I cry you mercy. I took you for a joint-stool.
In other words, there is still an element of theatre in Lear's behavior, as a child will talk to inanimate objects as if they were people, while knowing that, in reality, they are not. But when this chance has passed and Lear has descended into madness past recall, there is nothing for the fool to represent and he must disappear.
Frequendy the fool makes play with the words "knave" and "fool." A knave is one who disobeys the imperatives of conscience; a fool is one who cannot hear or understand them. Though the cognitive ego is, morally, a "fool" because conscience speaks not to it but to the volitional ego, yet the imperative of duty can never be in contradiction to the actual facts of the situation, as the imperative of passion can be and frequently is. The Socratic doctrine that to know the good is to will it, that sin is ignorance, is valid if by knowing one means listening to what one knows, and by ignorance, willful ignorance. If that is what one means, then, though not all fools are knaves, all knaves are fools.
lear: Dost thou call me fool, boy?
fool: All thy other tides thou hast given away; that
thou wast born with. kent: This is not altogether fool, my lord. fooclass="underline" No, faith, lords and great men will not let me. If I had a monopoly on't; they would have part of it.
Ideally, in a stage production, Lear and the fool should be of the same physical type; they should both be athletic meso- morphs. The difference should be in their respective sizes. Lear should be as huge as possible, the fool as tiny.
viii
body: O -who shall me deliver whole
From bonds of this tyrannic soul? Which, stretcht upright, impales me so That mine own precipice I go. . . .
souclass="underline" What Magick could me thus confine Within another's grief to pine? Where whatsoever it complain, 1 feel, that cannot feel, the pain . . .
andrew majrvell
valentine: Belike, boy, then you are in love; for last morning you could not see to wipe my shoes.
speed: True sir; I was in love with my bed. I thank you, you swinged me for my love, which makes me the bolder to chide you for yours.
—shakespeare, Two Gentlemen of Verona
The Tempest, Shakespeare's last play, is a disquieting work. Like the other three comedies of his late period, Pericles, Cym- beline and The Winter's Tale, it is concerned with a wrong done, repentance, penance and reconciliation; but, whereas the others all end in a blaze of forgiveness and love—"Pardon's the word to all"—in The Tempest both the repentance of the guilty and the pardon of the injured seem more formal than real. Of the former, Alonso is the only one who seems genuinely sorry; the repentance of the rest, both the courdy characters, Antonio and Sebastian, and the low, Trinculo and Stephano, is more the prudent promise of the punished and frightened, "I won't do it again. It doesn't pay," than any change of heart: and Prospero's forgiving is more the contemptuous pardon of a man who knows that he has his enemies completely at his mercy than a heartfelt reconciliation. His attitude to all of them is expressed in his final words to Caliban:
as you look To have my pardon trim it handsomely.
One must admire Prospero because of his talents and his strength; one cannot possibly like him. He has the coldness of someone who has come to the conclusion that human nature is not worth much, that human relations are, at their best, pretty sorry affairs. Even towards the innocent young lovers, Ferdinand and Miranda, and their "brave new world," his attitude is one of mistrust so that he has to preach them a sermon on the dangers of anticipating their marriage vows. One might excuse him if he included himself in his critical skepticism but he never does; it never occurs to him that he, too, might have erred and be in need of pardon. He says of Caliban:
born devil on whose nature Nurture can never stick, on whom my pains, Humanely taken, all, all lost, quite lost
but Shakespeare has written Caliban's part in such a way that, while we have to admit that Caliban is both brutal and corrupt, a "lying slave" who can be prevented from doing mischief only "by stripes not kindness," we cannot help feeling that Prospero is largely responsible for his corruption, and that, in the debate between them, Caliban has the best of the argument.
Before Prospero's arrival, Caliban had the island to himself, living there in a state of savage innocence. Prospero attempts to educate him, in return for which Caliban shows him all the qualities of the isle. The experiment is brought to a halt when Caliban tries to rape Miranda, and Prospero abandons any hope of educating him further. He does not, however, sever their relation and turn Caliban back to the forest; he changes
its nature and, instead of trying to treat Caliban as a son, makes him a slave whom he rules by fear. This relation is profitable to Prospero:
as it is
We cannot miss him. He does make our fire, Fetch in our wood, and serve us in offices That profit us
but it is hard to see what profit, material or spiritual, Caliban gets out of it. He has lost his savage freedom:
For I am all the subjects that you have Which first was mine own king
and he has lost his savage innocence:
You taught me language and my profit on't Is, I know how to curse
so that he is vulnerable to further corruption when he comes into contact with the civilized vices of Trinculo and Stephano. He is hardly to be blamed, then, if he regards the virtues of civilization with hatred as responsible for his condition:
Remember
First to possess his books, for without them He's but a sot, as I am.
As a biological organism Man is a natural creature subject to the necessities of nature; as a being with consciousness and will, he is at the same time a historical person with the freedom of the spirit. The Tempest seems to me a manichean work, not because it shows the relation of Nature to Spirit as one of conflict and hostility, which in fallen man it is, but because it puts the blame for this upon Nature and makes the Spirit innocent. Such a view is the exact opposite of the view expressed by Dante:
JLo naturale e sempre senza errore ma I'altro puote error per male ohhietto o per poco o per troppo di vigore.
(Purgatorio xvnj
The natural can never desire too much or too little because the natural good is the mean—too much and too little are both painful to its natural well-being. The natural, conforming to necessity, cannot imagine possibility. The closest it can come to a relation with the possible is as a vague dream; without Prospero, Ariel can only be known to Caliban as "sounds and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not." The animals cannot fall because the words of the tempter, "Ye shall be as gods," are in the future tense, and the animals have no future tense, for the future tense implies the possibility of doing something that has not been done before, and this they cannot imagine.