Playing the Fool in Lear and Peking Opera

The Fool in Shakespeare’s plays,  from comedies like Twelfth Night to tragedies like King Lear, plays a crucial role in speaking truth to power.

In Peking opera, there is a similar role known as the chou 丑.

In an excerpt from The Chinese Tragedy of King Lear, author Nan Z. Da considers the extraordinary demands of playing the chou, including the experiences of her great-grandmother, Song Fengyun, Peking opera’s first female chou, and Xiao Changhua, the most famous chou in China.

Turning to an analysis of King Lear, Da explores the significance of Shakespeare’s Fool and their disappearance over the course of the play. Is there a price to be paid for the privilege of speaking truth to power?

Like its global counterparts, Chinese opera fool roles run the entire gamut of human types and are accorded “jester’s privilege”—that mixed blessing of being able to speak with impunity. The chou 丑, the ugly or deformed who become jesters, span the entire gender and moral spectrum and hail from stations of life as far apart as imperial administrators and washerwomen. Chou are just one of the many “set” roles in Peking opera. There are also laodan 老旦 (elderly woman), xiaoshen 小生 (young man), huadan 花旦 (young woman), wen-wu shen 文武生 (roles that are civic or martial), just to name a few. But chou enjoy a unique privilege, which is that they are allowed and even encouraged to improvise their lines in an art form that largely shunned arbitrary, reckless improvisation. To speak truth to power even more penetratingly, the chou alone is permitted to break the fourth wall and address the audience and contemporary events. This effect can be jarring if the chou actor is feeling especially outlandish. Imagine seeing an actor in a Song-dynasty story turning to the audience and speaking directly to the members of the Politburo. That’s how much political power was extended to those playing the chou, although most never exercise that privilege anymore.

The chou pays for this privilege. My great-grandmother Song Fengyun was Peking opera’s first female chou. She performed acrobatics and sleights of hand and sang mocking and lighthearted songs. Her face aged faster than other women’s because she made thousands of facial expressions every day. The chou is the most expressive character. Every thought has to be squeezed out of the physical body, and this takes its toll. What’s more, once an actor decides to become a chou, he or she is never really able to stand up straight again. That is because the chou have to move across the stage on their haunches. They have to maintain this posture even when they perform acrobatic tricks, When they land from their flips, they must land in a squat. They can never sit on tables and chairs but must perch like creatures. In exchange for this hobbling, for the indignity and discomfort of spending most of their lives in a squatting position, the chous are allowed to make penetrating jokes, to have the entire empire under their thumbs.

In late and post-Qing China, the most famous chou was Xiao Changhua (shown with Mei Lanfang), born in 1878, the third year of the Emperor Guangxu. Xiao Changhua commanded the most classical chou figures, performing alongside the great Mei Lanfang for most of his career. Xiao died at the age of eighty-nine, at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, old enough that no one would bother to inquire how he died, because they could safely assume that his time had come. He’s lived a good long life in turbulent times, they might say. His illustrious career bridged the beginning of the end of the Qing empire and the beginning of the end of the Mao era.

But this is how Xiao Changhua died: it just so happened that the most famous role he performed came from a problematic opera. Silang (the Fourth Son) Visits His Mother, another story from the Yang family that we saw in the last chapter, was the favorite opera of Liu Shaoqi, the number one enemy of the state at the time (Liu Shaoqi). Hand-calligraphed “big character” posters and “little character” posters denounced capitalist roaders and traitors as “Fourth Son,” all because Liu Shaoqi’s endorsement of this opera exposed counterrevolutionary subversions in the storyline. All who were involved with the opera suffered the consequences. In 1967, Red Guards doused Xiao Changhua with boiling water until he died, as a joke.

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In order not to become a tyrant, the sovereign needs to hear gentle roasting and effective criticism. His jester must play what the philosopher Michel Foucault called the “parrhesiastic game,” the tricky dance of correcting the sovereign who keeps the truth-teller alive at their whim. The jester must practice dazhi ruoyu 大智若愚 to play the idiot, to strike and then soothe, if only to model a different behavior than that of the tyrant he’s critiquing.

So much rests on the Learian Fool. His responsibilities become overwhelming. You can feel the strain in the play’s jokes themselves. Lear’s fool is able to make so much out of so little, and he always receives so little appreciation. His dazzling spins on the aphoristic form (“Have more than thou showest, Speak less than thou knowest” . . .), for example, are met with scorn instead of acknowledgment. If you don’t like my play on words, he quips, it is because “ ’tis like the breath of an unfee’d lawyer—you gave me nothing for ’t.” He works so hard for nothing, so underappreciated and unrecognized that he doesn’t even get a name.

Come to think of it, where was the Fool in Act 1, Scene 1 of Lear? He’s so full of wisdom after the fact. Where was he when a well-timed, well-said, well-intended joke could have saved the day? The least generous reading is that he didn’t show up this time because he rarely wanted to exercise his jester’s privilege, always had his own skin in mind, or just didn’t care. The most generous reading of the Fool’s absence from these critical moments, besides tiredness, sickness or age, is that he knew he would only have made things worse. Having spent such a long time with the bighearted, mistake-prone belligerence of his master, the Fool may have become too close, no longer possessed of critical distance. At such proximity, the Fool has absorbed many of Lear’s traits. We learn that he pines for Cordelia, and perhaps even clings to her, like Lear. Like Lear in too many ways, the Fool also fails to see correctly in time, and lacks faith at the right moment to speak eloquently, with the right amount of jolliness, when needed.

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Under extreme political pressure the philosopher-fool disappears. I don’t know why adaptations of Lear have killed off the Fool. It should remain painfully unclear what happens to him. The Fool, as grand entertainer, must perform a vanishing act. Everything is moving along, and, suddenly, the person responsible for merriment and criticism is not there anymore. We just saw him a moment ago acting out a play with Lear and Edgar in the hovel. He just did a good bit there: Oh, is that Goneril? he exclaims: “I took you for a joint-stool.” A joint-stool! Har har har. The Fool was in top form, no signs of fading.

It takes a while to notice a disappearance when things are getting bad, but one day you look up and they’re gone, the comics and comedians who enlivened your days and cued your witticisms. Comedians grow old and embittered, too, become metacomical and turn into tragic historians of their own art form.

About the author

Nan Z. Da is an associate professor of English at Johns Hopkins University. Prior to that, she taught for nine years at the University of Notre Dame. She is the author of Intransitive Encounters: Sino-US Literatures and the Limits of Exchange and co-editor of the Thinking Literature series.