The Dyers Hand and Other Essays

In other words, there is still an element of theatre in Lear's behavior, as a child will talk to inanimate objects as if they were people, while knowing that, in reality, they are not. But when this chance has passed and Lear has descended into mad­ness past recall, there is nothing for the fool to represent and he must disappear.

Frequendy the fool makes play with the words "knave" and "fool." A knave is one who disobeys the imperatives of con­science; a fool is one who cannot hear or understand them. Though the cognitive ego is, morally, a "fool" because con­science speaks not to it but to the volitional ego, yet the im­perative of duty can never be in contradiction to the actual facts of the situation, as the imperative of passion can be and frequently is. The Socratic doctrine that to know the good is to will it, that sin is ignorance, is valid if by knowing one means listening to what one knows, and by ignorance, willful ignorance. If that is what one means, then, though not all fools are knaves, all knaves are fools.

lear: Dost thou call me fool, boy?

fool: All thy other tides thou hast given away; that

thou wast born with. kent: This is not altogether fool, my lord. fool: N

o, faith, lords and great men will not let me. If I had a monopoly on't; they would have part of it.

Ideally, in a stage production, Lear and the fool should be of the same physical type; they should both be athletic meso- morphs. The difference should be in their respective sizes. Lear should be as huge as possible, the fool as tiny.

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body: O -who shall me deliver whole

From bonds of this tyrannic soul? Which, stretcht upright, impales me so That mine own precipice I go. . . .

soul: What Magick could me thus confine Within another's grief to pine? Where whatsoever it complain, 1 feel, that cannot feel, the pain . . .

andrew majrvell

valentine: Belike, boy, then you are in love; for last morning you could not see to wipe my shoes.

speed: True sir; I was in love with my bed. I thank you, you swinged me for my love, which makes me the bolder to chide you for yours.

—shakespeare, Two Gentlemen of Verona

The Tempest, Shakespeare's last play, is a disquieting work. Like the other three comedies of his late period, Pericles, Cym- beline

and The Winter's Tale, it is concerned with a wrong done, repentance, penance and reconciliation; but, whereas the others all end in a blaze of forgiveness and love—"Par­don's the word to all"—in The Tempest both the repentance of the guilty and the pardon of the injured seem more formal than real. Of the former, Alonso is the only one who seems genuinely sorry; the repentance of the rest, both the courdy characters, Antonio and Sebastian, and the low, Trinculo and Stephano, is more the prudent promise of the punished and frightened, "I won't do it again. It doesn't pay," than any change of heart: and Prospero's forgiving is more the con­temptuous pardon of a man who knows that he has his enemies completely at his mercy than a heartfelt reconciliation. His attitude to all of them is expressed in his final words to Cali­ban:

as you look To have my pardon trim it handsomely.

One must admire Prospero because of his talents and his strength; one cannot possibly like him. He has the coldness of someone who has come to the conclusion that human nature is not worth much, that human relations are, at their best, pretty sorry affairs. Even towards the innocent young lovers, Ferdi­nand and Miranda, and their "brave new world," his attitude is one of mistrust so that he has to preach them a sermon on the dangers of anticipating their marriage vows. One might ex­cuse him if he included himself in his critical skepticism but he never does; it never occurs to him that he, too, might have erred and be in need of pardon. He says of Caliban:

born devil on whose nature Nurture can never stick, on whom my pains, Humanely taken, all, all lost, quite lost

but Shakespeare has written Caliban's part in such a way that, while we have to admit that Caliban is both brutal and corrupt, a "lying slave" who can be prevented from doing mischief only "by stripes not kindness," we cannot help feeling that Prospero is largely responsible for his corruption, and that, in the debate between them, Caliban has the best of the argu­ment.