“This great stage of fools,” the term that the mad Lear uses in preaching to Gloucester and Edgar in the fields of Dover (4.6.183), describes the great earth where we are all born. It similarly implies the breadth of Robert H. Bell’s Shakespeare’s Great Stage of Fools. This engaging book examines a broad range of foolery, folly, and fooling throughout Shakespeare’s plays.
In his first chapter, Bell begins by justifying the scope of these terms, which are variously described by Homer, both Old and New Testaments, the dictionary, and, most memorably, Moria, or Folly, the narrator and main character in The Praise of Folly (1511) by Desiderius Erasmus. In her monologue, cited by Bell, Moria warns that “no one ‘should expect me . . . to explain my subject matter — myself — by a definition, much less to divide it into parts’” (2). She mocks logic as sophistry, wisdom as foolishness, and intent as, at best, fleeting. Bell tells of the first time he taught Shakespeare. A student asked the meaning of the “glass” held by the fool, and Bell wrongly answered, an hourglass. The correct answer, a mirror, symbolizes much of the matter of this book. In foolery, writes Bell, “opposites are (or should be) mutually implicated: inverted is the dynamic, ongoing exchange between opposites such as sublime and ridiculous, everything and nothing” (7). Bell develops his study with this premise.
Chapter 2 describes the artificial and natural fools in Shakespeare’s canon, evolving from the antics of Will Kempe through the more ironic commentary of the fools played by Robert Armin. Bell next devotes a full chapter to the Henriad, which further illluminates his discussion of mirrored characters, in this case Hal and the apotheosis of the fool, “Shakespeare’s foolosopher king, Falstaff,” at once “more profoundly sublime and spectacularly ridiculous than any other fool than perhaps Don Quixote” (35). He is a “shadow king . . . Rex Ludens” (35), the jest contained in majesty.
In “Fools for Love: Fooling and Feeling,” Bell tells of lovers mocking and making love in Much Ado About Nothing, As You Like It, and Twelfth Night; and in “Folly Is Anatomiz’d,” he explains the memorably obnoxious but ineffective “anatomists” — Mercutio, Malvolio, Jaques, and Thersites. Often twinned with traditional fools, these scourges deride, ridicule, and abuse with a fool’s license, but, as Moria explains, “‘without offense’” (79).
Especially insightful is Bell’s discussion in Chapter 6 of the pairings through folly of tragic heroes — Hamlet, Othello, and Lear — with their mirrored images. Speaking with equivocation and playing at madness, Hamlet “seesaws between divinity and degradation, the numinous and the ludicrous” (103). The folly he shares with Polonius and the trickery with Claudius evolve into an acceptance of duality within himself and within all things. The constant presence of paradox “mingles clowns and kings by embodying what cannot be reconciled” (110). Fooling yields not only binary irony but also the conflation of “two (or more) simultaneous references,” what Bell calls “verbal fission and fusion” (103).
The final chapter, “No Epilogue, I Pray You,” does indeed serve as an epilogue, first observing that Shakespearean epilogues are regularly presented by the character most engaged in folly, whether it be Puck, Rosalind, Feste, 2 Henry IV舁’s anonymous apologist, or, as this chapter explains, Prospero. Focusing on The Tempest, arguably an epilogue to the canon, Bell describes the mirrored dualities of Prospero with Caliban, Stephano, and Trinculo, and their intertwined malevolence and beneficence, innocence and shrewdness. The glass — not hour but looking — is again the symbol of what at once is and is not, eliminating and revealing dimensions of character.
Bell’s text merits praise for its style — precise, witty, figurative, and lyrical. It is notably absent the jargon of some literary criticism that may soon be moribund due to its limited audience and short shelf life. Bell’s writing, valuable to scholars, students, and all lovers of Shakespeare, will remain important both for its clarity and its well-substantiated, perceptive observations.
At the end of his book, Bell notes that Shakespeare has left us a “never ending” supply of folly (138). There is so much more fooling and folly to be examined! Thus readers may eagerly look forward to Bell’s continuing discoveries. For as folly may be found everywhere on Shakespeare’s great stage, it overflows on Lear’s.
