Playing_the_Fool_-_a_Collection_of_Insights

*Playing the Fool - Various insights for actors preparing for the role* Early on in ''Twelfth Night,'' Feste, one of Shakespeare's most memorable fools, strives to straighten out the noble Olivia on the subject of mourning. ''Good madonna,'' he says, ''give me leave to prove you a fool.'' Then he engages her in a little improving dialectic: Feste. Good madonna, why mourn'st thou' Olivia. Good fool, for my brother's death. Feste. I think his soul is in hell, madonna. Olivia. I know his soul is in heaven, fool. Feste. The more fool, madonna, to mourn for your brother's soul, being in heaven. Take away the fool, gentlemen. Like the practical joker who celebrates April Fools' Day by slipping his whoopee cushion under some pompous rump, Feste -- though with considerably more art -- is out to explode pretensions. If Olivia can respond to Feste's sort of humour -- and she does -- then surely she's not quite so embalmed in mourning as she herself might think, or want others to imagine. If I can laugh at that, she'll be compelled to ask herself, how grief-smitten can I really be' And shortly Olivia will be in love, though, naturally, with the wrong person. What's touching about the comic pedagogy that Feste offers his mistress is that intervention into worldly matters isn't in his nature. He's actually detached, and rather melancholic. He'd prefer to view life from the wings, commenting on the passing show in his sadly melodious way. (Feste sings some of Shakespeare's most beautiful songs.) But he also loves Olivia a great deal -- an affection that she touchingly returns -- and when it appears that she is going to suffocate under her own renunciations, Feste swings, however reluctantly, into action. Shakespeare's fools are subtle teachers, reality instructors one might say, who often come close to playing the part that Socrates, himself an inspired clown, played on the streets of Athens. They tickle, coax and cajole their supposed betters into truth, or something akin to it. They take the spirit of April Fools' Day to an inspired zenith. Like Feste, Touchstone, in ''As You Like It,'' is something of a professor of the life sciences, but his methods are as coarse as Feste's are kind. Touchstone is a rancid reductionist. He doesn't have anything to do with turning base metals into gold, as his name might suggest, but rather takes what men and women have concurred in finding precious and exposes its sordid underside. Touchstone is a wild Freudian analyst whose nostrils are always primed to sniff out sex and scat. When Rosalind is near to swooning over the vapid love sonnets that her beau, Orlando, leaves her in the forest of Arden, Touchstone pops up to enlighten her. ''I'll rhyme you so eight years together,'' he declares. Then quickly he takes his stride: If a hart do lack a hind, Let him seek out Rosalind. If the cat will after kind, So be sure will Rosalind. Wint'red garments must be lin'd, So must slender Rosalind. Despite all the refined sentiments on display in Arden, what it all comes down to, according to Touchstone, is simple instinct, sweating and rutting and the two-backed beast. To which Rosalind says, eventually, yes. Yes, but. She takes in all that Touchstone feels and knows and, with a lightning celerity -- Rosalind is one of Shakespeare's quickest-thinking characters -- begins compounding a version of erotic love that includes sexual desires but isn't bounded and defined by them. In her mock dramas with Orlando, in which she's disguised as a boy, Rosalind, goaded by Touchstone, grows candid about her own shifting sexual desires. But she doesn't stop there. To her, shifting erotic desire is the inspiration for shifting human identity and for the playful exercise of wit. Without sex, life would be insupportable, but without self-willed changes of identity, shifting, theatrical improvisation, life would be impossible as well. Sex is finite, the affair of an hour. But play, pure extemporization, is endless, at least when the player is Rosalind (and Shakespeare). So, Rosalind avers, Orlando is going to have to put up with someone who never wants the same thing twice, and never is the same person on any two occasions: ''I will be more jealous of thee than a Barbary cock-pigeon over his hen, more clamorous than a parrot against rain, more newfangled than an ape, more giddy in my desires than a monkey. I will weep for nothing, like Diana in the fountain, and I will do that when you are dispos'd to be merry. I will laugh like a hyen, and that when thou art inclin'd to sleep.'' In short, Rosalind asserts, ''Make the doors upon a woman's wit, and it will out at the casement; shut that, and 'twill out at the keyhole; stop that, 'twill fly with the smoke out at the chimney.'' What Rosalind promises is a life of Shakespearean variety and largess (and tribulation) -- a