Lear's Fool Research Articles

Lear's Fool and the Meaning of 'Snatching'

Lear's Fool and the Meaning of 'Snatching'

“A King Lear's Fool”: Remembering Mashruwala

“A King Lear's Fool”: Remembering Mashruwala

Priest and jester in the policy sciences: Developing the focus of inquiry

Once the tension between priest and jester has been recognized, it becomes possible not only to keep it alive in developing the focus of inquiry, but also to seek a better balance (or imbalance) between the two. Yet, as Ron Brunner has pointed out (1984), an editor is rightly constrained by others - contributors, reviewers, colleagues. Helping to develop the focus of inquiry means not only taking initiative and staking out directions, but also responding to the spontaneous initiatives of others and encouraging them in their directions. That policy of a journal points to a desirable condition of inquiry and anticipates a desirable, even if hardly imaginable, condition of public life (cf. Schon, 1983, ch. 10). The most renowned of jesters, Lear's Fool, inhabits the margins of a world marked by delusion, disguise, deception, and betrayal; he ‘would fain learn to lie,’ (I. iv. 173) but his wit, through riddle and paradox, instead persistently conveys an unwanted truth. The jester becomes not just a source of amusement to his master, but a ‘pestilent gall’ (I. iv. 110). As an apparently ordered and rational world turns to chaos and excess, however, the Fool paradoxically remains constant (II. iv. 75–84). Those who will abandon and betray the old King are those who appear most coldly rational; indeed, it is the jester who is the most reliable of counsellors, enigmatically offering wisdom. The Fool's enigmatic counsel of moderation is (like Cordelia's gift) seen as a worthless ‘nothing’ (I. iv. 114–128). The jester brings vitality and wit to make us laugh. Yet the comic mood of the jester's clowning only sets in sharper relief something else we know. The jester has a serious side and allows us - if we will but look and listen - to laugh at ourselves, to see ourselves as others see us, to take that crucial step in developing the focus of inquiry whereby we expose ourselves to ourselves. Douglas Torgerson

Lear's Fool and Goya's Dilemma

Lear's Fool and Goya's Dilemma

Wittgenstein's Boundaries

JOHN ELLIS REMARKS in Playing Games with that interpretation of Wittgenstein is certainly unique. Though he does not intend this as praise, sounds so much like praise to ears that I wish I could accept imputation. However, truth is that my reading of Wittgenstein is only too indebted to someone else-to Oets Bouwsma, teacher, walking companion of Wittgenstein, Fool of analytic philosophy (in sense of Lear's Fool). Now I ask reader to forgive me as I take a very short detour through intellectual biography, a detour that seems justified to me for two reasons. First, because Ellis believes that it is clear enough what is at the root of alleged misreadings of Wittgenstein: Staten wants to make Wittgenstein seem very much like Derrida. I can think of no better way to show how far this is from truth than by describing how I came about my reading: primarily from Bouwsma's Wittgenstein seminar. Subsequently, when I discovered Derrida, I read him in light of Wittgenstein, and not other way around. My second reason is that, this being case, I can take occasion to acknowledge an intellectual debt and to pay tribute to a remarkable man.

Managing large-scale organizational change

~-.Joday'S business organizations face an era of turbulent change, the sources of which are varied, often unpredictable, and difficult to understand. In the last decade, companies have had to deal with such traumas as dramatic technological shifts (for example, the explosion in electronic capabilities); deregulation in such industries as banking, telecommunications, the airlines, and energy; economic uncertainty; fast growth; increased global competition; and major shifts in demography and values. In his article Lear's Fool: Coping with Change Beyond Future Shock (New Management, Vol. 2, No.2, 1984), D. Verne Morland summarizes the impact of rapid change on organizations:

Shakespeare in Baltimore

Oregon Shakespearean Festival, Graham played Lear three times. This Lear, his fourth, was not fully realized. Although at moments, particularly on the heath, Graham's Lear was movingly lost, usually he was a crotchety, cantankerous old nag, hemming and hawing at his daughters and servants with a bark to match the whine of Martha J. Brown's oddly rigid Cordelia. Conventionally presented as more sinned against than sinning, this Lear never managed to make us care. The reason not the need speech was uniformly angry; the soul in bliss speech was uniformly tired; and the blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! speech of III. ii had nothing of a nature's storm in its rhythm as spoken, conveying only crusty determination. Due to this actor's limited scope, his monochromatic Lear, the play was reduced to a family squabble. As the Fool, Albert Sanders was inexcusable. For while Graham's Lear was simply ordinary and plodding, unexplored, Sanders seemed to go out of his way to come up with a bizarre characterization of the Fool. His body folding in on itself, stooped and shuffling, Sanders gazed out at nothing, like a wistful wino on a park bench, not at all like Lear's fool. There was no bond between them. Nothing. As in his production of A Midsummer Night's Dream, director Barry showed considerable imagination and insight, especially in Edgar's band of swarming, muddy beggars and in Gloucester's rebirth at Dover, beautifully and simply staged: the gentle Gloucester just fell forward, and that was enough. But despite Barry's tight direction, fine ensemble work by much of the supporting cast, a very well-staged fight between Edmund and Edgar, a poem of a set, and lovely, evocative traditional music composed by Stewart W. Turner, this production of King Lear left its audience bored, tired, and disgruntled.

