Fool Character Analysis

As Lear prepares to depart from Goneril’s palace, he is chastised by his Fool (the jester who attends to him, offering entertainment and often wisdom) for his irrational actions. The Fool claims that Lear has lost his mind.

The Fool’s point is not direct, here, but rather conveyed through an odd image. That Lear has “pared thy wit o’ both sides” means that he has sliced or cut off his intelligence—so the Fool imagines “wit” as a physical object that can be cut. Symbolically, the “both sides” could represent Goneril and Regan, to whom Lear has apportioned each half of his estate. For in doing so, he has indeed “left nothing in the middle”: he maintains no power or land of his own, and thus his action could be seen as the result of no “wit.”

This passage also plays with the idea of madness and role-playing in the tragedy. Though the Fool is supposed to be a jesting figure, he speaks here with remarkable insight. (That his words are lighthearted but his content weighty is an another example of how Shakespeare explores the difference between language and meaning.) Indeed, one would never expect him to be able to criticize a king in this way—so Shakespeare seems to have turned the Fool into a ruler at the very moment the King becomes a Fool. Thus even amidst the strict social roles that predominate the text, interactions like this speak to a fluidity in the identities of all the play's characters.