Fool is a novel by American writer Christopher Moore, released on February 10, 2009.
The novel takes its premise from the plot of Shakespeare's play King Lear , narrated from the perspective of the character of the Fool, whose name is Pocket.
In the course of the novel are references to other Shakespeare plays, ranging from short quotations to whole characters—most notably the three witches from Macbeth. While the style of Fool is directed at an American audience, the author incorporates at times Shakespearean vocabulary, archaic syntax, and modern British slang, and obscure cultural terms relating to medieval life, which are explained in footnotes. In addition, Moore invents humorous British-style place-names for fictitious locations in the story.
This novel was followed by a sequel, The Serpent of Venice, released in 2014, which combines characters and plot elements from Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice and Othello , and Poe's The Cask of Amontillado , while keeping the perspective of Pocket. A second sequel, Shakespeare for Squirrels, places Pocket into a milieu based on Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream .
Plot
Pocket is the royal fool at the court of King Lear of Britain. To prevent Lear from marrying off his daughter Cordelia, a girl Pocket is especially fond of, he schemes with Edmund of Gloucester. Pocket advises the bastard (i.e., illegitimate) Edmund how to take the land of his legitimate brother Edgar, while Edmund is to prevent the marriage of Cordelia. Edmund somehow gets Lear to ask each of his three daughters – Goneril, Regan and Cordelia – how much they love him. While Goneril and Regan please the old king with their exaggerations, Cordelia enrages him with her famous laconic “I love thee, according to my bond.” Lear disinherits Cordelia and divides his kingdom between Goneril and Regan. Notwithstanding, the prince of France marries Cordelia and takes her with him.
Deprived of his adored Cordelia and angry with Lear because of the way Cordelia was treated, Pocket – advised by the ghost of a woman who turns out was not only his deceased lover but also the former queen of Lear and mother of Cordelia – starts his own vendetta: He encourages Goneril and Regan to strip Lear of his remaining power (especially his train of 100 knights, one of the conditions on which Lear passed the kingdom to his daughters) and works to drive the older sisters into war against each other. Lear finally realizes his error and goes temporarily mad. To estrange the sisters he makes both believe that they are in an affair with Edmund of Gloucester. While successful in this, Pocket fails to incite civil war, simply because Cordelia – now a veritable warrior queen – invades Britain with her army from France. Lear, and later on Pocket, end up in the dungeon of the castle now ruled by Edmund, now Earl of Gloucester.
The two elder sisters are in the same castle and ally against Cordelia, but poison each other out of jealousy nonetheless. Edmund confronts Lear and Pocket, and Pocket kills him with his throwing knives. Shortly after, Lear dies. Cordelia invades the castle and becomes queen of Britain. Pocket, who has been told by witches that he is the son of Lear’s brother, marries Cordelia and is made king.
King Lear is a tragedy written by William Shakespeare. It tells the tale of a king who bequeaths his power and land to two of his three daughters, after they declare their love for him in a fawning and obsequious manner. His third daughter gets nothing, because she will not flatter him as her sisters had done. When he feels he has been treated with disrespect by the two daughters who now have his wealth and power, he becomes furious to the point of madness. He eventually becomes tenderly reconciled to his third daughter, just before tragedy strikes her and then the king.
Leir was a legendary king of the Britons whose story was recounted by Geoffrey of Monmouth in his pseudohistorical 12th-century History of the Kings of Britain. According to Geoffrey's genealogy of the British dynasty, Leir's reign would have occurred around the 8th century BC, around the time of the founding of Rome. The story was modified and retold by William Shakespeare in his Jacobean tragedy King Lear.
Queen Cordelia was a legendary Queen of the Britons, as recounted by Geoffrey of Monmouth. She was the youngest daughter of Leir and the second ruling queen of pre-Roman Britain. There is no independent historical evidence for her existence.
A Thousand Acres is a 1991 novel by American author Jane Smiley. It won the 1992 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction in 1991 and was adapted to a 1997 film of the same name.
King Lear (1983) is a video production of William Shakespeare's 1606 play of the same name, directed by Michael Elliott. It was broadcast in 1983 in the UK and in 1984 in the US.
