Play: The Fool

Overview
Edward Bond’s 1975 play The Fool reimagines the life of the English peasant poet John Clare as a radical parable about class, language, and the social violence of enclosure. Bond uses Clare not as a biographical subject in the traditional sense but as an emblem of a sensibility crushed by the new economic order. The title signals both the role of the truth-telling clown and the way society brands dissent and vulnerability as folly. Scenes shift between Clare’s Northamptonshire village, the literary salons that commodify him, and the institutions that finally contain him, creating a panorama of a culture reorganized around profit and property.

Plot
The play opens in Clare’s rural community as enclosure is imposed: common fields are fenced, customary rights are criminalized, and the villagers’ seasonal rhythms are broken. Clare watches the hedges go up while composing poems from the disappearing landscape, a double vision that recognizes both beauty and violence. He is “discovered” as an authentic rustic voice and taken to London, where publishers and patrons flatter him, package his verse, and instruct him to perform a harmless, picturesque peasant self.

As Clare’s celebrity flickers, the village hardens under the new regime. Evictions multiply; poaching becomes a crime of hunger; a petty theft turns into a show trial; and a protest is met with disciplined force. Clare tries to use his poems to speak for the land and the poor, but the market wants pastoral charm, not social memory. At home, he marries and struggles to support his family; the woman he loved as a youth becomes a recurrent figure in his imagination, a sign of all that cannot be recovered once the commons are gone.

The pressures fracture him. He oscillates between the city’s exploitative culture and the village’s degradation, belonging fully to neither. His language becomes contested ground: words that once named shared places now name fenced commodities. After a collapse he is confined to an asylum, supervised by a well-meaning but instrumental modern medicine that treats his visions as symptoms to be neutralized. He escapes and wanders back across the country, a broken Odysseus crossing hedged and turnpiked England, trying to rejoin a life that has been fenced out of existence.

Characters and conflict
Clare stands at the center, a self-taught poet whose gifts are inseparable from his class position. His wife represents endurance under economic siege; the remembered Mary embodies the lost commons. The local gentry, gamekeepers, magistrates, and enclosure commissioners appear as a network rather than individual villains, showing how legality is used to redistribute life. Publishers and literary patrons are genial agents of the same process, editing reality into product. The asylum doctor is humane in tone yet part of the apparatus that restores order by redefining dissent as illness.

Themes and style
Bond fuses ballad, farce, and documentary scenes to show how a society narrates its violence as improvement. The recurring subject is ownership, of land, of labor, of language. Enclosure is not only a legal event but a cultural act that privatizes memory and imagination. Comedy punctures sentiment and reveals cruelty in custom; lyric passages carry the residue of the commons into speech. The “fool” is the one who tells truths that the rational world declares irrational.

Ending and significance
The final images leave Clare isolated, speaking from the wreckage of his identity while the machinery of order grinds on. The play refuses heroic closure: the community is not redeemed, and Clare’s art cannot reverse political defeat. Instead, Bond offers the stark recognition that when a society changes the ground of life, its poets either become ornaments or outcasts. The Fool is a fierce social history and a meditation on how, under capitalism, even language is enclosed.