t 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 plainly as possible) depends largely on the presence of
three characters, and on the affinities and contrasts between them