life she might never have had the wherewithal to conceive if Touchstone hadn't sent her flying into her own broadening field of play. Touchstone and Feste are creatures who, whatever their overt intentions, inspire expansive, self-enlarging gestures in their pupils. Shakespeare's most famous fool, the Fool in ''King Lear,'' leads the protagonist toward ever harsher simplifications. He goads Lear on to creating what are progressively fiercer and more compressed versions of his sorry state. The Fool intensifies Lear's misery, but as a way of leading him to the severest truths. Lear, it's said, has ever but slenderly known himself; now, in order to die at peace, he needs to face what he is. There is not much time left. As a king, Lear is given to display, to making large, grandiloquent pronouncements and also, alas, to soliciting them. He falls out with Cordelia in part because he demands that she traffic in his own inflated terms. The Fool, a displaced Zen master, wants to cut through all that. He offers bitter haikus to deflate Lear's endless self-promoting epic. Some of the Fool's utterances shade the border of nonsense, but in his life Lear has perhaps made all too much sense, and of a consistently self-blinded sort. ''Can you make no use of nothing, nuncle''' the Fool asks Lear, meaning, among other things, can you make no use of your now-impoverished state to see what the world can be, at bottom' To which Lear -- it is still early in the play -- replies, ''Nothing can be made out of nothing.'' But it turns out that the Fool's question is pregnant. A great deal can be made of nothing. And before the play is over, Lear, tutored by the Fool, will show us how humane a vision can arise from losing all outward trappings, and seeing the essential fragility and preciousness of everything that lives. ''Take physic, pomp,'' Lear cries in the midst of the storm, admonishing himself and others who have been blind to remediable human misery, Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel, That thou mayst shake the superflux to them, And show the heavens more just. Perhaps the most touching of all Shakespeare's fools is the one who does not even appear in his play: I mean Yorick, from ''Hamlet.'' Close to the end of the play, Hamlet raises up the old jester's skull and broods on Yorick's benevolent wit: ''a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy. He hath bore me on his back a thousand times.'' The scene is a sad one precisely because the theatrical Yorick couldn't be Hamlet's reality instructor, or rather his instructor in the hypervivid unreality that is art. If Hamlet is drawn unequivocally to anything, it is to the visiting actors. He uses them with unparalleled grace and warns all others to do the same. We quickly see that Hamlet would himself have made a superb actor, perhaps a fine director (his play to expose Claudius, ''The Mousetrap,'' is a singular success), maybe even a playwright of note. But all this is foreclosed, first by his exalted birth, then by the imperatives of revenge. Yorick would have ushered Hamlet down the road not taken, a road on which he might have found some measure of happiness. Hamlet gets Yorick; Lear gets his Fool; Olivia, Feste; Rosalind, Touchstone; Prince Hal gets Falstaff, who is a fool, and much more than a fool. In Shakespeare, to have a fool attending on you is generally a mark of distinction. It means that you've retained some flexibility, can learn things, might change; it means that you're not quite past hope, even if the path of instruction will be singularly arduous. To be assigned a fool in Shakespeare is often a sign that one is, potentially, wise. If we were to celebrate April Fools' Day in Shakespearean fashion rather than our own (There's a rip in your pants! Your fly's undone!), it would be quite a different day. On Shakespeare's Fools' Day, we'd test our capacity to hear the truth, in slant, peculiar and painful forms, and to use it to take a few steps in the general direction of freedom. The day would be a trying, exhilarating, perplexing and sometimes joyous affair, something, in fact, like what the intense reading of Shakespeare can be. We'd look forward to it -- and fear it -- all year long. Shakespeare's Clowns and Fools INTRODUCTION Appearing in most of Shakespeare's dramas, the clown or fool figure remains one of the most intriguing stage characters in the Shakespearean oeuvre and has frequently captured the interest of contemporary critics and modern audiences. Taking many forms, Shakespearean fools may be generally divided into two categories: the clown, a general term that was originally intended to designate a rustic or otherwise uneducated individual whose dramatic purpose was to evoke laughter with his ignorance; and the courtly fool or jester, in whom wit and pointed satire accompany low comedy. The dramatic sources of Shakespeare's