nothing in the middle" (Q .165-166). In other words, that he now is no more nor less than fool, but Lear-as-fool cannot escape the passage of time so easily as his Fool or Tom can and do. The Fool's jests, verses, and songs nearly always contain a moral lesson of some sort, typically pertaining to his ubiquitous theme of the folly of man; through wit and moral force, he attempts to "joke the king into awareness of his folly and then to joke away the pain caused by that awareness, to avert madness and destruction" (Snyder 148). Tom is similarly disposed towards moralizations. His own speech runs rampant with instructions on how best to "prevent the fiend," while his alter-ego Edgar muses on the the nature of man, empathy, suffering, and fortune (Q .136). Though Tom's frenzied, explicitly detailed lists do not, in form, greatly resemble the obscure recitations of the Fool, the instructive intent underpins both sets of remarks.
These two moralizing voices come together most notably in the mock trial of Goneril and Regan, which occurs in Act 3, scene 6 of the Quarto. At the start of the scene, three pairs of lines are spoken, with Tom taking the first and the Fool the second. Tom addresses his lines to his invisible devils, while the Fool speaks his first two to Lear. Only on the third line does he appear to turn his attention to Tom, who banishes the famished "Hoppedance" and the "foul fiend" with his longest utterance in the scene thus far ( .25, 24). Both Tom and the Fool pay full mind to the trial thereafter; they do not exchange another word. More curiously, the Fool does not speak at all after his line "cry you mercy, I took you for a join-stool," while Tom continues to philosophize- as though the voice of the Fool has become redundant ( .44). Tom's own final words (with the exception of a soliloquy which is also only present in the Quarto) are a welter of images- of dogs. As the Fool, in his first scene, referred to the elder royal daughters as dogs ("Lady Brach," or bitch), so does Tom repeat the metaphor in the Fool's final scene ( .99). When the former steps back, the latter will speak to fill the space left behind. The Fool speaks, falls silent, and lets Tom loose his own verbal torrent. Tom's final foray into the past ventures into the past of the Fool, and by assuming the words spoken in that past, he assumes a part of the Fool's identity. Tom has played moral advisor to Lear for the duration of his time onstage, and now, he must also play the fool. There, too, does he overplay, layering such frenzied passion and fear into his words that the Fool himself is forced to become the voice of sanity, if not wisdom. Lear's madness is such that only madness strikes him as sense. His world has no place in it for reason, and so the Fool, who speaks that reason, can no longer inhabit that world. His place must be surrendered to Tom.
As suddenly as Tom was thrust into the play, so does the Fool exit it. That Fool has become the image of the bedlamite, the being without being, just as much as Tom has become the image of comedy and moral instruction that the Fool once was. The two characters have forged a link through the language of fantasy, extra-temporality, and morality- a link further cemented by physical invocations of one by the other. The link acts almost as a line caught in an infinite loop: two opposing ends, joined by a line of ambiguous in-betweens, made into a circle so the beginning and end points become one. Where two disparate characters in disparate spaces once resided, there now exists a joint space in which the two are juxtaposed on a continuum. Even as they retain their own identities in name, they begin to take on attributes of the other. Through no fault of his own, the Fool has become the madman by speaking sense in a mad world, while the madman has risen, not quite of his own volition, to claim the vacant mantle of motley. Yet their titles remain, as though their work upon the stage remains unfinished; the Fool is still fool when he is hanged, and Tom haunts the stage and other characters' presences like a shadow, even after he is banished.
