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Courting the Fool: The Creation of Authoritative Space in King Lear
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Enid Welsford:  "To [the Elizabethan dramatist] the fool could be valuable as a highly coloured, fantastic, extravagant member of contemporary society, but he could not retain his significance as a fixed social type with a recognized vocation to bear perpetual witness to the vanity of all human pretensions.  So the Elizabethan dramatists made little of the fool.  But in this, as in so many other matters, Shakespeare escapes from our rash generalizations" (248-49).
"Neque enim is verus est habendus orator, qui bene scit dicere, nisi et dicere audeat."
 “No one who knows how to speak well can be considered a true orator unless he also dares to speak out.”             
Lorenzo Valla,   De falso credita et ementita Constantini donatione   1440