simple-minded clowns are at least as old as classical antiquity. In the plays themselves, such figures as Bottom of A Midsummer Night's Dream and Dogberry of Much Ado About Nothing are typically classified as clowns, their principal function being to arouse the mirth of audiences. The history of the courtly fool or jester in England is somewhat briefer, with these fools making early appearances in the courts of medieval aristocracy during the twelfth century. By the time of Queen Elizabeth's reign, courtly fools were a common feature of English society, and were seen as one of two types: natural or artificial. The former could include misshapen or mentally-deficient individuals, or those afflicted with dwarfism. Such fools were often considered pets—though generally dearly loved by their masters—and appear infrequently in Shakespeare's writing. The artificial fool, in contrast, was possessed of a verbal wit and talent for intellectual repartee. Into this category critics place Shakespeare's intellectual or "wise-fools," notably Touchstone of As You Like It, Feste of Twelfth Night, and King Lear's unnamed Fool. Critical analysis of Shakespearean clowns and fools has largely explored the thematic function of these peculiar individuals. Many commentators have observed the satirical potential of the fool. Considered an outcast to a degree, the fool was frequently given reign to comment on society and the actions of his social betters; thus, some Shakespearean fools demonstrate a subversive potential. They may present a radically different worldview than those held by the majority of a play's characters, as critic Roger Ellis (1968) has observed. Likewise, such figures can be construed as disrupting the traditional order of society and the meaning of conventional language, as Roberta Mullini (1985) has argued. As for so-called clowns—including the simple "mechanicals" of A Midsummer Night's Dream, Trinculo of The Tempest, and Launcelot Gobbo of The Merchant of Venice—most are thought to parody the actions of other characters in the main plots of their respective plays and to provide low humour for the entertainment of groundlings. Several critics, however, have acknowledged the deeper, thematic functions of Shakespeare's clowns, some of whom are said to possess a degree of wisdom within their apparent ignorance. Other topics of critical inquiry concerning fools are varied. Several scholars have studied the significance of certain Elizabethan actors who were thought to have initially enacted the roles Shakespeare wrote. Preeminent among these is the comedic actor Robert Armin, for whom several critics have suggested Shakespeare created the witty, even philosophical, fool roles of Feste, Touchstone, and Lear's Fool. Still other critics have focused on Shakespeare's less easily categorized clowns. Walter Kaiser (1963) has examined Falstaff's multifaceted function in the Henriad, which he has argued bears similarities to those of Shakespeare's other "wise fools." William Willeford (1969) has focused on the darker side of folly by exploring the title character of Hamlet as a unique form of the Shakespearean fool. Additionally, Catherine I. Cox (1992) has investigated Shakespeare's characteristic blending of comedy and tragedy through the use of clowns and other purveyors of laughter in his tragic plays. ------ The Shakespearian fool (or Shakespearean fool) is a recurring character type in the works of William Shakespeare. 'The Fool… the uncanniest character in Shakespeare… humanizes Lear, and makes the dread king accessible to us.' Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The invention of the human Shakespearean fools are usually clever peasants or commoners that use their wits to outdo people of higher social standing. In this sense, they are very similar to the real fools, clowns, and jesters of the time, but their characteristics are greatly heightened for theatrical effect. They are largely heterogeneous. [1] The "groundlings" (theater-goers that were too poor to pay for seats and thus stood in the front by the stage) that frequented the Globe Theater were most likely particularly drawn to these Shakespearian fools or clowns. However they were also favoured by the nobility. Most notably, Queen Elizabeth I was a great admirer of the popular clown, Richard Tarlton. For the Bard himself, however, actor Robert Armin may have proved vital to the cultivation of his fools.