King Lear I.iv.172-179

I had rather be any kind o’ thing than a fool

[FOOL  Prithee, nuncle, keep a schoolmaster that can teach thy fool to lie. I would fain learn to lie.]

LEAR  An you lie, sirrah, we’ll have you whipped.

FOOL  I marvel what kin thou and thy daughters are. They’ll have me whipped for speaking true, thou’lt have me whipped for lying, and sometimes I am whipped for holding my peace. I had rather be any kind o’thing than a fool, and yet I would not be thee, nuncle.

Here we should note another dramatic tweak or sleight of hand on Shakespeare’s part. The Fool has been missing, at least for a few days. We have been waiting for him since Lear has first asked where he is. Since he was not present in the first scene his appearance in this scene, the scene when Lear reappears, makes us feel — without spelling it out to ourselves — that he’s been missing since Cordelia’s banishment — just as Lear has. This is a present perfect attitude: the Fool only comes into the play at the beginning of this scene, only becomes a character in the play’s world when he is first mentioned.

This is an idea that Shakespeare is explicit about — later in King Lear as I’ll argue, and in Hamlet as well. When Hamlet says his “died within’s two hours” and Ophelia corrects him: “Nay, ’tis twice two months, my lord,” Hamlet’s grim joke is that we’re about two hours into the performance of the play, and in that play the death of his father became a (fictional) fact two hours ago. Two hours ago it became a fictional fact that his father had been dead for about two months. This is a way of playing with time that Shakespeare loved, and which he sometimes draws attention to (as in Hamlet), sometimes doesn’t, but which he is always interested in. In King Lear the Fool becomes a fictional fact at the start of the scene.

But he comes into existence as someone who has been gone, and we, in the present, peg that newly established perfect to Cordelia’s exit, now (as I said) quite a while ago. Yes, Lear says that he has noticed that the Fool has much pined away, but that too has the effect of making us feel that the Fool is the presence of her absence: his pining away is what the absent Lear has noticed about the absent Fool, before they reenter.

But the background of this scene establishes — as background, not as plot — that Goneril’s gentleman has chided the Fool, and now that both Goneril and Regan will have the Fool whipped for speaking the truth. So both daughters have threatened him. This is our present sense of the backstory of their relationship to the Fool, a relationship that for the purposes of the play coincides with Cordelia’s banishment. But there is no backstory at all before that. As I said before Lear’s return is the beginning of the play’s creation of our sympathy for him, and perhaps a way to put this briefly is to say that it was Lear alone who stormed out of scene one, but a different Lear, different in having the Fool as his companion, who has returned now in scene four.

Lear wants the Fool to tell only the truth. The threat is also meant to be reassurance that he is licensed to tell the truth, that he need fear nothing if he does. But the Fool’s response suggests that isn’t so: if he tells the truth his daughters will have him whipped.

The line in which he tells us that is a funny one, and I remember laughing at it in high school: “I marvel what kin thou and they daughters are”. But because Lear on one side and his daughters on the other seem to define the space of conflict, there’s a deep truth to the joke.

And then we get one of the Fool’s most melancholy lines (and there are a lot of them): “I had rather be any kind o’ thing than a fool, and yet I would not be thee, nuncle.” He would rather be anything than a fool, anything other than the spirit of sorrow which he embodies. And that sorrow includes the sorrow of what has happened to Lear. The oppositions in the scene which also mean absolute kinship (whipped for lying, whipped for telling the truth) now means the absolute kinship between Lear and the Fool, the two things in the world that one would rather be anything else than.