King Lear and the Fools of Robert Armin

S WE strip away the sentimental and the picturesque from Shakespeare's fools (Lavatch, Feste, Touchstone, and Lear's Fool), these characters begin to emerge more clearly in terms of Shakespeare's own time. For Lear's Fool especially, the theatrical and subsequent traditions are often poor guides as to how we should visualize this character type. The Fool was dropped completely from productions of King Lear on the Restoration stage, and, except for its reference to a fool's cap, the text of the play itself gives few clues to the nature of his dress. When Lear's Fool was restored in the mid-nineteenth century, directors and costume designers, full of Gothic enthusiasm, forced him and the other fools into the particolored motley of medieval continental manuscripts and, more damaging, into a single iconographic and didactic mode. There is no proof that this picturesque costume was seen on Shakespeare's stage-although his contemporaries knew it from a variety of emblematic contexts-and the association with Shakespeare's fools is probably a recent one. Producers of today may dress the fool differently, but, as we read the plays, the fool in particolored dress still comes readily to mind. Fortunately, one of Leslie Hotson's most persuasive books, Shakespeare's Motley (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, I952), jars us loose from the notion of particolor by recalling that Elizabethan motley was actually a rough cloth used for saddlebags and as a practical garment for servants and actual idiots, especially with a kind of shirt or petticoat. The garb, if not the material, was preserved into our own century by the orphaned boys of Christ's Hospital, whose petticoat livery, until recently, was virtually unchanged from the mid-sixteenth century when the school was chartered. What is not clear from Hotson's book is that the woodcut on the title page of The Two Maids of Moreclacke (i609), which Hotson takes to be evidence of the fool's dress, is more likely only the blue-coat livery of John o' the Hospital in the play.' Better depictions of the stage fool's garb (as Francis Douce pointed out in the last century) are probably the servant on the title page of Thomas Heywood's A Maidenhead Well Lost (i634) and the cuts in the anonymous A Pleasant History of Will Sommers (Folger's unique copy, i637).Y These cuts may show the fool's coat guarded with yellow of the Prologue to Henry VIII. To accompany this shift in our visual understanding of the Shakespearean

Hamlet and Iago: Nineteenth-Century Breeches Parts

T is well known that the ladies of the Restoration, having vanquished the aging boy actresses, soon slipped into what were nicely called breeches parts. Samuel Pepys among others will not let us forget the age's efforts to excite a rather jaded audience, and such monuments to excess as The Parson's 94V 5 If Wedding still have a pleasant notoriety. Nevertheless, it is sometimes useful to remind ourselves that the tradition of transvestitism did not die with the seventeenth century, and that there is a closer relationship between Mary Martin and Nell Gwyn than meets the casual eye. Mrs. Bracegirdle was considered an admirable male; and it was Peg Woffington, it will be recalled, who, having remarked at the close of a masculine impersonation that she believed half the audience took her for a man, heard Quin comfort her by telling her not to be uneasy for the other half could convince them to the contrary. Mrs. Jordan as Sir Harry Wildair and various eighteenth-century actresses continued to give body to this particular theatrical tradition to the extent that it has persisted into our own era in the efforts of such serious performers as Sybil Thorndike, Eva Le Gallienne, and Esme Berenger to play characters like Hamlet, Prince Hal, Lear's Fool, and Ferdinand. But perhaps no age has shown a greater fondness for actresses in male roles than the nineteenth century, an interesting phenomenon in this seemingly staid period. The years with which we are concerned frame themselves with notable clarity. In i802 Sarah Siddons was still performing Hamlet in Dublin, wrapped in a garment generously designed to preserve her modesty. In i899 the other Sarah appeared as Shakespeare's Prince in Paris, London and Stratford. With long, blond hair crowning an exceedingly feminine corporality, Bernhardt was obviously not suffering from Siddonian shyness, and her lack of restraint in this respect seems to have contributed as much to the critics' unhappiness as a text transmogrified to French prose. During the years between Siddons and Bernhardt, British and American theaters were studded with actresses anxious to display themselves in masculine parts. Naturally many of them were sensation-mongers whose efforts are of limited interest to students of serious drama. Ada Isaacs Menken, who as Mazeppa lashed herself to a foam-flecked stallion and galloped madly across a hidden treadmill, comes readily to mind, as does Madame Vestris, whose sprightly Macheath and Don Giovanni were

Lear's Fool: A Boy, Not a Man

Journal Article Lear's Fool: A Boy, Not a Man Get access HUNTINGTON BROWN HUNTINGTON BROWN Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Essays in Criticism, Volume XIII, Issue 2, April 1963, Pages 164–171, https://doi.org/10.1093/eic/XIII.2.164 Published: 01 April 1963

THE STRUCTURAL EXPERIMENT IN HAMLET

Shakespeare was by no means a slave to conventional play construction, and even if one takes the most liberal view there still remain several plays in which he courts structural disaster only to achieve felicitous success. The narrowly averted breakdown in The Winter's Tale is, perhaps, +he most extreme example. The sequence and unity of Hamlet are so complete and natural that the reader seldom pauses to consider how very nearly Shakespeare approaches, and avoids, utter chaos by presenting his material in the way that he does. A fellowship of strolling players arrive by chance at Elsinore, and virtually assume control for nearly six hundred lines. They gossip, rehearse, connive, are tutored, and eventually act. They stimulate Hamlet to enthusiasm, criticism, and soliloquy. They serve to bring the tragedy of Hamlet to a climax, but it is a false climax, and then disappear as suddenly as Lear's Fool, having impeded the action of the play and contributed simply one important piece of evidence to Hamlet's suspicions. It seems a small return for their prolonged presence, and one which could certainly have been obtained with considerably more economy. A brief analysis of the scenes under review will shew just how seemingly irrelevant most of this business with the players is: