Fool

YOU CHEEKY GIT—AN AUTHOR’S NOTE

I know what you’re thinking: “Why, are you, an American comic novelist, thrashing around in the deep end of genius with the greatest artist of the English language who ever lived? What did you think you might possibly achieve besides peeing in the pool and drowning in your own shallow aspirations?”

You’re thinking: “Shakespeare writes a perfectly elegant tragedy that functions perfectly well and you can’t leave it in peace. You have to put your greasy hands all over it, befoul it with badger shagging and monkey spunk. I suppose we just can’t have nice things.”

Okay, first, good point. And second, I can’t believe you think like that…

But you’re right, I’ve made a dog’s breakfast of English history, geography, King Lear, and the English language in general. But in my defense—well—I don’t really have a defense, but let me give you an idea from whence one begins when trying to retell the story of King Lear.

If you work with the English language, particularly if you work with it as dog-fuckingly long as I have, you are going to run across Will’s work at nearly every turn. No matter what you have to say, it turns out that Will said it more elegantly, more succinctly, and more lyrically—and he probably did it in iambic pentameter—four hundred years ago. You can’t really do what Will did, but you can recognize the genius that he had to do it. But I didn’t begin Fool as a tribute to Shakespeare; I wrote it because of my great admiration for British comedy.

I began with the idea of writing a story about a fool, an English fool, because I like writing rascals. I fired the first shot across the bow several years ago, over breakfast in New York with my American editor, Jennifer Brehl, on a morning after I had taken entirely too much sleep medication. (New York kind of freaks me out. I always feel like I’m a sponge mopping the anxiety from New York’s brow.)

“Jen, I want to do a book about a fool. But I don’t know whether I should just do a generic fool, or Lear’s fool.”

“Oh, you have to do Lear’s fool,” she said.

“Lear’s fool it is, then,” said I, as if that entailed no more effort than saying it.

Then she slowly melted in her chair and was replaced by a hookah-smoking caterpillar that said nothing but, “Wah, wah, wah, wah, wah,” but did pay for breakfast. I’ve blacked out the rest of the morning. (Business traveler’s tip: If you’re still not asleep after a second sleeping pill, DO NOT take a third.)

So into the deep end I dove, spending nearly two years immersed in Shakespeare’s work: performed live, in written form, and on DVD. I must have watched thirty different performances of King Lear, and frankly, about halfway into my research, after listening to a dozen different Lears rage at the storm and lament what complete nitwits they had been, I wanted to leap onstage and kill the old man myself. For while I respect and admire the talent and stamina it takes for an actor to play Lear, as well as the eloquence of the speeches, a person can take only so much whining before he wants to sign up for the Committee to Make Elder Abuse an Olympic Sport. Amid all the attractions at Stratford-upon-Avon, I think they should add one where participants are allowed to push King Lears off a high precipice. You know, like bungee jumping, only no bungee. Just, “Rage, wind, blow, crack your cheeks! Ahhhhhhhhhhh!” Splat! Sweet, sweet silence. Okay, perhaps not. (They have a Shakespeare Hospice at Stratford, by the way, for those who ticked the “Not to Be” box.)

Once one decides to retell Lear, time and place become problems that must be addressed.

According to a history of British monarchs (The Kings of Britain) compiled in 1136 by the Welsh cleric Geoffrey of Monmouth, the real King Leir, if indeed he existed, lived in 400 B.C., or about the time between Plato and Aristotle, at the height of the Greek empire, when there were no great castles in England, the counties that Shakespeare refers to in his play were long from being established, and at best, Leir would have been some sort of a tribal leader, not the sovereign of a vast kingdom with authority over a complex sociopolitical system of dukes, earls, and knights. A mud fortress would have been his castle. In the play, Shakespeare makes references to Greek gods, and indeed, legend says that Leir’s father, Bladud, who was a swineherd, a leper, and king of the Britons, journeyed to Athens looking for spiritual guidance, and returned to build a temple to the goddess Athena at Bath, where he worshipped and practiced necromancy. Leir became king rather by default when Bladud’s essential bits dropped off. The battle for souls between the Christians and the pagans that I portray in Fool probably took place closer to around A.D. 500 to 800, rather than during Pocket’s imagined thirteenth century.

Time, then, becomes a bit of a problem, not just in relation to history, but to language as well. (The time frame of the play seemed to bollocks up even Shakespeare, for at one point he has the fool rattle off a long list of prophecies, after which he says, “This prophecy Merlin shall make; for I live before his time” (Act III, Scene 2). It’s as if Will threw his quill in the air and said, “I know not what the hell is going on, therefore I shall cast this beefy bit of bull toss to the groundlings and see if it slides by.” No one appears to know what kind of language they were speaking in 400 B.C., but it certainly wasn’t English. And while Shakespeare’s English is elegant and in many ways revolutionary, much of it is foreign to the modern English reader. So, in the tradition of Will throwing his quill into the air, I decided to set the story in a more or less mythical Middle Ages, but with the linguistic vestiges of Elizabethan times, modern British slang, Cockney slang (although rhyming slang remains a complete mystery to me), and my own innate American balderdash. (Thus Pocket refers to the quality of Regan’s gadonkage and Thalia refers to St. Cinnamon driving the Mazdas out of Swinden—with full historical immunity.) And for those sticklers who will want to point out the anachronisms in Fool, rest easy, the whole book is an anachronism. Obviously. There are even references to the “Mericans” as a long extinct race, which places our own time somewhere in the distant past. (“Long ago in a galaxy far away,” if you get my meaning.) It was designed thus.

