Literary Lives
A Silent Fool
Cordelia’s Subversive Silence in King Lear
Not long before her death at the age of thirty-four, Simone Weil, in one of her last letters, reflected on a production of King Lear she had recently attended:
There is a class of people in this world who have fallen into the lowest degree of humiliation, far below beggary, and who are deprived not only of all social consideration, but also, in everybody’s opinion, of the specific human dignity, reason itself—and these are the only people who, in fact, are able to tell the truth: All the others lie.
She tells us that this class of people are “fools.” No one listens to them because they have “no academic titles or episcopal dignities.” In drama we often relegate the spoken truth of fools to the satirical and ironic, their silent truth to the regrettable and naïve.
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