Heeding Shakespeare’s insistence that we need to heed the wisdom of the fool, it shocked me that a recent production of “King Lear” at a local Christian university had excised most of the key speeches of Poor Tom, which enunciate radical Christian wisdom, thus eviscerating Shakespeare’s profound moral vision.

For the wisdom of this world is foolishness with God…. (1 Corinthians 3:19).

The above epigraph from Scripture serves splendidly as an epigraph to Shakespeare’s King Lear and as an epigram that encapsulates the play’s deepest meaning. The whole play plays paradoxically with the radical abyss that separates worldly wisdom from that other wisdom, the sanity of sanctity, which the world sees as madness. Since this is so, we should play particular attention to the “foolishness” of the play. What sort of foolishness is it? Is it the worldly wisdom which is foolishness to God? Or is it the folly of holy foolishness which turns its back on the ways of the world?

The axiomatic importance of such “foolishness” was emphasized by Shakespeare himself, in persona Hamlet, when the Prince of Denmark instructs the actor directing the play within the play, wherein Hamlet hopes to “catch the conscience of the King”, that the words of the fools and clowns should not be treated with any less seriousness than the words of the other characters:

And let those that play your clowns speak no more than is set down for them; for there be of them that will themselves laugh, to set on some quantity of barren spectators to laugh too, though in the meantime some necessary question of the play be then to be considered. That’s villainous, and shows a most pitiful ambition in the fool that uses it.

In other words, to put the matter bluntly, the words of the fools should be heeded because they might convey, under cover of whimsy, some of the deepest truths of the play.

Heeding Shakespeare’s insistence that we need to heed the wisdom of the fool, it shocked me that the production of King Lear at a local Christian university, which I attended this week, had excised some of the most important lines of the whole play, no doubt on the assumption that they were “foolish” and therefore unimportant and disposable. Ironically, the lines that were excised were not those of the worldly foolishness of the Fool but those of the holy foolishness of Poor Tom (Edgar in disguise).

It dawned on me that I was watching a bowdlerized version of the play when a crucial line uttered by the Earl of Kent was omitted. Having been put in the stocks unjustly, Kent declares that “[n]othing almost sees miracles but misery”. This omitted line serves as the cue for the entry of Edgar, another victim of gross injustice, who declares that “Edgar I nothing am”. It is Edgar, disguised as Poor Tom, who is the agent, the catalyst, of Lear’s conversion from the madness of his worldly pride to the embrace of the humble “nothingness” of poverty. As Kent’s cancelled words prophesy, it would take the experience of “misery” for Lear to understand the miracle of reality.

Scandalously, most of the key speeches of Poor Tom, which enunciate radical Christian wisdom, the “foolishness” of the Cross (1 Corinthians 1:18), are cancelled from the university’s production. By comparison, the Fool seems to speak with unquestioned authority, even though his wit is always at the service of the worldly wisdom which sees suffering as something to be avoided. Wisdom, for the Fool, is the attainment and retention of power and the pursuit of comfort. The Cross is to be avoided, not taken up and carried. His wit and wisdom, which dominates the first half of the play, is replaced in the play’s latter half by the other “fool”, the exiled and disguised Edgar in the guise of “Poor Tom”.

The difference between the two “fools” is that Poor Tom’s wisdom is spiritual, whereas the Fool’s is materialistic. This is why the Fool greets Poor Tom’s arrival with fear: “Come not in here, Nuncle, here’s a spirit. Help me, help me!” And again, the Fool repeats: “A spirit, a spirit. He says his name’s Poor Tom.” Edgar enters, reciting a line from a ballad about the Franciscans (Through the sharp hawthorn blows the cold wind), and bemoaning how the devil, “the foul fiend”, had led him “through fire and through flame”. The Franciscan connection is apposite and surely not accidental since St Francis was known as the jongleur de Dieu, God’s juggler, or a “fool for Christ”, who famously stripped himself naked in public and, “with presented nakedness”, witnessed to his “houseless poverty” as Lear will do.