In dealing with the geography of the play, I looked for the modern locations that are mentioned in its text: Gloucester, Cornwall, Dover, etc. The only Albany I could find is now, more or less, within the London metropolitan area, so I set Goneril’s Albany in Scotland, mainly to facilitate easy access to Great Birnam Wood and the witches from Macbeth. Dog Snogging, Bongwater Crash, and Bonking Ewe on Worms Head and other towns are located in my imagination, except that there really is a spot called Worms Head in Wales.

The plot for Shakespeare’s play King Lear was lifted from a play that was produced in London perhaps ten years earlier, called The Tragedy of King Leir, the printed version of which has been lost. King Leir was performed in Shakespeare’s time, and there is no way of knowing what the text was, but the story line was similar to the Bard’s play and it’s fairly safe to say he was aware of it. This was not unusual for Shakespeare. In fact, of his thirty-eight plays, it’s thought that only three sprang from ideas original to Shakespeare.

Even the text of King Lear that we know was pieced together by Alexander Pope in 1724 from bits and pieces of previously printed versions. Interestingly enough, in contrast to the tragedy, England’s first poet laureate, Nathan Tate, rewrote King Lear with a happy ending, wherein Lear and Cordelia are reunited, and Cordelia marries Edgar and lives happily ever after. Tate’s “happy ending” version was performed for nearly two hundred years before Pope’s version was revived for the stage. And Monmouth’s Kings of Britain indeed shows Cordelia as becoming queen after Leir, and reigning for five years. (Although, again, there is no historical record to support this.)

A few who have read Fool have expressed a desire to go back and read Lear, to perhaps compare the source material with my version of the story. (“I don’t remember the tree-shagging parts in Lear, but it has been a long time.”) While you could certainly find worse ways to spend your time, I suspect that way madness lies. Fool quotes or paraphrases lines from no fewer than a dozen of the plays, and I’m not even sure what came from which at this point. I’ve done this largely to throw off reviewers, who will be reluctant to cite and criticize passages of my writing, lest they were penned by the Bard hisownself. (I once had a reviewer take me to task for writing awkward prose, and the passage he cited was one of my characters quoting Thoreau’s “On Civil Disobedience.” You don’t get many moments in life; pointing that out to the reviewer was one of mine.)

A note on one of Pocket’s prejudices: I know that the term “fucking French” seems to crop up quite a bit in Pocket’s speech, but that should in no way be interpreted as indicative of my own feelings about France or the French. I love both. But the alliteration was very seductive, and I wanted to convey the sort of surface resentment the English seem to have for the French, and to be fair, the French for the English. As one English friend explained to me, “Oh yes, we hate the French, but we don’t want anyone else to hate them. They are ours. We will fight to the death to preserve them so we can continue to hate them.” I don’t care if that’s true or not, I thought it was funny. Or, as one French acquaintance put it, “All Englishmen are gay; some simply don’t know it and sleep with women.” I’m pretty sure that’s not true, but I thought it was funny. The fucking French are great, aren’t they?

Finally, I want to thank all the people who helped me in the research of Fool: The players and crew of the many Shakespeare festivals I attended in Northern California, who keep the Bard’s work alive for those of us in the hinterland of the Colonies; all of the great and gracious people in Great Britain and France, who helped me find medieval sites and artifacts so I could completely ignore authenticity when writing Fool; and, finally, great writers of British comedy, who inspired my plunge into the deep end of their art: Shakespeare, Oscar Wilde, G. B. Shaw, P. G. Wodehouse, H. H. Munro (Saki), Evelyn Waugh, The Goons, Tom Stoppard, The Pythons, Douglas Adams, Nick Hornby, Ben Elton, Jennifer Saunders, Dawn French, Richard Curtis, Eddie Izzard, and Mil Millington (who assured me that while it was virtuous that I was writing a book wherein I aspired to call characters “gits,” “wankers,” and “tossers,” I would be remiss and inauthentic if I neglected to call a few “twats” as well).

Also, thanks to Charlee Rodgers for her patient handling of logistic and travel arrangements for research; Nick Ellison and his minions for handling business; Jennifer Brehl for clean hands and composure in her editing; Jack Womack for getting me in front of my readers; as well as Mike Spradlin, Lisa Gallagher, Debbie Stier, Lynn Grady, and Michael Morrison for doing the dirty business of publishing. Oh, yes, and to my friends, who put up with my obsessive nature and excessive whining while I was working on Fool, thanks for not pushing me off a high precipice.

Christopher Moore