Sil. Fill the cup and let it come;
I'll pledge you a mile to the bottom."[586:C]
After drinking another bumper, and singing another song, allusive to the rights of pledging, Do me right, And dub me knight[586:D]; and quoting the old ballad of Robin Hood, and the Pindar of Wakefield[586:E], master Silence is carried to bed, fully saturated with sack and good cheer.
A character equally versed in minstrel lore, and equally prodigal of his stock, though wanting the excuse of inebriation, has been drawn by Beaumont and Fletcher, in the person of Old Merrythought in their Knight of the Burning Pestle[586:F]; but, in point of nature and humour, it is a picture which falls infinitely short of Shakspeare's sketch.
Many of the old songs, or rather the fragments of them, which are scattered through the dramas of our poet, either proceed from the
professed clown or fool of the play, or are given as the wild and desultory recollections of derangement, real or feigned; the ebullitions of a broken heart, and the unconnected sallies of a disordered mind.
Shakspeare's fools may be considered, in fact, as exact copies of the living manners and costume of these singular personages, who, in his era, formed a necessary part of the household establishment of the great. To the due execution of their functions, a lively fancy, and a copious fund of wit and sarcasm, together with an unlimited licence of uttering what imagination and the occasion prompted, were essential; but it was likewise required, that bitterness of allusion, and asperity of remark, should be softened by the constant assumption of a playful and unintentional manner. For this purpose, the indirect method of quotation, and generally from ludicrous songs and ballads, is resorted to, with the evident intention of covering what would otherwise have been too naked and too severely felt. Thus, in an old play, entitled A very mery and pythie Comedy, called, The longer thou livest the more Foole thou art, printed about 1580, the appearance of a character of this description is prefaced by the following stage-note:—"Entreth Moros, counterfaiting a vaine gesture and a foolish countenance, synging the foote of many songs, as fools were wont."[587:A]
The simple yet sarcastic drollery of the fool, and the wild ravings of the madman, have been alike employed by Shakspeare, to deepen the gloom of distress. In the tragedy of Lear it is difficult to ascertain whether the horrors of the scene are more heightened by the seeming thoughtless levity of the former, or by the delirious imagery of the latter. The greater part of the bitterly sportive metres, attributed to the fool, in this drama, appears evidently to have been written for the character; and as the reliques drawn from more ancient minstrelsy, seem rather the foot or burden of each song, than the commencement, and are at the same time of little poetical value, we shall forbear enumerating them. The fragments, however, allotted to Edgar are
both characteristic, and apparently initial; the line which Mr. Steevens asserts to have seen in an old ballad,
"Through the sharp hawthown blows the cold wind,"[588:A]