None of the above is evident in the university’s production and almost all of Poor Tom’s radical Christianity is simply removed. Poor Tom’s lines from this pivotal scene of the play, which leads to Lear’s conversion, are cancelled by the director of the production. As a means of illustrating the manner in which the play was damaged and vandalized by the director’s bowdlerization, we’ll look at the parts of the play that were cut.

Poor Tom counters the pragmatic worldliness of the Fool’s “wisdom” with a clear allusion to the Ten Commandments followed by a candid confession of sin:

Fool: This cold night will turn us all to fools and madmen.

Edgar: Take heed o’ th’ foul fiend; obey thy parents; keep thy word’s justice; swear not; commit not with man’s sworn spouse; set not thy sweet heart on proud array. Tom’s a cold.

Lear: What hast thou been?

Edgar: A servingman, proud in heart and mind; that curled my hair, wore gloves in my cap; served the lust of my mistress’ heart, and did the act of darkness with her; swore as many oaths as I spake words, and broke them in the sweet face of heaven. One that slept in the contriving of lust, and waked to do it. Wine loved I deeply, dice dearly; and in woman out-paramoured the Turk. False of heart, light of ear, bloody of hand; hog in sloth, fox in stealth, wolf in greediness, dog in madness, lion in prey. Let not the creaking of shoes nor the rustling of silks betray thy poor heart to woman. Keep thy foot out of brothels, thy hand out of plackets, thy pen from lenders’ books, and defy the foul fiend. Still through the hawthorn blows the cold wind …     

“Tom’s a-cold”. Sanity, seen as madness by the worldly, is out in the cold, citing Scripture and confessing its sins, and gaining wisdom through suffering. (Meanwhile, insanity, “Lady the Brach”, is in the warmth of Gloucester’s castle, standing by the fire in the stench of its own iniquity, corrupted by the pursuit of comfort.)  Tom repeats the refrain from the Franciscan ballad and Lear, pricked with the hawthorn of conscience more than by the cold wind, emulates Poor Tom’s example, and the example of St Francis, by tearing off his clothes and proclaiming “off, off, you lendings!”

This pivotal moment of the play, the point on which the drama turns, the moment when Lear finally goes “mad”, is included in the university production, of course, but its psychological power and philosophical raison d’être is obfuscated by the absence of the wisdom that leads Lear to consider Poor Tom “this philosopher” or this “learnèd Theban”, the latter reminiscent of the famous Teiresias, the blind seer of Greek legend whose eyeless vision is far better than those with eyes to see. The parallel with Poor Tom, who sees more in the “blindness” of his “madness” than the world sees in its “sanity”, and who in his poverty is richer than kings, is clear enough. Or at least it would have been if the director of the university production had not thought the wisdom and moral vision of Poor Tom unimportant.

Following the “madness” of Lear’s religious conversion, which might be considered the baptizing of his conscience, the unbaptized wisdom of the Fool becomes mere foolishness. In consequence, the Fool fades from view (so much so that his disappearance is hardly noticed) and Edgar emerges in his place as Lear’s Christian conscience. “The Prince of Darkness is a gentleman,” Poor Tom proclaims; and, when Lear asks him, “What is your study?”, he answers: “How to prevent the fiend, and to kill vermin.” To Lear’s unbaptized conscience, these words would have appeared foolish. He would have seen the poverty-stricken surface of the naked down-and-out and not the depths of the down-and-out’s wisdom; he would have perceived that the vermin were fleas or lice, not sins and vice.

I was deeply disappointed that this profound moral vision was absent from the production I attended. If only the director had listened to Shakespeare’s admonishment “to let those that play your clowns speak no more than is set down for them”; if only he had realized that “some necessary question of the play” was “to be considered” in the words that the fool or “madman” speaks; if only he had not been so “villainous” in his tampering with Shakespeare’s deeply Christian brilliance. If only….

___________

The Imaginative Conservative applies the principle of appreciation to the discussion of culture and politics—we approach dialogue with magnanimity rather than with mere civility. Will you help us remain a refreshing oasis in the increasingly contentious arena of modern discourse? Please consider donating now.

The featured image is “King Lear and the Fool in the Storm” (c. 1851) by William Dyce, and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.