Page 37 - King Lear: The Cambridge Dover Wilson Shakespeare

xxxii K I N G LEAR
to evil, spiritual degradation. Thus rather than saying
the Fool's wisdom has its limitations, it would be more
accurate to say that the Fool's task is to try to show the
king that he has been guilty of error in two quite separate
categories, material and spiritual. His criticism oscillates
from the one to the other. And one cannot avoid the
impression that the Fool knows well enough that the one
category is, sub specie aeternitatis, more important than
the other.
The Fool is Lear's tutor. But at the end of 3. 6, with
the storm raging, the Fool vanishes from our sight for
ever. Shakespeare simply drops him. Why ?
Consider the dialogue at this point. Lear has gone mad,
and, towards the end of 3. 6—that tremendous scene—
he is asked by Kent to rest. 'Make no noise,' he replies,
'Make no noise; draw the curtains. So, so; we'll go to
supper i'th'morning.' But the Fool then utters his very
last words:
And I'll go to bed at noon.

In his insanity Lear says something which is absurd.
One goes to supper in the evening, not in the morning.
Lear, in his madness, has inverted ridiculously. That is
one significance. But there is another as well. Lear
inverts. Now the Fool, his tutor, has been continually
uttering what we may call inversion-statements, enig-
matically or ironically emphasizing the foolishness of
what Lear has done. Lear is as one who bears his ass over
the dirt: he makes daughters into mothers—the father
gives the rod into the hands of his children and takes
down his own breeches (an inversion not only ludicrous
but obscene). The Fool's inversion-utterances are an
essential symptom of his wisdom. But now, tortured and
driven mad by the storm, Lear himself can give us an
inversion-phrase—'We'll go to supper i'th'morning'.
He is now able to speak in an idiom that has been used