Fool

Fool is Christopher Moore's gleefully profane reimagining of Shakespeare's King Lear, told from the one vantage the tragedy never gave us: that of the fool. Pocket is Lear's diminutive, quick-tongued jester — a bawdy schemer with a talent for mischief and a soft spot for the king's honest daughter, Cordelia.

When the aging Lear demands that his three daughters profess their love in exchange for his kingdom, the rotten machinery of court politics lurches into motion. Armed with little more than a rude wit and his dim-but-devoted apprentice Drool, Pocket sets out to bend the ensuing chaos to his own ends. Ghosts, witches, scheming nobles, poison, and a great deal of very filthy humor follow, as Moore ransacks the Shakespearean canon for laughs while keeping the bones of the tragedy intact.

Wildly anachronistic, crude, and surprisingly clever, Fool is the first of Moore's Pocket novels, later followed by The Serpent of Venice and Shakespeare for Squirrels. It is a raucous love letter to the Bard for readers who like their classics with the reverence stripped out and the jokes turned all the way up. Not for the easily offended.