Ethical comicality and the Fool: an essay on King Lear

Abstract

Abstract William Shakespeare’s King Lear abounds with features both tragic and bitter. It is, as suggested by many critics, one of the most painful demonstrations of the human predicament in Shakespeare’s oeuvre. But with the introduction of the Fool, Shakespeare artistically threads through the tragic elements of his work a delicate strand of comedy. The Fool is described by some Shakespeare scholars as a bitter character and by some as a mysterious and enigmatic one. This paper does not aim to subvert or polemicize such readings, but attempts to look at the Fool from an ethical perspective: he will turn out to be a comically responsible and ethical figure Shakespeare employs to galvanize his audience and enforce the ethical concerns behind this tragedy. The main focus of this paper, then, is to study the bitterly comic, but responsible, role of the Fool in King Lear in the light of the ethical philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas. It is through Levinas’s account of “the ethical” which is prior to “the ontological” (e.g. language) that this study tries to analyze features of irony and comicality embedded in this tragedy with regard to the Fool.