[2] The Changing Trope of the Fool The fool was not a new character on stage. Indeed, a tradition of jesters had long prevailed in aristocratic courts. The jester, however, was a dynamic and changing part of royal entertainment. Shakespeare both borrowed from the new motif of the jester and contributed to its rethinking. Whereas the jester of old often regaled his audience with forms of clowning--tumbling, juggling, stumbling, and the like--Shakespeare's fool, in sync with Shakespeare's revolutionary ideas about theatre, began to depart from a simple way of representation. Like other characters, the fool began to speak outside of the narrow confines of exemplary morality, to address themes of love, psychic turmoil, and all of the innumerable themes that arise in Shakespeare, and indeed, modern theater. Perhaps central to the Bard's redrawing of the fool was the actor Robert Armin: ...Shakespeare created a whole series of domestic fools for [Armin]. [His] greatest roles, Touchstone in "As You Like It,"(1599), Feste in "Twelfth Night,"(1600), and (the) fool in "King Lear,"(1605); helped Shakespeare resolve the tension between thematic material and the traditional entertainment role of the fool. Armin became a counter-point to the themes of the play and the power relationships between the theatre and the role of the fool--he manipulates the extra dimension between play and reality to interact with the audience all the while using the themes of the play as his source material. Shakespeare began to write well-developed sub-plots expressly for Armin's talents. A balance between the order of the play and the carnevalized inversion factor of festive energy was achieved. Armin was a major intellectual influence on Shakespeare's fools. He was attuned to the intellectual tradition of the Renaissance fool yet intellectual enough to understand the power of the medieval tradition. Armin's fool is a stage presence rather than a solo artist. His major skills were mime and mimicry; even his improvisational material had to be reworked and rehearsed. His greatest asset was as a foil to the other stage actors. Armin offered the audience an idiosyncratic response to the idiosyncrasies of each spectator.[3] Dramatic function 'That, of course, is the great secret of the successful fool - that he is no fool at all.' Isaac Asimov, Guide to Shakespeare.[4] Some have argued that the clowning in Shakespeare's plays may have been intended as "an emotional vacation from the more serious business of the main action"[5]. Clowning scenes in Shakespeare's tragedies mostly appear straight after a truly horrific scene: The Gravediggers in Hamlet after Ophelia's suicide; The Porter in Macbeth just after the murder of the King; and as Cleopatra prepares herself for death in Antony and Cleopatra. Nevertheless, it is argued that Shakespeare's clowning goes beyond just 'comic relief', instead making the horrific or deeply complex scenes more understandable and "true to the realities of living, then and now"[6] by shifting the focus from the fictional world to the audience's reality and thereby conveying "more effectively the theme of the dramas"[7]. Bottom in A Midsummer Night's Dream Dogberry in Much Ado About Nothing Touchstone in As You Like It The Fool in King Lear Trinculo in The Tempest Costard in Love's Labours Lost Feste in Twelfth Night Launcelot Gobbo in The Merchant of Venice Lavache in All's Well That Ends Well Yorick in Hamlet A Fool in Timon of Athens Puck in A Midsummer Night's Dream Thersites in Troilus and Cressida Clown in Othello Dromio of Syracuse and Dromio of Ephesus in The Comedy of Errors Speed in Two Gentlemen of Verona Launce in Two Gentlemen of Verona The Gravediggers in Hamlet Citizen in Julius Caesar Pompey in Measure for Measure Clown in The Winter's Tale Grumio in The Taming of the Shrew Fools described Trinculo Trinculo is considered to be a jester, but as he is only seen with the Stephano and Caliban, he does not have the stage time to act out the qualifications of a traditional fool. At the end of the play, however, it is revealed that he works for both Stephano and the King of Naples. He is a domestic buffoon, and is outfitted accordingly. Launce and Speed Speed is a clever and witty servant, while Launce is simple and pastoral. There is no mention of specific dress, or any indications of the two being a domestic fool or jester. Feste Feste is a hired and domestic fool for Olivia. He is referred to as "an allowed fool," "a set fool," and "the jester, that the Lady Olivia's father took much delight in." Feste claims that he wears "not motley" in his brain, so even though he dresses the part of the fool, he is not an idiot, and can see through the other characters. There is no other mention of his dress, other than what can be deduced from this quote. Pompey - Measure for Measure While this clown is the employee of a brothel, he can still be considered a domestic fool. Costard This clown is referred to as a "fool" in Act V, scene ii, but the word in this context simply refers to a silly man. He is not simple enough to be considered a natural fool, and not witty enough to be considered an artificial one. He is rather just a man from the country. Launcelot Gobbo Nowhere in the play does Gobbo do anything that qualifies him as an official fool