(“Two Noble Kinsmen.”)
Of the few sketches of imbeciles which we find in the drama under consideration there is hardly one which can properly be called a full-length portrait. As a class, the idiots come in for a fair share of attention; the “fool” as well as the “madman” is shewn us in the asylums of Fletcher and Middleton, but no dramatist seems to have thought the tragic or the comic possibilities of the “lunatic lean-witted fool” sufficiently promising to justify the inclusion of him as a prominent character of a play. This is not altogether surprising; the imbecile—we shall take the term as nearly as possible in its precise signification[118:1]—was not considered as an ordinary madman; he was treated like the half-developed creature he really was, looked
after more carefully than the madman, and trained in simple things just like a child. So the fool occupied a subordinate place, in drama as well as in life.
The word “fool” as has been explained,[119:1] is used in our plays in more senses than one, and a few characters who answer to the description “simple,” “idiot” or “imbecile” may now be mentioned. They demand little space, for, though serving a dramatic purpose, they have little interest or importance in themselves. Nearest sanity is Pogio of Chapman’s “Gentleman Usher,” whose half-witted condition seems to be largely pose; it is a strange way of carrying out his own dictum that “gentility must be fantastical.” Bergetto, too, in Ford’s play, “’Tis pity she’s a Whore,” though consistently spoken of as “fool’s head,” “dunce” and the like, could hardly be called anything more serious than a foolish fellow. Jerome, in Chettle’s “Tragedy of Hoffman,” and Cloten, the “empty purse” of Cymbeline, have both something of the true congenital idiot about them. With Jerome, however, our judgment is influenced more by impression than by anything he says or does in the play. Hoffman and others call him an “idiot,” and he himself owns “They say I am a fool,” after which he speaks of seeking out “my notes of Machiavell.” But this is mere
foolish talk, as, indeed, are most of his speeches. In a quaint scene he addresses the people as their King, but is outdone by a later speech of Hoffman’s, which he himself solicits saying, “I charge you all, upon pain of death, that you hear my cousin.” The action of a fool, indeed, but was it not also the action of honest Brutus? Therefore we must cling to our estimate of Jerome, framed from his own speeches, as justification for including him in this category. Both the actions and the words of Shakespeare’s Cloten are those of a man mentally deficient; Guiderius was not far from the truth when he said:
“not Hercules
Could have knock’d out his brains, for he had none”;[120:1]
and everyone who knows him wonders
“That such a crafty devil as is his mother
Should yield the world this ass.”[120:2]