"The Foretelling" is the first episode of the BBC sitcom The Black Adder, the first series of the long-running comedy programme Blackadder. It marks Rowan Atkinson's début as the character Edmund Blackadder, and is the first appearance of the recurring characters Baldrick and Percy. The comedy actor Peter Cook guest stars as King Richard III.
Edmund or Edmond is a fictional character and the main antagonist in William Shakespeare's King Lear. He is the illegitimate son of the Earl of Gloucester, and the younger brother of Edgar, the Earl's legitimate son. Early on in the play, Edmund resolves to get rid of his brother, then his father, and become Earl in his own right. He later flirts with both Goneril and Regan and attempts to play them off against each other. His mother died during child birth.
The History of King Lear is an adaptation by Nahum Tate of William Shakespeare's King Lear. It first appeared in 1681, some seventy-five years after Shakespeare's version, and is believed to have replaced Shakespeare's version on the English stage in whole or in part until 1838.
King Lear is a 1971 British film adaptation of the Shakespeare play directed by Peter Brook and starring Paul Scofield. Filmed in stark black-and-white, the film was inspired by the absurdist theatre of playwrights such as Samuel Beckett and upon release was noted for its bleak tone and wintry atmosphere.
Women in Shakespeare is a topic within the especially general discussion of Shakespeare's dramatic and poetic works. Main characters such as Dark Lady of the sonnets have elicited a substantial amount of criticism, which received added impetus during the second-wave feminism of the 1960s. A considerable number of book-length studies and academic articles investigate the topic, and several moons of Uranus are named after women in Shakespeare.
King Lear is a 1971 Soviet drama film directed by Grigori Kozintsev, based on William Shakespeare's play King Lear. Dmitri Shostakovich composed the score.
Regan is a fictional character in William Shakespeare's tragic play King Lear, named after a king of the Britons recorded by the medieval scribe Geoffrey of Monmouth.
Cordelia is a fictional character in William Shakespeare's tragic play King Lear. Cordelia is the youngest of King Lear's three daughters, and his favourite. After her elderly father offers her the opportunity to profess her love to him in return for one third of the land in his kingdom, she refuses and is banished for the majority of the play.
Goneril is a character in William Shakespeare's tragic play King Lear (1605). She is the eldest of King Lear's three daughters. Along with her sister Regan, Goneril is considered a villain, obsessed with power and overthrowing her elderly father as ruler of the kingdom of Britain.
King Lear is a 1999 adaptation of William Shakespeare's play of the same name. The film stars Brian Blessed in the title role. Apart from Peter Brook's King Lear in 1971, it is the only other feature-length film adaptation to preserve Shakespeare's verse. Yvonne Griggs, in Shakespeare's King Lear: A close study of the relationship between text and film (2009), characterised it as "a very stilted costume drama".
King Lear is a 1953 live television adaptation of the Shakespeare play staged by Peter Brook and starring Orson Welles. Preserved on kinescope, it aired October 18, 1953, as part of the CBS television series Omnibus, hosted by Alistair Cooke. The cast includes Micheál Mac Liammóir and Alan Badel.
Kuningas Lear is an opera in two acts by Aulis Sallinen, with a libretto by the composer, based on the play by William Shakespeare and premiered in 2000; it was Sallinen's sixth opera.
King Lear is a 1916 silent film based on the 1606 play, directed by Ernest C. Warde and starring his father, the noted stage actor Frederick Warde. The film is one of a spate of Shakespearean films produced at the time to coincide with the 300th anniversary celebrations of William Shakespeare's death.
King Lear is a 2018 British-American television film directed by Richard Eyre. An adaptation of the play of the same name by William Shakespeare, cut to just 115 minutes, was broadcast on BBC Two on 28 May 2018. Starring Anthony Hopkins as the title character, the adaptation is set in an alternative universe, 21st-century, highly militarised London and depicts the tragedy that follows when the sovereign King Lear announces the end of his reign and the division of his kingdom among his three daughters. The adaptation was met with positive reviews, which commended its acting and many singled out Hopkins for his performance in the title role.