or jester. Still, he is considered as such, perhaps because he is called a "patch" and a fool. It is possible that these terms refer rather to the idea of the clown. Either way, Gobbo is proof that Shakespeare did not necessarily constantly discriminate in his qualifications of clowns, fools, and jesters. Touchstone Touchstone is a domestic fool belonging to the duke's brother Frederick, and is one of the witty (or "allowed") fools. Accordingly, he is often threatened with a whip, a method of punishment often used on people of this category. Lavache He is a domestic fool, similar to Touchstone. Clown - The Winter's Tale He is simply a country booby. The Fool - King Lear The Royal Shakespeare Company writes of the Fool: There is no contemporary parallel for the role of Fool in the court of kings. As Shakespeare conceives it, the Fool is a servant and subject to punishment ('Take heed, sirrah - the whip ' 1:4:109) and yet Lear's relationship with his fool is one of friendship and dependency. The Fool acts as a commentator on events and is one of the characters (Kent being the other) who is fearless in speaking the truth. The Fool provides wit in this bleak play and unlike some of Shakespeare's clowns who seem unfunny to us today because their topical jokes no longer make sense, the Fool in King Lear ridicules Lear's actions and situation in such a way that audiences understand the point of his jokes. His 'mental eye' is the most acute in the beginning of the play: he sees Lear's daughters for what they are and has the foresight to see that Lear's decision will prove disastrous.[8] Writes Jan Cott, in Shakespeare Our Contemporary, The Fool does not follow any ideology. He rejects all appearances, of law, justice, moral order. He sees brute force, cruelty and lust. He has no illusions and does not seek consolation in the existence of natural or supernatural order, which provides for the punishment of evil and the reward of good. Lear, insisting on his fictitious majesty, seems ridiculous to him. All the more ridiculous because he does not see how ridiculous he is. But the Fool does not desert his ridiculous, degraded king, and accompanies him on his way to madness. The Fool knows that the only true madness is to recognize this world as rational. Costumes “Motley is the only wear.” --Shakespeare: As You Like It, ii. 7. The costumes worn by Shakespearean fools were fairly standardized at the Globe Theatre. The actor wore a ragged or patchwork coat. There were often bells along the skirt and on the elbows. They wore closed breeches with tights, with each leg a different color. A monk-like hood, covering the entire head was positioned as a cape, covering the shoulders and part of the chest. This hood was decorated with animal body parts, such as donkey's ears or the neck and head of a rooster. The animal theme was continued in the crest worn as well. The actor had props. Usually he carried a short stick decorated with the doll head of a fool or puppet on the end. This was an official bauble or scepter, which had a pouch filled with air, sand, or peas attached as well. He wore a long petticoat of different colors, made of expensive materials such as velvet trimmed with yellow. This section, which contains notes from the director Bill Alexander's notebooks, puts the Fool in an historical context and offers information about King James VI/I's fool, Archie Armstrong. There is also a personal view, by Joy Leslie Gibson, of the relationship between Lear and his Fool in nine productions of the play. KING LEAR: Dost thou call me fool, boy' FOOL: All thy other titles thou hast given away; that thou wast born with. [1.4.146-8] Oliver Ford Davies played King Lear in Jonathan Kent's production at the Almeida in 1998 and recorded many of the journeys he made, in rehearsal and performance in his book, Playing Lear The Fool is the first person, indeed the only person in the play, to criticise Lear for abdicating and dividing the kingdom. Lear hears him out, seems to join in the fun, and threatens him with the whip. Is this the tempo of their relationship' The profession of the jester is ambiguous and abounds in internal contradictions, arising out of the discrepancy between profession and philosophy. The profession of a jester, like that of an intellectual, consists in providing entertainment. His philosophy demands of him that he tell the truth and abolish myths. The Fool in King Lear does not even have a name, he is just a Fool, pure Fool. But he is the first fool to be aware of the fool's position: FOOL: I marvel what kin thou and thy daughters are. They'll have me whipped for speaking true; thou'lt have me whipped for lying; and sometimes I am whipped for holding my peace. I had rather be any kind o'thing than a fool. And yet I would not be thee, nuncle. Thou has pared thy wit o'both sides and left nothing in the