But even if this obstacle were serious and the Fool were imagined as a grown man, we may still insist that he must also be imagined as a timid, delicate and frail being, who on that account and from the expression of his face has a boyish look.[178] He pines away when Cordelia goes to France.  Though he takes great liberties with his master he is frightened by Goneril, and becomes quite silent when the quarrel rises high.  In the terrible scene between Lear and his two daughters and Cornwall (II. iv. 129-289), he says not a word; we have almost forgotten his presence when, at the topmost pitch of passion, Lear suddenly turns to him from the hateful faces that encompass him: 

                        You think I’ll weep;
     No, I’ll not weep: 
     I have full cause of weeping; but this heart
     Shall break into a hundred thousand flaws
     Or ere I’ll weep.  O fool, I shall go mad.

From the beginning of the Storm-scenes, though he thinks of his master alone, we perceive from his words that the cold and rain are almost more than he can bear.  His childishness comes home to us when he runs out of the hovel, terrified by the madman and crying out to the King ’Help me, help me,’ and the good Kent takes him by the hand and draws him to his side.  A little later he exclaims, ’This cold night will turn us all to fools and madmen’; and almost from that point he leaves the King to Edgar, speaking only once again in the remaining hundred lines of the scene.  In the shelter of the ‘farm-house’ (III. vi.) he revives, and resumes his office of love; but I think that critic is right who considers his last words significant.  ‘We’ll go to supper i’ the morning,’ says Lear; and the Fool answers ‘And I’ll go to bed at noon,’ as though he felt he had taken his death.  When, a little later, the King is being carried away on a litter, the Fool sits idle.  He is so benumbed and worn out that he scarcely notices what is going on.  Kent has to rouse him with the words,

              Come, help to bear thy master,
     Thou must not stay behind.

We know no more.  For the famous exclamation ‘And my poor fool is hanged’ unquestionably refers to Cordelia; and even if it is intended to show a confused association in Lear’s mind between his child and the Fool who so loved her (as a very old man may confuse two of his children), still it tells us nothing of the Fool’s fate.  It seems strange indeed that Shakespeare should have left us thus in ignorance.  But we have seen that there are many marks of haste and carelessness in King Lear; and it may also be observed that, if the poet imagined the Fool dying on the way to Dover of the effects of that night upon the heath, he could perhaps convey this idea to the audience by instructing the actor who took the part to show, as he left the stage for the last time, the recognised tokens of approaching death.[179]