King lear why does the fool disappear

JavaScript seems to be disabled in your browser. For the best experience on our site, be sure to turn on Javascript in your browser. The Fool is Lear's own stand-up comedian, sure, but more interestingly, he's the only guy that Lear allows to criticize him. Remember, when Kent lips off, Lear boots him out of the kingdom and when Lear doesn't like what Cordelia has to say, Lear disowns her altogether.

As in many of Shakespeare's plays, the Fool is actually really smart—and the only person who tells it like it is. Compare Lear's Fool, for example, to Feste in Twelfth Night — neither one of them are afraid to call their misguided masters "foolish" and they both function as characters that provide a lot of social commentary. At the same time, the Fool is more than just a funny and brutally honest guy; he's also super-loyal.

But the Fool is also a big mystery: what happens to him? He disappears after Act 3, Scene 6, and nobody ever explains where he's gone. The only possible reference to the Fool after that is in the final scene, when King Lear says "And my poor fool is hanged" 5. This could mean a couple of things: 1 Lear might be referring to Cordelia with a pet name, "fool," since Cordelia has just been hanged by Edmund's goons.

Loyalty and bluntness Study focus: A positive figure? Most prefer to believe that the Fool serves a positive function when he criticises his master. So why does the Fool disappear? Some commentators suggest Jacobean audiences would not have been disconcerted by the disappearance of a character half way through the play. Other critics think that the Fool is dopped when he is no longer needed. Other critics suggest it would be inappropriate to have a comic character however dark his humour in the bleak final Acts of the play.

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