Fool by Christopher Moore

“ ‘Like looking down on a lubricious chess set, isn’t it? The king moves in tiny steps, with no direction, like a drunkard trying to avoid the archer’s bolt. The others work their strategies and wait for the old man to fall. He has no power, yet all power moves in his orbit and to his mad whim. Do you know that there’s no fool piece on the chessboard, Kent?’

‘Methinks the fool is the player, the mind above the moves,’” (Moore 184).

    Such is the game in Fool, a bawdy black comedy in which author Christopher Moore retells the story of King Lear from the point of view of his fool, Pocket, whose voice and mind bring outlandish yet insightful new dimensions to the classic tragedy. A long-standing resident in the royal household, Pocket is armed with an intimate and unique knowledge of every character’s deepest secrets and darkest deeds. Motivated by the banishment of his adored mistress Cordelia—and helped along by a prophesizing ghost and trio of witches— he uses this knowledge to become an instrument of revenge and war, mercilessly exposing them all as they truly are and orchestrating their familiar downward spirals of folly, madness, treachery, and death.

   At the most basic level, Moore’s novel shows a deep understanding and skillful redeployment of the basic plot, themes, and main characters of Shakespeare’s play. However, he clearly does not attempt present a clear or unwaveringly faithful retelling of the original, instead diverging in his use of language, in character development, and in the plot itself. Indeed, Pocket’s general narrative style, which, as Moore himself puts it, is a combination of, “linguistic vestiges of Elizabethan times, modern British slang, Cockney slang […] and [his] own innate American balderdash,” is riddled with a near-constant stream of expletives and tales of sexual encounters—a far cry from Shakespeare’s figurative language and iambic pentameter. This is at once one of the most shocking and illuminative divergences of the work, as the wholly uncensored nature of this language allows for an unexpected new level of transparency and depth, both of the characters and the scenes themselves (Moore 308). This becomes most apparent when this outrageous bawdiness is inserted directly into the, “original,” scenes and events—in with much of the original diction and is reproduced closely, albeit in a more modernized way—in the form of Pocket’s interjections, observances, or, in the most extreme cases, his alteration of the original conversations themselves. For example, Moore reproduces the iconic scene in which King Lear tells Regan and Goneril, “I gave you all,” in an exaggerated and revealing manner: “ ‘I gave you all!’ screeched Lear, waving a palsied claw at Regan,” to which she responds, “And you took your bloody time giving it, too, you senile old fuck,” (Shakespeare II.4.250) (Moore 201). Clearly, the extreme nature of this language both provides a comedic element to the scene and, more profoundly, adds a new dimension to both Lear’s feebleness and Regan’s heartlessness. In doing so, it gets to the heart of this thematic conflict, revealing the inner flaws and emotions of these characters in a very outright way.

   This kind of transparency is achieved more generally through Pocket’s illuminative histories and blunt, unambiguous judgments of everyone, which provide definitive and thorough character developments that we don’t see in the original text. First, the innocent characters are made even more clearly good. For example, Cordelia’s virtuosity and strength are strongly emphasized through Pocket’s descriptions of her innocent childhood, his comical observation that, “sweet thing that she is, her bark could frighten a mad badger,” and the fact that she does not die at the end of this version (Moore 10). Conversely, the bad are much worse: Regan and Goneril’s falseness and lust for power are much more explicitly portrayed, and there is an added dimension of blatant wickedness in their natures, revealed in the above example and when they say things like, “I have to defeat the fucking French, then I’ve got to kill Albany, Goneril, and I suppose I’ll have to find Father and have something heavy fall on him,” (Moore 270). Similarly, Edmund Gloucester plainly, “owns his darkness,” make him much more purely malicious (Moore 21).

