Looking at the Fool in Lear is like staring into a cracked mirror at 1:34 AM with bourbon on your breath and truth seeping through the fissures. This isn’t some jingling court jester doing pratfalls for the Renaissance crowd, this is the guy who sees the wreckage before the crash, who speaks in riddles because straight talk will get him hanged, who loves his king enough to mock him into sanity even as the whole rotten edifice comes tumbling down.
The most difficult character in comedy is that of the fool,
and he must be no simpleton that plays that part.
Miguel De Cervantes
The Fool’s the only one with the guts to tell Lear he’s torched his own kingdom, given away the store, betrayed himself for the ego stroke of hearing his daughters lie prettily. “Thou shouldst not have been old till thou hadst been wise,” he says, which is the gentlest way of calling someone a catastrophic dumbass I’ve ever heard. He’s got that raw nerve genius, seeing the emperor’s naked and broke and wandering toward the storm.
But here’s the knife twist: recognizing the Fool means recognizing I’m him. Ive played the wise idiot in my own disaster, haven’t I? Seen the truth, spoken it in my head in the shower, in the car, in those 6:13 AM anxiety spirals, and then watched myself do the wrong thing anyway. The worst kind of fool isn’t ignorant. The worst kind sees clearly and still walks into the fucking storm and ends up in some shit bar in some small town in upstate New York, nursing watered down whiskey under fluorescent lights that hum like tinnitus, surrounded by other fools who let me know I should have known better. The jukebox plays something that was almost good in 1987. I’ve given away what matters. Mistaken performance for substance.
The Fool vanishes halfway through the play, and Shakespeare never explains why. Maybe because once Lear becomes his own fool, once he’s lost everything and gained sight, there’s no need for a shadow self anymore. Or maybe because the Fool’s real home was always inside us, that voice we ignore until the kingdom’s ash and we’re howling at the wind we could’ve seen coming all along.