ABSTRACT
The facts collected in earlier chapters in this book will have made it clear that when Sidney objected to the neighborhood of kings and clowns on the public stage, he was not pleading for realistic drama; and that, when Shakespeare made Lear and his Fool companions in misfortune, he may have broken the canons of classical art, but he certainly was not destroying verisimilitude. On the contrary, if he was catering for the popular taste for clownage, he was doing so by creating a figure who was sufficiently life-like to be tragically convincing. Lear’s Fool, like Touchstone and Feste, is an “all-licensed” critic who sees and speaks the real truth about the people around him. It is a critical, a crucial question which effects a startling division among the dramatis personae—it being for instance obvious that Goneril, Regan and Edmund are not candidates for the cap and bells.
