Kings and Fools in Three Shakespearean Tragedies

Kings and Fools in Three Shakespearean Tragedies. The word “fool” in English has several meanings that are artfully exploited by Shakespeare in his plays. Whether we refer to the fool as a “court jester,” or a “madman”, “someone who lost his reason” or “a simple-minded, ignorant man, easily tricked by others,” the word gives rise to ambiguities which point to identitary crises, confusions between appearance and reality, while also revealing the conscience problems of the characters, their mistakes and the difficulty with which they position themselves into their worlds. Playing on the duality center and margin, represented here by the symbolic positions King and Fool, the three tragedies we envisaged for analysis, namely Hamlet, King Lear and Macbeth, dwell on the construction of hierarchy, social stability, authority and power. The tragic heroes, all central in their worlds, gradually discover the meaning of marginalization, either provoked by others or by themselves, and acquire a different understanding of their genuine place in the world. The paper, therefore, will analyze the instances of the uses of the word “fool” in these tragedies in connection to the heroes’ reflections on human condition, their life and their place in the world. We will also parallel these uses to the Romanian translations that capture, sometimes only partially, the complexities of the word.