The theatrical fool or clown (we need not distinguish them here) was a sore trial to the cultured poet and spectator in Shakespeare’s day.  He came down from the Morality plays, and was beloved of the groundlings.  His antics, his songs, his dances, his jests, too often unclean, delighted them, and did something to make the drama, what the vulgar, poor or rich, like it to be, a variety entertainment.  Even if he confined himself to what was set down for him, he often disturbed the dramatic unity of the piece; and the temptation to ‘gag’ was too strong for him to resist.  Shakespeare makes Hamlet object to it in emphatic terms.  The more learned critics and poets went further and would have abolished the fool altogether.  His part declines as the drama advances, diminishing markedly at the end of the sixteenth century.  Jonson and Massinger exclude him.  Shakespeare used him—­we know to what effect—­as he used all the other popular elements of the drama; but he abstained from introducing him into the Roman plays,[176] and there is no fool in the last of the pure tragedies, Macbeth.

But the Fool is one of Shakespeare’s triumphs in King Lear.  Imagine the tragedy without him, and you hardly know it.  To remove him would spoil its harmony, as the harmony of a picture would be spoiled if one of the colours were extracted.  One can almost imagine that Shakespeare, going home from an evening at the Mermaid, where he had listened to Jonson fulminating against fools in general and perhaps criticising the Clown in Twelfth Night in particular, had said to himself:  ’Come, my friends, I will show you once for all that the mischief is in you, and not in the fool or the audience.  I will have a fool in the most tragic of my tragedies.  He shall not play a little part.  He shall keep from first to last the company in which you most object to see him, the company of a king.  Instead of amusing the king’s idle hours, he shall stand by him in the very tempest and whirlwind of passion.  Before I have done you shall confess, between laughter and tears, that he is of the very essence of life, that you have known him all your days though you never recognised him till now, and that you would as soon go without Hamlet as miss him.’

The Fool in King Lear has been so favourite a subject with good critics that I will confine myself to one or two points on which a difference of opinion is possible.  To suppose that the Fool is, like many a domestic fool at that time, a perfectly sane man pretending to be half-witted, is surely a most prosaic blunder.  There is no difficulty in imagining that, being slightly touched in the brain, and holding the office of fool, he performs the duties of his office intentionally as well as involuntarily:  it is evident that he does so.  But unless we suppose that he is touched in the brain we lose half the effect of his appearance in the Storm-scenes.  The effect of those scenes (to state the matter as