The Clown is not only quaint, droll, full of banter, sly with sense, like clowns in the other plays, but he is the most ebullient with spirits of them all, ready for the next freak, to dissemble himself in the curate's gown and carry on two voices with Malvolio in the prison, keeping him on the rack the while, or to carouse with the two knights till daybreak, and delight them with manufacturing burlesques. "Thou wast in very gracious fooling last night, when thou spokest of Pigrogromitus, of the Vapians passing the equinoctial of Queubus: 'twas very good, i' faith. I sent thee sixpence for thy leman: hadst it?" Feste resumes the burlesquing humor: "I did impeticos thy gratillity; for Malvolio's nose is no whipstock: my lady has a white hand, and the Myrmidons are no bottle-ale houses." As for "bottle-ale," the phrase occurs once more in Shakspeare, 2 "Henry IV.," ii. 4, to express contempt,—"Away, you bottle-ale rascal!" So Feste does not think small-beer of the Myrmidons, or retainers of Olivia, who might scent out his sixpence as quickly as Malvolio. Was the bottling of ale just coming in, to the immense disgust of the loyal Briton, who thought nobly of the ancient brew and would not have it save mightily on tap? The words, "Pigrogromitus," "Vapians," "Queubus," sound like the names which Rabelais manufactured to cover his sly allusions to public personages; but they cannot be traced. It is just possible that Shakspeare invented them to burlesque the words and style which mariners and travellers brought home to vapor with to eager listeners in the taverns: marvels of the East that would not stay in Damascus, but came by caravan,—of Virginia, Guiana, and the "still-vex'd Bermoothes," the "Anthropophaginian,"[9] men "whose heads do grow beneath their shoulders," not positively discredited by Sir Walter Raleigh; one-leg and one-foot savages, seen by early sailors to the coast of Maine,—all the misunderstanding and exaggeration of a new period of adventure and discovery of new lands were bountifully nourished upon sack and canary in the London taverns. What legends were fabricated at the Mitre in Cheapside, the Swan at Dowgate, the Boar's Head near London Stone, the Ship at the Exchange, the Red Lion in the Strand! These were haunts of Frobisher's and Drake's men; of Sir Humphrey Gilbert's, fresh from Newfoundland in the only ship that was saved; of Barbour's expedition to Roanoake in 1584; of Gosnold's, in 1602, to Cape Cod and the islands in Buzzard's Bay. The sack grew apprehensive and forgetive, and justified Falstaff's eulogy. Bermoothes was not the only region vexed by devils and spirits, but every tavern from Plymouth to London. A trace of Shakspeare's interest in these London entertainments is found in the "Tempest," where Trinculo wishes that he had Caliban in England for a show. "There would this monster make a man: any strange beast there makes a man; when they will not give a doit to relieve a lame beggar, they will lay out ten to see a dead Indian." Captain Weymouth was sent by Sir Ferdinando Gorges and Chief Justice Popham, in 1605, to found a colony upon the coast of Maine. He kidnapped five Abenaki Indians near the mouth of the Sagadahoc, and carried them home. Three of these were kept by Gorges at Plymouth, and the other two were sent up to London to the care of the Chief Justice. One of these died there. The passage in the "Tempest" is strong confirmation that Shakspeare went with the other cockneys to see him.
Though Shakspeare empties all his own love for pure fun into this clown, he makes of him the only cool and consistent character in the play, and thus conveys to us his conviction of the superiority of an observer who has wit, humor, repartee, burlesquing, and buffoonery at command; for none but wise men can make such fools of themselves. Such a fine composition is apt to be misunderstood by the single-gifted and prosaic people; but this only piques the bells to their happiest jingle; and a man is never more convinced of the divine origin of his buffooning talent than when the didactic souls reject it as heresy. All Shakspeare's clowns brandish this fine bauble: their bells swing in a Sabbath air and summon us to a service of wisdom. Feste has no passion to fondle, and no chances to lie in wait for except those which can help his foolery to walk over everybody like the sun. Even when he seems to be wheedling money out of the Duke and Viola, he is only in sport with the weakness which purse-holders have to fee, to conciliate, to enjoy an aspect of grandeur. His perfectly dispassionate temper is sagacity itself. It discerns the solemn fickleness of the principal personages. They are all treated with amusing impartiality; and it is in the spirit of the Kosmos itself which does not stand in awe of anybody. It seems, indeed, as if the function of fool, and the striking toleration which has always invested it, was developed by Nature for protection of those of her creatures who are exposed to flattery and liable to be damaged by it. Not for shallow amusement have rich and titled persons harbored jesters, who always play the part of the slave of Pyrrhus, at proper intervals to remind them that they are mortal. All men secretly prefer to know the truth; but the pampered people cannot bear to sit in the full draught of it. Its benefit must, however, be in some way conveyed to them. Bluff Kent is banished for saying to Lear, in the plainest Saxon, what the fool kept insinuating with impunity. Therefore, no genuine court has been complete without its fool. The most truculent sceptre has only playfully tapped his liberty. Timur the Terrible had a court-fool, named Ahmed Kermani. One day, in the bath with a crowd of wits, the conversation fell upon the individual worth of men, and Timur asked Ahmed, "What price wouldst thou put on me if I were for sale?" "About five-and-twenty aspers," rejoined Ahmed. "Why," said Timur, "that is about the price of the sheet I have on." "Well, of course, I meant the sheet." When the business of kingship becomes decayed, the office of fool is obsolete.