   Then there is King Lear himself. Though he has his tender moments, there is no question that Pocket irrevocably believes—and proves—that he deserves to die. In fact, Pocket’s whole war plot is importantly motivated by a desire for revenge against this tyrannical monarch, whose black nature becomes most evident through his confession of his murderous and treacherous history, in which he admits:

   “My own father I imprisoned in the temple at Bath because he was a leper, and later had him killed. My own brother I did murder when I suspected him of bedding my queen. No trial, not even the honor of a challenge. I had him murdered in his sleep without proof. And my queen [Thalia] is dead, too, for my jealousy. My kingdom is the fruit of treachery, and treachery I have reaped,” (Moore 213)

   As shocking as these revelations already are, they merely skim of surface of King Lear’s sins in this version of the tale. Indeed, Moore constructs a whole new and revealing history to this end. Specifically, the king first forced his brother to rape Pocket’s mother, technically making Pocket—who was quickly orphaned and raised in a nunnery—Lear’s nephew. Further, Then, he jealously sent his queen to be the anchoress in the nunnery where Pocket was raised, and, “Through the cross in the wall, [Pocket] discovered a new universe—of Thalia’s body, of my body, of love, of passion, of escape—and it was a damn sight better than bloody chants and juggling” (Moore 70). However, they were soon caught together and the King ordered the Queen’s death. This completely new background story is integral to the present sequence of the events, since it is the ghost of this wronged queen that guides Pocket and instructs him on how to send the kingdom crumbling.

   Thus, in a totally new facet of the story, the archetypal wronged wife and wronged illegitimate son get their revenge against the tyrannical king. There is no pity for his fall from grace and descent into madness, a point that is emphasized even more poignantly by his death: in a final ironic moment, he is hugged to death by Pocket’s overly-excited apprentice, a Natural[1] named Drool who momentarily thinks that King Lear is his long-lost father.

   All of these exaggerated characterizations largely eliminate the openness to interpretation that Shakespeare leaves in the original text—accentuated by the universally tragic ending—in which all of these characters’ actions can be justified to some extent, instead passing judgment on all of them.

   It would be easy to think—with all of these ghosts, fools, and expletives—that Moore has taken excessive liberties and fundamentally misunderstood the nature of the tragedy that he is manipulating. However, this is completely untrue. Instead, such expansions and changes in the plot and characters display not only a profound understanding and creative engagement with the controversial main themes and issues of the play—among others, the folly of both political ambition and blind loyalty, the often treacherous and false nature of nobility, the issue of age and respect, and the destructive nature of war—but also a firm and persuasive stance on them, with many new conclusions and implications. Some of these diverge strongly from the source text. For example, he takes a strong stance on the notion that, “Small vices show through tattered clothes, when all is hidden beneath fur and fine robes,” or, in other words, that nobility can hide their vices and do as they please (Moore 258). In this world, this is simply not the case: the dark pasts and terrible inner natures of King Lear, Regan, Goneril, and Edmund[2] are inescapable, and they all get what they deserve by suffering slightly altered yet satisfying deaths. Conversely, in a refreshing change of events the uncorrupt and good—like Cordelia, Kent, and Edgar—escape equally tragic deaths and end prosperously. While such conclusions represent strong interpretations of the much more ambiguous original work—in which everyone dies in equally tragic ways— one can argue that they better satisfy the modern reader’s notions of justice and right.

   However, there are other conclusions, like Lear’s treacherous history and tragic fate, that seem to simply take many of Shakespeare’s points one step further. Indeed, at the core of this adaptation is the same idea—presented in an exaggerated fashion—that most of the actions and scheming of the play are simply madness and folly. Moore strongly forwards this notion by the very choice to filter everything through the eyes of the fool and make him the play’s puppet master. Further, statements like, “Methinks the art of war was made for fools, and fools for war,” solidify this idea, taking Shakespeare’s notion of the king becoming a fool one step further in a very thought-provoking way (Moore 139). Overall, Christopher Moore’s well-written, insightful, and unexpectedly thought-provoking novel irreverently voices everything left un-thought and unsaid in King Lear, leaving its main themes and characters exposed, abused, and delightfully judged.

Works Cited

Moore, Christopher. Fool. New York: HarperCollins books, 2009.

Shakespeare, William. King Lear . Ed. Stephen Orgel. The Penguin Group, 1999.

[1] “the ‘Natural’ jester was one who had some physical deformity or anomaly, a hunchback, a dwarf, a giant, Down’s syndrome, etc.,” (Moore 11).

[2] Also Cornwall and Oswald, but they weren’t discussed explicitly in larger analysis