middle. [1.4.178-184] In ancient times courts employed fools and by the Middle Ages the jester was a familiar figure. In Renaissance times, aristocratic households in Britain employed licensed fools or jesters, who sometimes dressed as other servants were dressed, but generally wore a motley (i.e. parti-coloured) coat, hood with ass's ears or a red-flannel coxcomb and bells. Regarded as pets or mascots, they served not simply to amuse but to criticise their master or mistress and their guests. Queen Elizabeth (reigned 1558-1603) is said to have rebuked one of her fools for being insufficiently severe with her. Excessive behaviour, however, could lead to a fool being whipped, as Lear threatens to whip his fool. Distinction was made between fools and clowns, or country bumpkins. The fool's status was one of privilege within a royal or noble household. His folly could be regarded as the raving of a madman but was often deemed to be divinely inspired. The 'natural' fool was touched by God. Much to Gonerill's annoyance, Lear's 'all-licensed' Fool enjoys a privileged status. His characteristic idiom suggests he is a 'natural' fool, not an artificial one, though his perceptiveness and wit show that he is far from being an idiot, however 'touched' he might be. The status of court fool was greatly elevated under the early Stuart kings. Archie Armstrong was official fool both to King James VI/I and his son, King Charles I. To King James, Armstrong was, in a sense, a gentleman groom of the chambers as well as a source of amusement. He had the ear of the king and part of his income derived from bribes from those wishing to petition the king. Despite King James' well known dislike of tobacco, Archie was granted a royal patent for the manufacture of tobacco pipes. He was also made a free citizen of Aberdeen. The Fool does not follow any ideology. He rejects all appearances, of law, justice, moral order. He sees brute force, cruelty and lust. He has no illusions and does not seek consolation in the existence of natural or supernatural order, which provides for the punishment of evil and the reward of good. Lear, insisting on his fictitious majesty, seems ridiculous to him. All the more ridiculous because he does not see how ridiculous he is. But the Fool does not desert his ridiculous, degraded king, and accompanies him on his way to madness. The Fool knows that the only true madness is to recognize this world as rational. Joy Leslie Gibson writes about Lear's Relationship with the Fool, with particularly reference to 9 productions of King Lear seen over a 60-year period: In Elizabethan and Jacobean Fools were primarily servants, yet, in many cases, they were indulged. At the beginning of King Lear (Act 1 scene 4 line 95 Quarto Scene 4;94) Lear calls the Fool 'my pretty knave', yet also threatens him with a beating (1.4.109 Quarto 106). Fools were allowed some license when 'entertaining' their employers. The Fool's criticism of Lear's lack of foresight is particularly trenchant: When thou clovest thy crown i'th'middle and gavest away both parts, thou borest thy ass o'th'back o'er the dirt. Thou hadst little wit in thy bald crown when thou gavest the golden one away (1.4.142: Quarto Scene 4.153) As the play progresses, the Fool becomes less forthright and as circumstances worsen, more and more frail. In Act 1 scene 4 it is said that he is pining for Cordelia and in doing so, pricks Lear's conscience. In the storm scene the Fool speaks with a great deal of common-sense. While Lear pours out great rhetoric and becomes the storm, the Fool is practical: O nuncle, court holy water in a dry house is better than this rain water out o'door. Good nuncle, in; ask thy daughters' blessing. Here's a night pities neither wise men nor fools (3:2:10 Quarto Scene 9:10). In the hovel the Fool rallies a little, though he has not much to say. His final words in the Folio 'And I'll go to bed at noon' suggest that the Fool is worn out and has reached the end (NB the line does not appear in the Quarto). The Fool disappears from the play in Act 3 scene 6. Some critics think that this is because, in the original production, a boy player acted both Cordelia and the Fool, but others point out that Richard Armin had joined Shakespeare's company, the King's Men, after Will Kemp had left it and as his 'line' was pathetic fools. Armin also played Feste (in Twelfth Night). There is no contemporary parallel for the role of Fool in the court of kings. As Shakespeare conceives it, the Fool is a servant and subject to punishment ('Take heed, sirrah - the whip ' 1:4:109) and yet Lear's relationship with his fool is one of friendship and dependency. The Fool acts as a commentator on events and is one of the characters (Kent being the other) who is fearless in speaking the truth. The Fool provides wit in this bleak play and unlike some of Shakespeare's clowns who seem