I TURN, in this chapter, to another clown type in the professional theatre, the fool proper. Here, I begin with an examination of the logical underpinnings of criticism addressing the two texts of King Lear as they affect the character of the Fool(s) there, with the ultimate goal being a better understanding of historical fool types and lingering confusion about this iconic character as we have come to know him, typically, from conflated editions of the play. That conflated figure is a strange product for, as a number of Renaissance textual scholars argued persuasively in the 1980s, most notably in The Division of the Kingdoms, the Quarto and Folio versions of King Lear are quite different texts often producing remarkably distinct literary and theatrical effects. Any interest in this discovery was effectively and, unfortunately, insistently quelled by the vast majority of “revisionist” critics who, determined in part to prove that the Folio was authorial and definitive, argued that the Folio text was simply an improved or perfected version of the earlier and, they assumed, therefore necessarily inferior, Quarto text. Because most of their work amounted to an extended attempt to demonstrate that the Folio renderings of characters were superior to artistically deficient counterparts in the Quarto, the earlier text has never been fully appreciated. Oddly, the chief victim of an attack on the relative artistry of the Quarto was the Fool, a character revisionist critics found to be either too satirical or, conversely, not as satirical as the Folio version.