Allusion is yet another of several commonalities shared between the Fool and Tom- one that, due to the strength of the connection forged, might well resonate more strongly with modern audiences than even those of Shakespeare's time. Relationships between characters onstage can easily be represented by giving them like manners of speaking; Shakespeare's lovers, for example, often share verses or trade off couplets, as in the love sonnet in Romeo and Juliet. In the case of Tom and the Fool, the words of other authors, be they Shakespeare's literary predecessors or his contemporaries, link the speech of these two characters in a striking manner. Creating quips and catechisms from current media is par for the Fool's course- and yet Tom never sees this stratagem at work, making the common mode of speech doubly interesting to explore. The device first appears in Act 1, scene 4 of both the Quarto and the Folio, in one of the Fool's many sung catches. The lines "that such a king should play bo-peep/ And go the fools among" have evolved in connotative meaning since the time of Lear's publication (Q .157-158). The phrase "play bo-peep" in Shakespeare's day referred to both a children's game and a turn in the pillory, but today its connotations are more benevolent, evoking the children's nursery rhyme "Little Bo Peep has lost her sheep," which was not formally published until 1870 ("Little Bo Peep"). Today's audiences might find it difficult to separate impressions of the rhyme from the Fool's actual intent- to prove Lear a fool for his witless actions. Similarly, a later verse spoken by Tom superimposes a modern fairytale connotation over the true words spoken. At the end of Act 3, scene 4 (of both Quarto and Folio), Tom speaks an odd verse aimed most directly at Gloucester: "child Roland to the dark tower came,/ His word was still 'Fie, fo, and fum;/ I smell the blood of a British man'" (F .163-165). The verse is plaintive, both childish and ineffably unsettling- and evocative, for a modern audience, of a childhood nightmare as yet devoid of a happy ending. Most Westerners today would be able to conjure an image of the menacing giant from the fairy tale "Jack and the Beanstalk" upon hearing these strangely similar words. The original fairy tale, "The Story of Jack Spriggins and the Enchanted Bean," published in 1734, adapted this verse to form the now-familiar mantra of "fee, fie, foh, fum, I smell the blood of an Englishman." While the allusion would have no impact upon an early modern audience, it gives Tom's perspective a new depth for a contemporary one, one more aligned with their earlier observation of the same style of literary heralding in the Fool. Modern audiences, having observed the patterns of juxtaposed foreshadowing and moralizing, are able to visualize these characters' connection more fully by attributing the connotations of fairy tales to the aforementioned verses.
Together, these three forces- predictive power, moral instruction, and literary allusion- establish the characters of the Fool and Tom as reflections of each other. Thus connected, their power to move Lear to an understanding of the truths they represent grows stronger. For his part, the Fool begins by trying to impress upon Lear the self-serving and deceitful natures of his two elder daughters, and the folly inherent in trusting them over the true and devoted Cordelia. Though the Fool's words are veiled in railing jest, the cautionary sentiment behind such mocking barbs as "thou hadst little wit in thy bald crown when thou gavest thy golden one away" and "for when thou gavest them the rod and puttest down thine own breeches,/ Then they for sudden joy did weep" is difficult to ignore (F .130-131, 139-141). His purpose seems twofold: to warn Lear of his daughters' true natures and to simultaneously make Lear aware that he, like every other man living, is at heart nothing but a fool. Often Lear seems averse to the Fool's advice, threatening him one several occasions with a whipping that is merely shrugged off into another parable of sorts:
I marvel what kin thou and thy daughters are. They'll have me whipped for speaking true, thou wilt have me whipped for lying, and sometime I am whipped for holding my peace. I had rather be any kind of thing than a fool; and yet I would not be thee, nuncle. Thou hast pared thy wit o' both sides and left nothing in the middle (Q .161-166).
No matter how vehemently Lear opposes the Fool's words, however, decrying them as a "pestilent gall to [him]," some part of his subconscious may well recognize the truth of those words (Q .99). Scholar Gillian Woods, in her essay entitled "King Lear: madness, the Fool and Poor Tom," suggests that, for want of proper soliloquies, Lear only finds self-awareness when in the company of the Fool; he takes heed of his own imminent madness and his fear of it, coming to realize that the daughters who claimed to love him are false and will ruin him, and that he, by so arrogantly mistaking their natures, has all but proved himself a fool. The Fool provides a "choric commentary," speaking the truths that Lear does not want to hear, yet must, for the sake of his own development (Woods). When the words of the Fool seem insufficient to bring Lear to acknowledge the reality of his own foolish state, however, a more forceful method of truth-telling must take those words' place. Here Tom, established as the Fool's proverbial "other half," can put forth his own philosophizing in hopes of succeeding where the Fool failed, in bringing Lear to greater knowledge of himself.
