A Fool’s Mirror, designed in the Somerset studios of Bernard Pearson, formerly of Clarecraft.
The frame is cast by hand in a man made material which closely resembles ivory, after a sculpture most cunningly wrought sometime in 1599.
On the rear of the mirror is an intriguing document from the Cabinet of Curiosities. Could it be the title page of an old folio of Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice? Who can say?
The verse quoted on the frame does indeed originate from ‘The Merchant of Venice’ and was a song played to a man about to make the choice of his life:
Tell me where is fancy bred,
Or in the heart or in the head?
How begot, how nourished?
Reply, reply.
It is engender’d in the eyes,
With gazing fed; and fancy dies
In the cradle, where it lies.
Let us all ring fancy’s knell;
I’ll begin it – Ding, dong, bell.
Ding, dong, bell.
Why the fool? Who knows? Perhaps the original was carved for his Lady by a man who is not the Fool of the Court or the monarch, but the man who makes her laugh in a world sometimes bereft of humour.