Student Essay on The Fool in Shakespeare

The Fool in Shakespeare by William Shakespeare

Essay

With the term "fool" Shakespeare usually denotes a character who behaves in an unsense way, near to madness. His fools are called "artificials" because they live in the fictive world of the court and, through their comic speech, they struck the wide language of powerful persons. Because of their madness, they have the right to interrupt, imitate ecc. Usually, the fool opposes his mad truth to lies and appearances.

In "King Lear", the fool is a sort of mirror, who contributes to lead Lear to his awareness of madness. But, after this play, this figure disappears, maybe because Shakespeare has experienced that the "fool" has not power, his true vision of reality is not able to change the events.

So, after King Lear's madness, the fool disappears from the scene of this play and from Shakespeare's theatre, at all.