Tom, too, acts as a vessel for truth, but unlike the Fool, he does not fulfill this role solely with words. Certainly the possibility exists that Tom is the mouthpiece through which Edgar, driven into hiding and bereft of his identity, can voice his own pain, but Tom's association with Lear's pain is equally apparent. Lear, upon seeing Tom's naked, shivering, half-starved, and raving state, asks if he has "given all to [his] two daughters," assuming that "nothing could have subdued nature to such a lowness but his unkind daughters" (Q .43, 60-61). In lieu of verbally acknowledging the truth of the Fool's insinuations of his daughters bringing him ruin, Lear instead projects that fearful understanding onto the figure of the beggar, the "unaccommodated man" whose battles with invisible devils and frenzied moral remonstrances might represent- for all Lear knows- the suffering of all of humanity (Q .90-91). Tom represents a subjective truth, the truth of pain as an experience unique in motivation and sensation to the individual. Lear can look at Tom and see his own future state, cast out and razed to rags by the daughters whom he mistakenly trusted; Gloucester can look at him and see the honest and dutiful son he wronged; the Fool can look and see the truth of his own redundancy, when a sane voice can no longer appease Lear's mind. Only Edgar can "look" at Tom and see a mask, a fabrication, a means to an end- and yet Tom, as an abstract expression of desperation, fear, and a will too broken to wish to contend with an increasingly cruel and twisted society, is still his own truth.
Tom is the truth of the mirror, reflecting what all who look upon him most fear to see. The Fool, on the other hand, is the truth of sanity, an objective observer of human nature at its best, worst, and most foolish. Together these two characters, these two truths, bring the eponymous king through a cycle of self-awareness, fear, empathy, loss of control, judgement, and acceptance as he works to understand his daughters and the soundness of his own mind. Lear begins at a place of arrogance, aiming to reserve "the name and all the additions to a king" while delegating the true rule of his affairs to his false daughters, moved by their empty speeches of love as he is (Q I.i.124-125). When the Fool first begins to counsel him, he dismisses the words as heresy, but the insistence that "thou shouldst not have been old before thou hadst been wise" provokes a significant change in Lear's manner, from brash disregard to a fear, and therefore a cognizance of madness (Q I.v.137-138). Act 3, scene 4 sees Lear begin to associate his madness with his mistreatment at his daughters' hands, when he "gave [them] all"; this scene also marks the first appearance of Lear's empathy for others: Kent, the Fool, and all the kingdom's "poor naked wretches," pelted mercilessly by the storm (Q .19, 25). As much as Tom drives Lear further into madness with his fevered prattle, so too does he act as almost as a blank canvas, onto which Lear can project his coalescing fears, doubts, and pities. The Fool and Tom together help the mad king achieve some twisted form of justice, "trying" the villainous daughters in absentia, and Lear's subsequent mad jaunts act almost as a purgatory, allowing him to ruminate on his mistaken thoughts. By the time Lear returns to sanity he is able to admit that he is "not in [his] perfect mind," and that he erred gravely in placing so much stock in words that he would disinherit the one daughter who truly loved him.
The consistent linkage of the Fool and Tom through their use of language helps to solidify their front as vessels of truth, acting in harmony with one another to guide Lear on this psychological journey. They are not fractured beings, moving in isolation; rather, they are united in their purpose, wittingly or not. To bring Lear to greater awareness of himself, the Fool will quip and cajole, and Tom will allow Lear to visualize and therefore give credibility to the outcome of his fears: different methods to be sure, but the ultimate purpose is the same, and an audience can better appreciate this shared purpose after witnessing the relationship between the Fool and Tom. A chorus of two will always be twice as powerful as a single voice singing alone. The two-tone song of Tom and the Fool, characterized by the common elements of temporal distortion, moral instruction, and literary allusion, works a powerful spell on Lear. Through their shared truths, he is able to see in himself the folly and madness that truly resides therein.
Works Consulted
Amanna, Kate. "King Lear's Mirror." Core Journal, vol. 8, pp. 53-58.
Guinle, Francis. "King Lear: Between Polyphony and Cacophony." Music in King Lear. N.p., n.d. Web. 16 Apr. 2017.
Palfrey, Simon. Poor Tom: Living King Lear. Chicago: U of Chicago, 2014. Print.
Wikipedia contributors. "Little Bo Peep." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 7 Mar. 2017. Web. 17 Mar. 2017.
Works Cited
Omkara. Dir. Vishal Bhardwaj. Perf. Ajay Devgan, Saif Ali Khan, and Kareena Kapoor. Eros International, 2006. DVD.
Snyder, Susan. "Between the Divine and the Absurd: King Lear." The Comic Matrix of Shakespeare's Tragedies: Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Othello, and King Lear." Princeton University Press, 1979, pp. 137-179.
Stephen Greenblatt, et al. The Norton Shakespeare. 2nd ed. New York: W.W. Norton & Company. 2008. Print.
Woods, Gillian. "King Lear: Madness, the Fool and Poor Tom." The British Library. The British Library, 09 Nov. 2015. Web. 16 Apr. 2017.
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