Feste bandies words with Viola, and makes her submit to delicate insolences: her distinguished air cannot abate him. He pretends to wish to be convinced by Malvolio that the latter is sane, but concludes that he will never believe a madman till he can see his brains. Feste keeps his own head on a level keel as the sparkling ripples of his drolleries go by. Shakspeare's intention is conspicuous in him to make all the clowns the critics of all the other personages, and kept in the pay of their creator.
When the play is over, the Duke plighted to his page, Olivia rightly married to the wrong man, and the whole romantic ravel of sentiment begins to be attached to the serious conditions of life, Feste is left alone upon the stage. Then he sings a song which conveys to us his feeling of the world's impartiality: all things proceed according to law; nobody is humored; people must abide the consequences of their actions, "for the rain it raineth every day." A "little tiny boy" may have his toy; but a man must guard against knavery and thieving: marriage itself cannot be sweetened by swaggering; whoso drinks with "toss-pots" will get a "drunken head:" it is a very old world, and began so long ago that no change in its habits can be looked for. The grave insinuation of this song is touched with the vague, soft bloom of the play. As the noises of the land come over sea well-tempered to the ears of islanders, so the world's fierce, implacable roar reaches us in the song, sifted through an air that hangs full of the Duke's dreams, of Viola's pensive love, of the hours which music flattered. The note is hardly more presageful than the cricket's stir in the late silence of a summer. How gracious has Shakspeare been to mankind in this play! He could not do otherwise than leave Feste all alone to pronounce its benediction; for his heart was a nest of songs whence they rose to whistle with the air of wisdom. Alas for the poor fool in "Lear" who sang to drown the cries from a violated nest!
THE FOOL IN "KING LEAR."
The bauble of the Fool in "King Lear" rings us into a horizon that, before we reach it, mutters with the premonition of madness; and we wonder if any humor can find shelter with us underneath that blackening sky. When the Fool joins our company, we search his features in vain for a trace of Feste's and Touchstone's temper. That spring of geniality has been stirred by the king's misfortunes till it is roiled into irony; and we recognize the only tone that can take lodgings in this tragedy. It makes rifts in the gathering tempest, not of clear sky but of lighter cloud-racks, around whose edges the first lightnings run. We have ceased to smile and begin to forebode. All cheeriness and whim are getting blotted out so fast that we share the Fool's longing for the shelter of the hut when heaven began to pelt that old gray head, "crowned with rank fumiter," upon the heath.
His irony is tart; but commiseration for his master saves it from ill-temper. Just as it threatens to become cynical, a song occurs to him, which is a low call drawing him back, as the mother's voice lures her child from the edge of a cliff ere it falls over:—
"Then they for sudden joy did weep,
And I for sorrow sung."
"When were you wont to be so full of songs, sirrah?" It was not his wont, then? By no means. This court-jester stood by when the latent disease of the King's brain was suddenly unmasked by the sincerity of Cordelia, whose love was more ponderous than her tongue. He saw her transformed, in an instant of the King's first lesion, from a daughter into an outcast. First, wonder at a blow which no one could anticipate, and then pity at seeing that love's vessel thus pushed over and its rareness spilled, has destroyed his appetite for mirth. He unconsciously resorts to the Fool's alternative between jesting and gravity, which is a fusion of both these qualities in irony; and he catches at the ragged edges of old songs when he feels himself tumbling into bitter aspersion of the King. He has, too, been affrighted by the sudden and groundless vehemence which hurls the faithful old Kent into exile as soon as he dared speak a word for Cordelia. What! Daughterhood stamped out like a spider, life-long loyalty sent to the dogs! This palace can dispense with jesting for the future; and our wits must yield a different grain. Touchstone is the wise fool of life's comedy. But Lear snatches at his fool's bauble, invests him with the pathos of a broken sceptre and a crumbling reason, and may well inquire when he learned to sing. "I have used it, Nuncle, e'er since thou madest thy daughters thy mother." His songs insinuate so much unpalatable truth that he tells the King to keep a schoolmaster that can teach his fool to lie, and pretends that under the circumstances, with the King undertaking to be the house-fool, lying might be an accomplishment.