unfunny to us today because their topical jokes no longer make sense, the Fool in King Lear ridicules Lear's actions and situation in such a way that audiences understand the point of his jokes. His 'mental eye' is the most acute in the beginning of the play: he sees Lear's daughters for what they are and has the foresight to see that Lear's decision will prove disastrous. Different actors have given their own readings of this relationship. There follows a brief survey of the relationship in 9 productions of King Lear: In the 1940s a generation of people were greatly in debt to the actor-manager Donald Wolfit (1902-68) who ceaselessly toured the country with productions of Shakespeare's plays. King Lear was his greatest part which well-suited his sonorous voice and declamatory delivery. His Fool was Richard Goolden, whose plaintiff voice gave great pathos to the part. Their relationship was one of friendship: there was an especially tender moment when, after the cursing of Gonerill, Lear left the stage leaning on the Fool for comfort. Peter Yate's film of Ronald Harwood's play The Dresser is the story of Wolfit (Albert Finney) and his relationship with his dresser (Tom Courtney) during a performance of King Lear in a provincial theatre during WW2. The ageing actor dies peacefully in his dressing room shortly after Lear has died on stage. Alec Guinness played the Fool to Laurence Olivier's Lear in 1946. Kenneth Tynan talked of Guinness's 'lances of insolence' and wrote I took most pleasure in Alec Guinness' vindictive Fool: he played the pathos of the part down to extinction. (He that Plays the King: p.59) Paul Scofield, in Peter Brook's stage production [RSC 1962] played a stern, vigorous Lear, with Alec McCowen as his wry, acerbic Fool. Goolden, Guinness and McCowen all wore the traditional Jester's costume, pied, with a coxcomb hat. This tradition was broken by Michael Williams, who played the role twice, first with Eric Porter as Lear [RSC 1968]. Writing of this time he said he saw the Fool as Something of the monkey, clinging to Lear. I went to the Zoo to study monkeys. There I saw Alec McCowen who revealed that he had modelled his Fool on a red monkey...I chose a different one (p. 84 Flashback, A Pictorial History 1879-1979, One hundred years of Stratford-Upon-Avon and the Royal Shakespeare Company by Micheline Steinberg, RSC Publications 1985) Williams play the part again when Donald Sinden played Lear [RSC 1970]. Set in the 19th century, this time Williams' Fool was a very old, hard-bitten music-hall comedian. This idea of a comedian was one also used by Antony Sher, when Michael Gambon played Lear in Adrian Noble's production [RSC 1982]. Sher wore a white face, a red nose, loud suit and size 20 boots: he was 'a Wisdom-Hancock-Laurel pot pourri' speaking 'the voice of bitter truth' (Shropshire Star). Writing in The Year of the King, Sher says that what made the Fool fascinating to him was that the unintelligible jokes added to the nightmare of the madness. There was a scene in which Lear played a ventriloquist and the Fool the dummy and a Music Hall double act which emphasised the Fool as Lear's alter ego. In this production, Lear killed the Fool in his madness. A critic in the Shropshire Star wrote, 'It may seem contrived but never before have I noticed so dramatically the sudden absence of the Fool. Did he ever exist but in Lear's mind'' In 1990 John Wood played the King [RSC, director Nicholas Hytner] and the part of the Fool was played by a woman, the Scottish actor Linda Kerr Scott. Macready had used a woman for the part in the nineteenth century. In Shakespeare's day, though, all parts would have been played by boys or men. Michael Billington wrote that Kerr Scott thought that she was reminiscent of a ventriloquist's dummy and that she lost the sense that the Fool is both 'Lear's external critic and inner conscience'. When Robert Stephens played Lear in 1993 the play was set in the eighteenth century and the Fool was played by Ian Hughes as a witty, urbane court gentleman, whose comments were treated with respect. Charles Spencer wrote 'Lear's tender relationship with his Fool (a lovely, sad-faced performance from Ian Hughes) is beautifully drawn.' Another critic wrote 'I found Ian Hughes' interpretation of the Fool particularly interesting: he is no peripheral figure, rather he is the voice of reason and sanity… an image of genuine hope'. Six years later the Japanese Director, Yukio Ninagawa direct the play with Nigel Hawthorne as Lear [RSC 1999]. The cast were all English with the exception of Hiroyuki Sanada who played the Fool. It was a distracting choice, for although Sanada, with his clown face and skilful acrobatics, gave an effective performance it was out of key with Hawthorne's reserved king. Richard Chilvers wrote 'he rarely engaged with Lear and the jokes were lost in the telling.'